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We’re Teaching Online

For our Online Teaching Resource Fellowship project, which ran throughout the strange summer of 2020, a team of University of Toronto graduate students in Buddhist Studies gathered and annotated a robust set of online resources relevant to teaching in our field.

The beta release of their work can be found on a Google sheet, for now, but this resource is currently being transformed into another format with support of the University of Toronto Libraries – please stay tuned for that.

Other resources now available can be found at the Ho Centre’s YouTube channel, pictured above, which includes a playlist of lectures from our February 2020 conference on Teaching Buddhist Studies, among other resources.

Those of you teaching or studying Tibetan may also want to keep an eye on our developing resources for teaching Classical Tibetan online, pictured below, some of which is at our Classical Tibetan YouTube channel.

And be sure to check out our podcast, The Circled Square, found at http://teachingbuddhism.net/ as well as on iTunes and the usual podcast services.

Connecting in Uncertain Times

John Vervaeke teaches wildly popular courses in Buddhism, Psychology & Mental Health undergraduate program and in the Cognitive Science program. He also teaches courses in the Psychology department on thinking and reasoning, with an emphasis on higher cognitive processes that promote intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and wisdom. He is also founder of the Consciousness & Wisdom Studies Lab, and he has a popular YouTube channel.

Nowadays, he is also leading a daily meditation session, in an effort to help us all stay connected in these days of distraction. You can join these sessions each morning in his series of videos in response to the pandemic.

Arts & Science spoke to Vervaeke recently about his work on mindfulness and meditation in times of stress and anxiety – read the full article here.

Encyclopedia Donation

We are pleased to announce this important book donation to the University of Toronto Mississauga Libraries. Below, Shelley Hawrychuk, Chief Librarian of UTM Libraries, receives a donation of the Encyclopedia of Buddhist Art, a publication from Buddha’s Light Publications USA, from Venerable Chueh Fan, Abbess of Fo Guang Shan Temple, at the Dharma Day celebrations at Fo Guang Shan temple Mississauga, on December 8th 2019. This illustrated 20 volume set of books was donated by the temple and will now be housed for use by students and researchers at the UTM libraries.

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Engaging Education in Buddhist Studies

In the initiative “Engaging Education in Buddhist Studies” (EEBS), established in 2019 with support from Khyentse Foundation and the Ho Centre, our instructors are creating modules for Buddhist studies courses that combine creative and/or contemplative practices that are grounded in research on the benefits of experiential education, including increased engagement, self-confidence, and compassion among student-participants. The goals of this initiative are to make student participation in classroom work more accessible, to amplify diverse voices in the classroom, and to support overall wellness and mental health among students. This project is part of our growing priority on programming that supports experiential learning, equity, and student well-being, following principles of place-responsive and trauma-informed pedagogy.

This initiative aims to bring the teaching of Buddhist Studies into the company of newly developing, dynamic educational movements that are student-centered, place-responsive, contemplative, trauma-informed, and attentive to student well-being. Well-tested approaches to embodied or engaged pedagogy emphasize the value of engaging students’ senses and their bodies in the process of studying religion, and much of our work is inspired by these approaches. This project also strives to help students feel connected to the lives of real Buddhists, historically or today, by interacting with stories, religious and aesthetic objects, movement, food, and ritual, and by taking interest in the concerns of householder Buddhists as well as monastics.

In 2019-20, EEBS work was incorporated into five U of T courses:

  • RLG370 Interdependence
  • RLG 201 Introduction to Religion in the Visual, Literary and Performing Arts 
  • RLG 373 Buddhist Institutions and Practices: Visuality and Materiality in Buddhism 
  • FAH 394 Sand, Stone, Gold and Crystal: Materials and Materiality in Asian Art 
  • RLG 370 Topics in Buddhism: Meditation and Mindfulness: From Buddhist Traditions to the Global Present

Experiential modules developed for those courses included activities where:

  • Students maintained regular contemplative and wellness practices in class and at home, and class time was devoted to learning movement and breathing practices with local meditation practitioners.
  • Students worked with traditional metal funnel tools (chakpur) to create sand mandalas in class and discussed how mandalas make meaning (impermanence and purposeful transience, difficulty of process and production). 
  • Students worked with a local Tibetan artist to sculpt torma (offering cakes) out of clay and coloured clay. They learned about the form, why they are made, and how they create substitutes for other kinds of imagined offerings
  • Students worked with a local Tibetan artist to learn how to paint the Buddha’s head, studying the iconometric method used to measure a traditional Buddha head with its correct relative proportions according to the Tibetan art tradition

Welcoming New Tibetan Books from Kathog Trungpa Rinpoche

On Tuesday, December 18, 2018, a reception to celebrate the new donation of rare and previously unpublished Tibetan books by Kathog Trungpa Rinpoche was held at the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies. 

Our centre director (on leave 2018-19) Frances Garrett, Kathog Trungpa Rinpoche, and our interim centre director Sarah Richardson hold the newly donated books, surrounded by some of our Ho Centre community members.

Kathog Trungpa Rinpoche visited the University on a book donation trip from Nepal and India to grant Toronto a generous donation of newly published books. Kathog Trungpa Rinpoche, a high emanated reincarnate lama (or tulku) from the Tibetan Buddhist Kathog lineage has been working tirelessly for the past two decades to collect and publish rare and old texts from the Kathog lineage.

Kathog Trungpa Rinpoche hands newly published books to our centre director, Sarah Richardson.
Kathog Trungpa Rinpoche hands newly published books to the Ho Centre interim director, Sarah Richardson.

This difficult work began with travel to temple collections across the Tibetan cultural world, where he and his team gathered important books, many of which were only previously available in old manuscript or woodblock print format. He has collected these materials and made modern edited and digitally printed versions, and is now providing these books free of charge to Universities in North America where significant Tibetan studies research is taking place. Just the week before the gift was received in Toronto, another set of these books was welcomed to Columbia University in New York City.

The donation of nine multi-volume collections that contain the important texts and biographies of lineage masters of the Kathog tradition.
The donation of nine multi-volume collections that contain the important texts and biographies of lineage masters of the Kathog tradition.

This generous donation to the University library includes nine multi-volume collections that contain the important texts and biographies of lineage masters of the Kathog tradition, an important Nyingmapa group whose main temple is based in the eastern Tibetan region of Kham. These texts were welcomed at the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies by University faculty, students and staff, and will eventually be accessioned into the main collections of the University of Toronto’s central (Robarts) library system, where they will be housed in the Tibetan reading room of the East Asian library.

Kathog Trungpa Rinpoche talking with Ho Centre director, Sarah Richardson, and Tibetan teacher and PhD student, Kunga Sherab.
Kathog Trungpa Rinpoche talking with Ho Centre interim director, Sarah Richardson, and Tibetan teacher and PhD student, Kunga Sherab.

The U of T Libraries have the largest Tibetan language collection in Canada. The Library began purchasing subscriptions to the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center’s electronic text collections in 2008. In 2013, a collaboration between the University of Toronto and Columbia University’s research libraries was established to harness expertise in Tibetan collection services at both universities and increase the availability of Tibetan resources to a wider community of scholars in both Canada and the United States. The partnership provides for jointly sponsored acquisitions trips to enhance the Tibetan collections at both universities, and a shared point of service for research consultations. Since this collaboration began, the U of T’s Tibetan Collection has more than doubled in size.
For more on Tibetan Studies at U of T please visit https://buddhiststudies.utoronto.ca/programs/tibetan-studies/
logo for U of T Robert H.N Ho family foundation center for buddhist studies
The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation

The University of Toronto operates on land that for thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and  the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land. Learn more about this history.