Word: buddhisme
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Producer Philip Garvin, 26, first immersed himself in American religion while photographing a book on the Lubavitchers. Later, after discovering Thai Buddhism during a stay abroad, he decided to investigate spirituality in the U.S. and started a pilot film on the California Pentecostal church. Station WGBH in Boston heard of his work and financed the rest of the pilot. Foundations aided the others. Garvin took pains to let the people themselves tell the story; there is no narration. Thus the series is pithy and personal, but some basic journalistic questions-a number of important whos, whats, wheres and hows...
Died. Alan Wilson Watts, 58, onetime Episcopal minister who became a leading exponent of Zen Buddhism and a counterculture hero; of heart disease; near Mill Valley, Calif. Born in England, Watts came to America in 1938, lectured widely on college campuses and occasionally lived on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay. His concept of inner peace and release from what he termed "the chronic uneasy conscience of Hebrew-Christian cultures," made popular through The Way of Zen (1957) and his essay Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen (1958), earned him an enthusiastic following that ranged from hippies to psychoanalysts...
...Western theologians have to a large extent been both provincial and elitist in outlook. Learning from the religions of the poor has not been a serious undertaking in recent theology. "Radical theologians" have not been conversant with Third World religious movements. Cox directs attention to the political radicalization of Buddhism in Southeast Asia and to the revolutionary movements among Catholic priests and laymen throughout Latin America. His indictment of the provinciality of contemporary white Western theologians is strong medicine: "Because we are part of the imposed culture we cannot understand why a flat renunciation of all imposed culture...
...suburb of Bangkok, on Dec. 10, 1968, barefoot and wet from a shower, Merton touched a defectively wired room fan and was electrocuted. His death prompted friends to speculate whether Merton would ever have returned to the U.S. from his enthusiastic plunge into Buddhism. The answer now seems to be yes, though he might not have returned to Gethsemani itself...
...Dzogchen, a mystical method that like Zen stresses the ability to achieve sudden illumination. "The parting note was a kind of compact that we would both do our best to make it [to complete Buddhahood] in this life." Yet what Merton found most striking in his exploration of Buddhism was the realization that the contemplative ways of the East were for him only an analogue of his own methods. Though he greatly admired the spirituality of Asian holy men, he remained steadfastly Christian, always aware that there were on both sides "differences that are not debatable...