NEW YORK -- On the rare occasions that Master Jinje travels outside his monastery in the rural mountains of South Korea, he is greeted by crowds of Koreans who have taken to practicing Ganhwa Seon, the unique form of Zen meditation that he has spent decades imparting on the nation's largely non-monastic, non-Buddhist population.
But when Jinje, a high-level monk of Jogye, South Korea's largest Buddhist order, wandered past the hot dog stands and bodegas of New York City's Morningside Heights neighborhood in his grey monastic robes earlier this week, few people turned their heads.
Outside South Korea, where Buddhism has roughly 11 million followers and Jinje is revered as one of the nation's pre-eminent meditation teachers, he is little-known by those other than Buddhism scholars and a small number of Korean Buddhist immigrants. In fact, until last week, the 78-year-old had rarely stepped foot outside East Asia and had never come to the United States...
No comments:
Post a Comment