Does it belong in a museum?

According to the good people at Empty Hand Zen Center, for three Saturdays in July, meditation will become art at the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase in Purchase, New York. (I recall another mixing of meditation and art in Dallas in early June, as mentioned on Bad Buddha.) It sounds very cool. I was recently at the Dia Beacon in Beacon, New York, which seemed like a good place for meditation too. I guess museums are designed to be interesting spaces, so it shouldn’t surprise us that other activities flourish there too. Also, museums generally have more money than most dharma centers.

Speaking of museum-quality art and meditation, check out this rippin’ surfboard adorned with pictures of the bhikkhus at Metta Forest Monastery. Pictured are the monastery’s abbot, Ajaan Geoffrey Thanissaro, and the artist, surfer and aspiring cartoonist Vince Bury. Can you guess which is which?

Metta Forest Monastery is located on 140 acres of avocado groves and chaparral northeast of San Diego, and your humble correspondent is lucky enough to be visiting there this coming weekend. (I’ll be in the area on dull web-related business.) Unfortunately I won’t have anything remotely as cool as this surfboard to bring along. Which is one of many reasons I won’t be enlightened anytime soon. Anyway, there will be a dharma talk Saturday morning and I’ll try to figure out what some of it’s about to report back here.

– Philip Ryan, Webmaster