Around 20 people attended the exhaustive lecture by Simon Wickham-Smith on the Spiritual Ecology in Contemporary Mongolia, which was held in Conference Room 210 at the C.K. Choi Building in the UBC Point Grey Campus on the evening of January 26, 2012.
In his lecture, Wickham-Smith spoke about the evocative works of seminal Mongolian poets writing in the 1980s and the 1990s, from G. Mend-Ooyo to Altan Ovoo to T. Sodnomnamji to O. Erdenetsogt. Through his analyses of the spiritual and ecological expressions in their poems, he examined how they reflect the intimate and complex relationship of the semi-nomadic Mongols to their ever changing landscape. This complex relationship may be traced historically back through the introduction of democratic elections in 1990, the earlier purges of Mongolian monastic communities in 1937 – 38, and even back to the introduction of Buddhism from Tibet in 1244. Yet recently, this relationship has been profoundly reshaped. Wickham-Smith described how the enduring religious traditions in the country (Buddhist and Shamanic) on one hand, and an emerging capitalist market economy, together inform the dynamic relationship that underlies contemporary cultural identity of Mongolia. It is this identity that contemporary poets express through their work.
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.
This lecture is part of a series organized by UBC’s Buddhism and Contemporary Society Program, and the Program itself is grateful for the continuing support of The Tung Lin Kok Yuen Canada Foundation, and the cooperation of units here at UBC, especially the Institute of Asian Research, the Department of Asian Studies, and the I.K. Barber Learning Centre.
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