Travel Lectures by Catherine Hopper

Having done my last talk of the season, I’m off to a log cabin on the shores of Loch Voil, in the Scottish Highlands. After 11 years in my day job, this is my sabbatical: a four-week solitary retreat in the grounds of a Buddhist retreat centre, Dhanakosa; a chance to rest, walk, read, meditate, listen to music and drink coffee with chocolate biscuits. I was there for two weeks exactly 10 years ago and have done many solitary retreats since, but never this long. Farewell!

It’s October and the UK lecture season is only just beginning but I started early, warming up with an academic paper given at a conference in Bangkok in September. My day job includes making very popular Buddhist DVDs for Religious Education in UK schools. This is pretty much unheard of in Buddhist Asia, so I’d been asked to come and show video clips and explain what we do and how RE works here. Fascinating to see the huge diversity among the thousands of delegates, most of them monks. Also extraordinary to be treated as a Buddhist VIP for three days: rushed through diplomatic channels at the airport; traffic stopped for our enormous convoy of buses taking us from hotel to university, with police outriders fore and aft!

To answer the questions from my last post: Phnom Penh was a great place to recover from jetlag, with its blossoming cafe culture. There were no women speakers at the plenary sessions of the conference; however this was not for want of trying on the part of the conference organisers, and there were several female speakers in the parallel themed sessions. Finally, it seems the world contains far more Buddhist universities than you’d expect! They’re mostly in Asia, but there’s also one in Boulder, Colorado - where as it happens, my cousin works.

It’s exactly a year since my last invitation to the East, when I was providing consultancy to the Ministry of Education of the Royal Government of Bhutan. You can hear all about this in my lecture Bhutan Revisited. I’m very fortunate to be offered such interesting travels, given that my everyday life is pretty simple. I live with six friends in a Buddhist women’s community in Salford. Most of them are ordained, like me, and so are my colleagues at work.

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This is the quiet time of my year as a travel lecturer; however, my day job as Munisha, education officer at The Clear Vision Trust, is providing plenty of other opportunities for public speaking: at a conference in June marking the first 100 years of Buddhism in Britain I gave a talk about Buddhism and Young People in Britain. As a result I now have an invitation to speak on using video to teaching young people about Buddhist ethics, at another conference, in September, in Bangkok, run by the International Association of Buddhist Universities.

Will I be the sole woman speaker? Will it be great fun to go there via my half-sister’s house in Phnom Penh and visit her sweet daughters? And just how many Buddhist universities could there be in this world? Come back and find out.