Barbra Clayton
Barbra Clayton is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Mount Allison University, a liberal arts institution located in the heart of maritime Canada. She is the author of Moral Theory in Śāntideva's Śikṣāsamuccaya, the article on Buddhist Ethics in the Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, and several articles on Mahayana morality. Her recent work focuses on the ethics of environmentalism in the Shambhala Buddhist community, as well as on Buddhist monasticism at Gampo Abbey in Canada. She is the co-editor with Dan Cozort of the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, though is currently taking an extended sabbatical from this role in order to devote more time to her two small children, Emma and John. She lives with them, her husband Brian, and a cat named Shime, in Sackville, New Brunswick. She is a recent and zealous convert to organic gardening.
Bio last updated December 27th, 2018.
Articles by Barbra Clayton
Dharma Matters, Buddhist Batters
By Barbra Clayton
June 1, 2013
Barbara Clayton talks to Convivium about Cape Breton’s Gampo Abbey, where the Shambhala Buddhist monks swing for the fences at the annual July 1 baseball game.
Convivium: In Renouncing the World to Get Engaged? Gampo Abbey and the Role of Monasticism in a Lay Bhuddist Movement, you make the point that it is a really curious kind of renunciation that Shambhalians are engaged in because they are very much engaged in the world, even if it is a pretty remote part of the world in Cape Breton What is clear is that within the demands of the monastic life, the Shambhala monks and retreatants at Gampo Abbey have a great deal of fun at their annual July 1 baseball game against the local townspeople; and though they are Buddhists from a variety of backgrounds, they play to win C: You really participate in the life of the community when you are there? I love the story you tell about the July 1 baseball game C: You cited a wonderful phrase they use: temporary monasticism, or what some have called 'meditating off the cushions,' meaning to take meditation practice back out into the world of daily life If you go to Bodia in India, if it's a Buddhist festival, there will be people selling fish in little bags that you then release into a local stream or river or pond Shambhala Buddhism is an evolution of the entirely secular Shambhala meditation movement originated by the late Chögyam Trungpa in Colorado in 1970, blending it into an adaptation of a variety of formal Buddhist religious traditions C: I wonder what a Buddhist approach to baseball would be? Because you should actually try to not try to swing, right? You should actually try to not catch the ball C: You use the phrase westernized Tibetan Buddhism and I am wondering if Tibetan Buddhists, without any qualifier, would look at something like Shambhala and say 'This is just Buddhism light BC: Under Trungpa, they had their Shambhala teachings and their Buddhist teachings