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Marian Beijing
Publisher: Asoka
Date Time
7 July 2021 is 20:00 to 21:00
Marian Beijing
Marjan Beijering has been working as an independent historian since 1998. She studied social history in Rotterdam, worked as a journalist, history teacher and set up heritage projects. She discovered Van de Wetering's work when she started meditating herself. For this biography she researched archives and spoke with relatives, friends and publishers in the Netherlands and the United States. She also visited the monastery in Kyoto where Van de Wetering stayed in the late XNUMXs.
Good overview of the VdW biography. It is a pity that the interviewer always tries to look for the direction of Zen and Buddhism with his questions. Ultimately, in my opinion, Marjan Beijering does not manage to avoid this sufficiently and in the end it seems that she wrote the book mainly in the context of Buddhist research through person-oriented historiography. Asoka, a Buddhist publishing house, has republished the Zen “triology” together with Van de Weterings' biography, but in this way the ideological promotion gets a little too much emphasis in my opinion. I even suspect that there is a connection between this emphasis and the fact that the book has received almost no media attention. The statement on the back cover that Beijering was brought into contact with the writer VdW through a meditation group does not help either. There are quite a lot of people for whom “spirituality” has no positive meaning and VdW was certainly “disrespectful” in that respect.... Read more »