Pizza with chopsticks

Today André van der Braak and I visited the translation center of the Longquan Monastery. In June a delegation of this Buddhist monastery came to the Netherlands and VU University, where Venerable Xianqing gave a lecture on Buddhism in China today. I learned a lot from attending this lecture and was very excited to meet him again today at the translation center. Venerable Wuguang was also present. We had a very interesting conversation about Chinese Buddhism. We spoke about emptiness and how emptiness is actually very open. We also discussed the different approaches to this same concept in Confucian and Taoist teachings and how they influenced the Chinese Buddhist practice. Venerable Xianqing was also very interested in André van der Braak’s book ‘Nietzsche and Zen’.

We had lunch with all the people who were present at the translation center. Toa accompany the Chinese food they had ordered pizza and served coca cola specially for us. This for me was really a meeting between Western and Chinese culture, because the pizza slices were served in a bowl and we ate them with chopsticks. The noodles and the vegetables were very delicious.

It was really inspiring to see how many people were working in the translation center. They translate books, teachings, blogs and micro-blogs into different languages. I encourage you to take a look on their website: http://www.longquanzs.org/eng/index.php. They are active in many different ways and extensively describe these on this site.

In the afternoon I had some time for my self, which was great as I was able to get some rest after all the new impressions. In the evening there was an VU alumni dinner at a restaurant downtown. The restaurant served typical food from Beijing and once again it was delicious and plentiful. It was interesting to meet the Chinese alumni who had either graduated or had spent a year or a semester studying at VU university. I had a lot of interesting conversations with the alumni that were sitting near me. I was surprised when they told me that one thing they missed was Dutch food, for example the Cool Best juice and the Dutch bread, yoghurt and cheese. One of the alumni had even traveled from Shanghai to Beijing especially for this dinner.

Tomorrow practically the whole delegation is heading back to the Netherlands. I will stay for six more days and tomorrow, very early in the morning someone will come to pick me up and drive me to Longquan Monastery where I will spend the weekend. I am really looking forward to this visit and you will read about my experiences there very soon.