Today we visited Dharma Drum Mountain in New Taipei City. When we first arrived, we were greeted by a team of volunteers, professors, and monastics. We then began our first session with an introduction of Dharma Drum Mountain and DILA, the liberal arts school associated with the monastery. We then moved on to some guided meditation. We first participated in a seated meditation, very similar to the meditation we’ve practiced with professor Young and at some other religious sites. I found that this time, it was actually much easier to relax my mind and body than before, and when we […]
It is our last week in Taipei, and we have a range of activities that we aim to get done before we leave. Our group activity for today was attending a cooking class at CookInn. We made zhongZi, which is a rice ball with different meats and seafood inside. The hardest part about making these was wrapping the rice in bamboo leaves. It was very challenging to wrap the leaf around itself and get it to stay in place while covering all the rice and fillings. We also made bubble tea and were served meatball soup. Overall it was a […]
Today we visited Studio 76, a film production company who specializes in entertainment and smart media distribution. I don’t know much about studio production, so it was really interesting to hear from an expert in the field. One aspect of this company visit I found particularly interesting was how their company is working to stay competitive despite advances in technology, particularly in AI. Studio 76 is working to diversify their business through manga, which takes films and turns them into comics. Before AI, a project to turn a film into a comic would take approximately nine months to complete. With […]
Today we had the opportunity to tour a Confucius temple. I was really looking forward to this excursion because up until this point, we have focused mostly on Buddhism and Daoism, and I wanted to see how the two religions differ from Confucianism and how their places of worship differ. In the Confucius temple, there wasn’t a figure to represent Confucius. Instead, there was a plaque with his name written in Chinese. This differs from Buddhism and Daoism where a main part of their worship is facing the gods and goddesses and praying to an actual figure. The Confucius temple […]
Today we started the day with class where we took a deeper look into the intersection between business and religion in Taiwan. I found one article particularly interesting about the ethics behind Buddhists investing in the stock market. Business and religion have conflicting values, and often don’t intersect, so the discussion of the ethics behind temples applying for IPOs and Buddhists investing in the stock market raise many questions of morality. Buddhist and temples investing in stocks means they are affiliated entirely with that business, which includes even controversial practices, like harmful environmental practices, scandals, etc., which conflict with Buddhist […]