Susan Morrison
East Hamilton High School
Teacher

Using Iconography and Tradition to Teach Reading and Writing:

Have students create autobiographical stele designs. Identify the one, singular moment to be emphasized and then create specific symbols of highlights with sequence and structure.

Create 3-D stele summaries from the Tibetan short story, “An Old Nun Tells Her Story”, from Tales of Tibet. Use clay on 8x10 shower board cutouts. Shows prioritizing, summary, symbols, sequence, tone, and should be accompanied by a written defense.

Thangkas: consider providing one set template or have them make their own, leaving the medium up to the students (depending on how daring and fearless your class is). The subject could be the topic of a research paper or a literary criticism paper. Just as example, if your students are writing a paper on Hemingway, thangkas can include the lineage and hierarchy and placement requirements and students could create relevant, iconic symbols. Should be followed by a written explanation of the piece. Could also work with literary analysis (maybe rhetorical analysis), but this would be so much tougher -- turning abstractions into more abstractions.

Give students thangkas that already exist and have them write a narrative that might tell the painting's story, with expectations on placement, symbols, organization, relationships, hierarchy, etc.

Mandalas are much trickier. I am obsessed with the idea of teaching rhetorical structure through visual means. We've tried making 3-D models of papers for revision, graphic organizers of all sorts etc. Most high schoolers have such a tough time "seeing" structural errors in their writing. I would take my more daring classes and have them create mandalas representing a piece of their writing with set locations for main points, supporting material, transitions, stylistic elements, etc. Again, this is in its incubation stage right now but I have hope for this one.

You could go more literal and create mandalas for existing stories about houses or structures -- House of Usher anyone? Gatsby and the Eggs?

A very very small but fun activity might be to have students create their own treasure texts, maybe just aphorisms or even a style requirement (alliteration), and have them hide them about the campus with rewards for those who uncover them by semester's end. You could even turn this into a scavenger hunt if you want.

Buddhism dives so deeply into the senses, admittedly in order to reject them, why not have students in groups create an argument for a given topic (rhetoric) with the expectation that they must present their stance through all the senses, not through words or writing. Each student in the group could represent one of the senses. Might be tough but would be really interesting. They would need to to some analytical piece to explain their choices. You might could extend this and have them create representative prayer flags with each of the five colors representing their element of persuasion.

Students could create rudimentary prayer wheels from found objects (maybe one per group or pairing) and write random words on their wheel (you could always assign specifics to each wheel writer -- style or subject focused). Put them all together, make students, spin them and write an extension of what comes up on the combined prayer wheels. Think of it as ancient madlibs.

Create a wiki page on http://pbworks.com/  or any similar site, for summaries, analysis, labeling, and reviewing of selected jataka tales. Could always include re-writing or updating the tales.

Socratic seminars (Padeia, nun’s seminar, concentric circles, etc.) on selections from The Nine-Eyed Agate poems of Jangbu, poetry of Woeser, and  Dhondup Gyal’s “Waterfall of Youth”.

 
The overall idea is to use Tibetan and Buddhist traditional objects, art, writing styles and iconography to not only cover contemporary writers and poets but to also strengthen reading and writing skills. The goal is to teach the content as a means of improving processes. There is a physicality and unavoidable sensory experience in Tibetan Buddhism that creates so many options for analysis, synthesis, and creation in an English class.

Supplemental Ideas:

Buddhist influences on transcendentalists in America with an emphasis on the essays of Emerson and Thoreau.

Extend the comparison to Whitman’s poetry. How do you reconcile Whitman’s glorification of the physical individual with the Buddhist emphasis on impermanence of the physical. 

Eastern influences on American post-modernist and imagist poets. Ezra Pound was admittedly inspired by Asian culture but he railed against Buddhism. BUT still deserves a look, especially with the modern Tibetan writers who are not neccessarily Buddhist writers. Certainly a connection exists in typography, the importance of the physical form within the actual style. Think e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, and even extend out to Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Check out work by Jangbu and Dhondup Gyal.

Speaking of Dhondup Gyal’s groundbreaking poem, “Waterfall of Youth”, it demands comparison to Allen Ginsberg and “Howl” and would be a natural gateway into Buddhism’s influence on the Beat writers.

The modern Tibetan writing, see Tales of Tibet, lends itself to comparison with existentialists, if not nihilists.

Red Poppies, by Tibetan writer Alai, sounds as though it lends itself to comparisons could stand up to Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury.

Many of the nonfictional accounts of life in feudal Tibet, especially the intrigues and maneuverings surrounding installations of the Dalai Llamas  would be fascinating comparisons to Voltaire and possibly Machiavelli.

In nonfiction, it could be fascinating to look at the debate roiling regarding the Dalai Llama’s Middle Way option and the steadfast call for Tibetan independence. This would wed nicely to Civil Rights writers with the differences between MLK and Malcolm X.

The entire question of Middle Way or independence would be a great Problem Based Learning hook.

One last comparison/contrast, and this might be a stretch, would be to compare socialists text specifically tied to China and Western tracts on independence and democracy.

 

This site was created by [Susan Morrison ] at the NEH Summer Institute "Literatures, Religions, and Arts of the Himalayan Region," held at the College of the Holy Cross, Summer 2011.