The Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC), has a couple podcasts and articles this week on this topic:<\/p>\n
The article surrounding the first begins:<\/p>\n
At the heart of Buddhism is a metaphor for interconnectedness: Indra\u2019s net. The Vedic god\u2019s net, which is supposed to hang over his palace on Mount Meru, is said to stretch to infinity. At each point where the threads cross sits a jewel that reflects all the other jewels, and like mirrors within mirrors, the entire cosmos is reflected.<\/p>\n
Lewis Lancaster, Professor Emeritus of Buddhism at the University of California at Berkeley, knows how apt that metaphor is in the current world. For years he\u2019s struggled to find an adequate way of documenting the complicated, almost infinite spread of Buddhism from its 5th century BCE Indian origins. That is, until he found an equally complex instrument to map the ancient faith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Prof. Lancaster\u2019s project provides an amazing visual and current image of Buddhism as it is being practiced and has been practiced throughout time and around the world, the\u00a0Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative<\/a>. He has been working for over a decade on compiling the data needed for this (not unlike the prolific work of Charles Muller, and others, to compile the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism<\/a>).<\/p>\n
If you haven\u2019t seen it yet, Prof. Lancaster\u2019s lecture 5 years ago in California gives a comprehensive overview of Buddhism and his work to make it better known:<\/p>\n