Buddhism in the Balkans: The Odyssey of a Buddhist Monk Snjezana Akpinar This lecture was given on November 24, 1998, as part of the Institute for World Religions Fall Faculty Lecture Series, Walking the Way: Praxis and Gnosis in Religious Experience.
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any of us regard the Balkans as the crossroads of all trouble. Even the word itself has come to mean something ominous and disintegrating. After World War I, the term “Balkanization” was coined to mean “to break up into small, mutually hostile political units.” Coming from the Balkans I could easily expound on such stereotypes. I shall, however, approach the area from a different point of view, connecting two seemingly disparate subjects: Buddhism and the Balkans. How did the two come to meet? I will discuss the contacts between Buddhism and a religious sect, then turn to the life of a Buddhist monk who exemplified that connection. Ever since history can remember, the Balkans have been an area where different cultures met. In the ancient days this area was considered as the north of greater Greece; later it was the east of Imperial Rome. Being mountainous, the Balkans were hard to conquer and easy to hide in, so customs, ideas, philosophies and unfashionable religions persisted, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. The area still forms a buffer between the various understandings of East and West as these evolve through history. It is also a crossroads for trade. The word “Balkan” derives from a Mongol word meaning “mountain chain,” a remainder from the Huns and their more recent relatives, the Bogomils, who made it to the Balkans around the same time as the Slavs. The Bogomils were a Gnostic sect that lived in the Balkans during the Middle Ages. When Christianity came converting most of Europe, the issue 1, june 2001
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