The Valpo Core

Christ College Symposium Series:

September 25, 2008, 6:30-7:30 pm, CCLIR Community Room

Meditation and Monasticism: Making the Ascetic Self in Thailand

with guest speaker Joanna Cook, George Kingsley Roth Research Fellow in Southeast Asian Studies,
Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, England

Buddhism, more overtly than other religions, is a system of self-cultivation—a set of techniques by which followers mold themselves into particular kinds of persons, with reference to ideals, relationships and practices drawn from Buddhist traditions as locally constituted. In a consideration of monastic practice and identity, Dr. Cook, who took ordination as a Thai Buddhist nun for four months during her undergraduate years and for a year while writing her doctoral dissertation, will explore the ways in which people make religious and cognitive concepts real through learned bodily and mental experiences. She will examine the ways in which the personally transformative process of becoming a Buddhist monastic is in direct dialogue with the concerns of community living and the broader issues of modernization and cultural change.