Roshi Joan Halifax is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, author, anthropologist, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life care. Here, she tells of her path from her adventurous youth to zen buddhism, and the many people she met along the way, including Stanislov Grof, Joseph Campbell, Thich Nhat Hanh, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Bernard Glassman, and many others. She tells, with great feeling, how she became involved in helping the dying, and how she dealt with the death of her mother, and the impact it had on her personal understanding of Buddhism.
Alice Boner was a Swiss sculptor and painter who relocated to India in the 1930s in order to study in detail the principles of the sacred art. In 1926 she met the dancer Uday Shankar at a performance in Paris. She traveled with him to India to recruit dancers to tour the West, and for five years she managed the dance company before leaving to live in India on her own.She found a house on the Ganges, near Benares (Varanasi). After a profound experience, she developed her vision of the metaphysical structure hidden in the sculptures of the temples. Alice Boner’s book, Principles of Composition in Hindu Sculpture, reveals Indian art just as its creators had conceived it.Narrated by Arianna Ferrario, Alice Boner is revealed in her own words, based on ten diaries kept safe by her sister Georgette.
In this interview, which was his last, Alain Daniélou (1907-1994) recalls some of the central moments of his life: the study of dancing and printing, the fifteen years spent in India attending traditional schools in Sanskrit, and studying philosophy and music. Daniélou was a professor at the Hindu University in Benares and director of the Indian Music College.
The English poet Kathleen Raine devoted her life to the defense of the “ancient sources” of wisdom and to the creative power of imagination. As the tireless life and soul of Temenos, a magazine dedicated to the sacred traditions of humanity, Raine is also the founder of the Temenos Academy for the study of universal wisdom.Kathleen Raine was a fine English poet, even receiving a golden medal from the Queen herself. She was also an expert poetry scholar, studying the works of William Blake, who already in the 1700s forecast a new form of consciousness, a form we are only reaching now. According to Blake, who, in the words of Kathleen Raine, was a “prophet in the biblical sense, with a spiritual message for his nation,” imagination is divine essence, the eternal world we will all reach once we perish.