Grief, Translation, and the Wonder of Friendship

Instructor(s): Chenxing Han and Paula Arai

Program Description:

A Book Launch Conversation on one long listening

How do we grieve our losses? How can we care for our spirits? How is it that 不知最亲切: not knowing is most intimate? one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care dances with these questions as it weaves together letters to a dying friend, bedside chaplaincy visits, and memories of a migratory childhood. In this book launch conversation, Chenxing Han, author of one long listening and Be the Refuge, is joined by Dr. Paula Arai, Eshinni and Kakushinni Professor of Women and Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Buddhist Studies and author of numerous books, including Painting Enlightenment and The Little Book of Zen Healing.

Chaplains serve as translators between anguish and recovery, silence and speech, the broken and the whole. The training of Buddhist chaplains is still an emerging field, and the ethics of spiritual care in a multilingual, multicultural world remain ripe with questions. Guided by Buddhist teachings on spiritual friendship (kalyāṇamittatā), Chenxing and Paula will invite us into an intimate evening of conversation, storytelling, and companionship with the unknown.

This program is co-sponsored with the Institute of Buddhist Studies

About the Instructor(s):
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  Chenxing Han

  Chenxing Han is the author of Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (2021) and one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care (2023). She holds a BA from Stanford University, an MA in Buddhist Studies from the Graduate Theological Union, and a certificate in Buddhist chaplaincy from the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California. She is a co-teacher of Listening to the Buddhists in our Backyard at Phillips Academy Andover and a co-organizer of May We Gather: A National Buddhist Memorial for Asian American Ancestors.

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  Paula Arai

  Paula Arai (Ph.D. from Harvard University) has been teaching Buddhist Studies for over 26 years and is author off Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra—The Buddhist Art of Iwasaki Tsuneo; Bringing Zen Home: The Healing Heart of Japanese Women’s Rituals; and Women Living Zen: Japanese Sōtō Buddhist Nuns. Raised by her Japanese mother, she is at home in the aesthetic, moral, and contemplative modes in Sōtō Zen.