President's Remarks

Good evening ladies and gentlemen.

On behalf of the Ho Family Foundation I would like to thank you for joining us to celebrate the establishment of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford.

OUR POINT OF VIEW

In the next few minutes I would like to share with you our family’s approach to funding Buddhism related programs and where we see this new Center at Stanford fitting into our strategy.

Our inspiration has its origins four generations ago in the work of my great grandmother in law, Lady Clara Ho Tung. She devoted her life to supporting the understanding and practice of Buddhism in her home of Hong Kong, and worked in three major areas, areas that she felt a strong personal connection with.

First Lady Clara encouraged the study and intellectual understanding of Buddhism, by travelling all over China, to all the sacred mountains and other sites, in search of teachers, who she brought to give talks to Hong Kong’s multi-cultural population.

Second, she supported practitioners and devotees of the tradition, by offering instruction in meditation and establishing thriving temples that became centers of their communities.

And particularly close to her heart, she connected Buddhism with her culture in very concrete ways by supporting education and social programs. She was especially interested in education for women, both the dharma and practical life skills, and the schools she established continue to flourish.

Now, nearly one hundred years later, the Ho family continues to see these three areas: intellectual study, support of the living tradition, and engagement with modern culture as our funding priorities.

It was clear to Lady Clara, and is even more so to our family today, that these three areas accomplish much more than simply understanding and preserving an ancient and important tradition. They also have important implications for the healing and development of individuals, communities and cultures today.

FUNDING STRATEGIES

Let me give you a little detail about how we support the three areas.

The first area we fund today is the preservation and scholarly understanding of the tradition past and present. We do this in two main ways, through academic institutions and through the arts.

Through the Family Foundation and other Ho family philanthropies we have established chairs and Centers of Buddhist Studies at the University of Hong Kong, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, and the International Buddhist College of Thailand. We also provide general support to Buddhist colleges in other parts of Asia. Stanford is our first grant of this kind in the United States but will shortly be followed by others in the US and Europe, and later in Asia.

We also support the preservation and public presentation of traditional Buddhist arts. We have assisted the conservation, education and the creation of an archive for both the sacred dance and the visual arts of Bhutan. This work became a landmark exhibition, called The Dragon’s Gift, which is currently at the Rubin in New York and will come here to the Asian Art Museum in February.

We are also funding a new gallery of Buddhist sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, to open next April.

Our second area is supporting living Buddhist traditions, both in their countries of origin and in the modern western world.

We promote Chinese Buddhism as well as other traditions through the Tung Lin Kok Yuen temples in Hong Kong and Vancouver. We also help Tibetan monastic colleges and nunneries in the Himalayas. And we sponsor many types of meditation programs, lectures and combined workshops in North America, Europe and Asia, led by some of the most accomplished meditation teachers such as Thich Nhat Hanh.

The third area of our funding encourages dialogue and collaboration between Buddhism and aspects of modern society.

In particular we have created arts education programs that incorporate meditation and awareness practice into the exploration of self, community and culture. For example, we have programs in schools in Hong Kong and China that use photography, creative writing and dance to help young people discover and express their authentic selves.

WHAT ROLE DOES STANFORD PLAY?

While this Center at Stanford chiefly addresses the first of our funding priorities, namely the scholarly study of Buddhism, it also is important for the other two. For example scholarly study contributes to the living tradition by clearing up misconceptions among modern practitioners who might otherwise over assimilate Buddhism into mainstream western spiritual ideas and assumptions.

And a more accurate understanding of Buddhism among modern people greatly facilitates creative dialogue between Buddhism and modern culture. For example, many trends in philosophy, art, literature, and psychology have been deeply influenced by contact with Buddhism. Even science has been changed through the Dalai Lama’s dialogues with scientists and medicine through applying meditation techniques to reduce stress and heal disease.

Examples like these suggest that Arnold Toynbee may have been right that the coming of Buddhism to the West will prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century, resulting in the profound transformation of both Buddhism and modern culture. It’s exciting to see Stanford playing an important, and perhaps even a leading role in this process.

In closing, I would like to express our delight and excitement to see this project come to fruition. All of us at the Ho Family Foundation look forward to a long, close and happy collaboration with Carl, Paul, Irene and the rest of the Buddhist Studies community at Stanford.

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