Friday October 15, 2010, 2:30pm – 3:30pm
“Buddhism in Canada’s Health Care: Broadening the Spectrum of Human Experience at End of Life.”
Anne Bruce (University of Victoria). Buddhism has been and continues to be a religion that is concerned about dying, death and the dead. Buddha declared that among all the realizations, the realization of death and impermanence is the greatest (Ponlop 2006). Not only are meditative practices and doctrines linked to recognizing and accepting death as natural and inevitable, but within Buddhism dying itself is considered an opportunity for spiritual practice and liberation. This may account, in part, for the growing interest in Buddhism and Buddhist meditative practices by health care providers and health care volunteers. In this paper, the impact and growing integration of Buddhism within Canada’s health care system is examined. In particular, the impact of Buddhism within end-of-life care is explored. The concept of time is presented as an exemplar of how Buddhist perspectives are shaping end-of-life care. As a complex, socially determined construct, time plays a significant role at the end of life. Increasingly, science and Western writers are recognizing the benefits of seeing the world and ourselves as multiple patterns of relationships rather than separate entities. To this end, Buddhist notions of dependent origination and the distinction between conceptual understanding (trangdon) and knowing through direct experience (ngedon) are examined. How we experience and constitute time as conceptual views or direct experience has implications for the way we engage with time and timelessness in end-of-life care. Introducing diverse concepts contributes to the growing dialogue between Buddhist and biomedical perspectives and invites health care providers to recognize or explore a broader spectrum of human experience.
“Buddhism Behind Bars: the Canadian Experience.”
Paul McIvor (University of South Africa). Buddhist prison outreach is a recent phenomenon in Canada, where spiritual counseling remains predominantly Christian within prison walls. The scale and the mechanics of such outreach are under-researched. This paper examines the range of Buddhist individuals, temples and centres performing Buddhist prison outreach. It does this by profiling in-depth two very active groups in Canada, surveying Buddhist organizations and examining a cohort of volunteer informants. The paper also looks at how the legal and administrative environments in Canada’s corrections system shape the possibilities open to Buddhist outreach at the provincial/territorial and federal levels (facility chaplains are interviewed to inform this aspect of the paper). The various forms of Buddhist prison outreach are examined, including inmate correspondence, inmate visits and programming (such as meditation groups). Finally, the paper looks at the implications of this form of outreach for 21st century Canadian Buddhism; where is the impact of such outreach felt? How does such social action fit with conceptions of Engaged Buddhism? What place does this outreach have?
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.