Day 2: Wheel of Life

Wheel of life, an introductory talk to Buddhism in the context of Wheel of Life.
Learning and education through the means of visual representation, not written language.
I realize how little I knew about Buddhism and how ,interestingly, Buddhist philosophy differ from western philosophy in retrospect.
The practicality of Buddhism is at once astonishing, given the strict order monks and devotees live in. The sense that each is ultimately responsible for their rebirth, hence their life, is compellingly powerful. The ultimate goal is to achieve enlightenment, devoid of desire and suffering.
The wheel can be seen as a reflection of both of the Buddhist idea of external cosmology and internal microcosmic whole.

First Lecture: Meaning of Education

It is intense! Mark Mancall is, by my roommate's word, "sensational". He is very knowledgeable, profound and opinionated. I totally love the the lecture! The lecture evoke us to reflect upon the meaning of higher education, touching on comparative changes in higher education in recent years and Mark's own view of a proper higher education. Mark quoted extensively from Confucius in stating the purpose of higher education. In particularly, he noted that high education is ,first and foremost, a quest for mental maturity, an education of mind, and, at core, an education of morals. He agreed whole-hearted with the six virtues of Confucius in creating a just and peaceful society (the truth of which I strongly revere), namely, 仁benevolence,君子person of virtues,德moral superiority,礼propriety,文art of peace, and one other I cannot recall.

He talks about the importance of writing and precise use of words. He demands us to examine the world around us and observe how often the words like 'democracy', 'liberty', 'freedom' are used without clarity and justification. He claims that without the precision of diction, references in language turn ambiguous and words misconstrue and blur with reality.

He emphasizes the importance and necessity of a truly complete, rigorous humanity education, in term of education the soul and mind, not in term of skills and trade. He states the instrumentalism of recent higher education is too great that the higher institutions forget their mission of passing down traditional culture heritage and cultivating of cultured citizens.

He proposes that we, the new generation of SLE kids should reflect on our own purpose of education, and emulate many virtuous aspect of the traditional higher education, such as the perceptiveness of reality taught through drawing, the intimacy with literature gained through memorization and the fine skills of close analysis of a text.

Superb lecture! Bravo! I would love if he can stay till the end of the academic year!!!

Syllabus (Will update as time goes on)

Hail to the beginning of SLE!
Don't know what is SLE? Well, it stands for Structured Liberal Education. It is an unique, academically vigorous residence-based one-year humanity program offered at Stanford University. As a current student in the program, I will report on my SLE experience daily (hopefully) to record my personal experience in this SLE , and, maybe in retrospect, giving my readers, you, a sense of what SLE is like.

Here is a basic schedule for the week. And I will try to update the syllabus a.s.a.p.

Over the summer, we had a short reading list: Homer's Odysseus translated by Lombardo and the Tanakh, the Jewish holy scripture (some parts of it).

This week we will focus on the meaning and method of education, with readings as following:

Plato's Euthyphro, Penguin Classics version included in The last days of Socrates
Heart Sutra: http://www.snibbe.com/buddhism/heart.html
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius:http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html
Wheel of Life

Will update soon!!