UBC’s Buddhism and Contemporary Society Program presents a lecture by Simon Wickham-Smith.
“Spiritual Ecology in Contemporary Mongolian Literature”
Date: Thursday, 26 January 2012
Time: 5:00 – 7:00 PM
Place: Room 120, C.K. Choi Building, 1855 West Mall
Lectures are free and open to the public. Seating will be on a first-come first-serve basis. Doors will open 30 minutes prior to the lecture.
To download a .pdf poster for printing: Wickham-Smith Poster.
Over the past twenty years, Mongolia has developed a complex relationship with the ideas of development, embracing both mining and religious pluralism, a capitalist market economy and the tenets of the traditional shamanic relationship with nature. Mongolian culture, moreover, has become at the same time both more concerned with the preservation of heritage and the assimilation of European and American influences. This presentation will trace the development of Mongolia’s cultural identity since the introduction of democratic elections in 1990, through the specific prism of literature, and will show how internal and external forces have come to influence the expression of spirituality and ecology in the work of contemporary poets. The dynamic interaction of these various trajectories which are being followed currently by these writers will help to define Mongolia’s culture and political position in Asia and on the international stage.
Simon Wickham-Smith was born in the UK in 1968 and received a BA (Honours) in English Language and Literature from King’s College, London. He was ordained as a monk in the Karma Kagyü lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1993, he subsequently took part in a traditional three-year retreat at Kagyü Samyé Ling monastery in Scotland. He has spent much of the last fifteen years working on Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary Mongolian culture, and he has published a number of translations and scholarly articles, including The Hidden Life of the Sixth Dalai Lama (Lexington Books, 2011). He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, Seattle, writing a dissertation on the work of the contemporary Mongolian poet G. Mend-Ooyo.
BCS Program lectures are made possible by the generous support of The Tung Lin Kok Yuen Canada Foundation.
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