Dr Jonathan Mair, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, will be speaking about his research on contemporary Chinese ethics and Buddhist self-cultivation as part of an Asian Studies day organised by University of Kent scholars in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Ghent in the Belgium.
Dr Mair’s talk will be based on recent fieldwork carried out with funding from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust, in which he participated in Buddhist retreats in Taiwan and France. The retreats, attended mostly by members of Chinese communities from many different countries including mainland China, are an opportunity for intensive reflection on the self. Participants – up to 800 of them in Taiwan and around 100 in France – engage in silence in simple practices such as sitting, walking, eating together and carrying out chores for seven days.
During this time they are completely isolated from the outside world. By concentrating on their own reactions during these activities, participants are supposed to learn to recognise their negative mental habits, such as greed, anger and envy, and replace them with positive virtues such as compassion, patience and equanimity.
The retreats are organised by Fo Guang Shan, an international Buddhist movement headquartered in Taiwan. Fo Guang Shan teaches a modernised form of Buddhism it calls ‘Humanistic Buddhism’.
The Kent-Ghent Asian Studies Day will take place on Saturday 18th May 2019 from 09:30 in Darwin Lecture Theatre 2 on the Canterbury campus. In this event, ideas on health, well-being and the body in a variety of Asian cultures will be explored.
All talks are open to all and free to attend.
(Funded by the Kent-Ghent Grant for joint projects.)
More information, including the programme and collected abstracts, can be found here.