Jan Willis, PhD: Remembering Lama Yeshe
Tid
(Torsdag) 18:00 - 20:00 CET
Information om evenemang
This event is a hybrid event (you can take part via Zoom as well) This evening Jan Willis will share her story and teachings of Lama Yeshe,
Information om evenemang
This event is a hybrid event (you can take part via Zoom as well)
This evening Jan Willis will share her story and teachings of Lama Yeshe, the founder of FPMT and beloved teacher of thousands of disciples around the world.
Jan Willis is one of Lama Yeshe’s earliest Western disciples and sees him as one of her root spiritual mentors. She grew up in the Jim Crow South of 1950s and 1960s and took part in the Civil Rights movement. While traveling through Asia in the early 1970s, she met Lama Yeshe and discovered a path to healing the wounds of racism: “[Buddhism] has helped me in real ways to find what I was looking for as a young person in a world that was violent,” she explained. “It showed me how to locate deep wounds that racism caused in my early life … and having found them, how to heal them.”
About Lama Yeshe:
Lama Thubten Yeshe was born in Tibet in 1935. At the age of six, he entered the great Sera Monastic University, Lhasa, where he studied until 1959, when the Chinese invasion of Tibet forced him into exile in India. Lama Yeshe continued to study and meditate in India until 1967, when, with his chief disciple, Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, he went to Nepal. Two years later he established Kopan Monastery, near Kathmandu, in order to teach Buddhism to Westerners.
In 1974, the Lamas began making annual teaching tours to the West, and as a result of these travels a worldwide network of Buddhist teaching and meditation centers—the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT)—began to develop.
In 1984, after an intense decade of imparting a wide variety of incredible teachings and establishing one FPMT activity after another, at the age of forty-nine, Lama Yeshe passed away. He was reborn as Ösel Hita Torres in Spain in 1985 and recognized as the incarnation of Lama Yeshe by His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1986.
Buddhist Scholar, Teacher, and Practitioner
Jan Willis, PhD, has had a distinguished career as a scholar and teacher of Buddhism spanning fifty years. She first met Tibetan Buddhists in India and Nepal at the age of nineteen and went on to earn degrees in Philosophy and Indic and Buddhist Studies from Cornell and Columbia Universities.
She has taught at UC Santa Cruz, the University of Virginia and at Wesleyan University and now –in retirement–teaches part-time at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA.
Jan’s areas of expertise are Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist saints’ lives, Women and Buddhism, and Buddhism and Race and she has published works in all of these areas.
Coming from Birmingham, AL. she marched there with Dr. King in 1963 and has begun leading workshops which explore Race and Racism through a Buddhist Lens.
Her memoir ”Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist and Buddhist. An African American Woman´s Spiritual Journey” was published 2001.
TIME Magazine named Professor Willis one of six ”spiritual innovators for the new millennium.”(Dec 2000).
She was a recipient of Wesleyan University’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. (2003)
Newsweek’s ”Spirituality in America” issue included a profile of her and (Sept 2005),
Ebony magazine named Willis one of its ”Power 150” most influential African Americans (May 2007).
READ MORE about Jan Willis: https://www.janwillis.org/awards/
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Jan Willis Ph.D.
Jan Willis Ph.D.
Jan Willis grew up in the Jim Crow South, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Birmingham Civil Rights Campaign, and escaped the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama only to face racism of another kind while enrolled at an Ivy League university. Jan persevered and earned her BA and MA in Philosophy from Cornell University, and her PhD in Indic and Buddhist Studies from Columbia University. When she studied abroad in India and Nepal, she met the Tibetan Lama Thubten Yeshe who became her mentor for fifteen years, and one of the most influential Buddhist teachers in the West. Through his guidance, Jan learned to face down the demons of her past and embrace her whole identity—Black, Baptist, and Buddhist. She has studied and taught Buddhism for fifty years.
In December of 2000, Time magazine named Willis one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium.” In 2003, she was a recipient of Wesleyan University’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Newsweek magazine’s “Spirituality in America” issue in 2005 included a profile of Willis. In its May 2007 edition, Ebony magazine named Willis one of its “Power 150” most influential African Americans.
Jan is currently Professor of Religion Emerita at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and Visiting Professor of Religion at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA. She is the author of numerous essays and books, including The Diamond Light: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation; On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi; Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist and Buddhist; and Dharma Matters: Women, Race and Tantra. To learn more, please visit her website: janwillis.org.