 This week I put on my Buddhist hat (not literally, though I was wearing a Buddhist pin) and joined a procession of monks and lay people on a half-hour peace walk from the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley to Mangalam Centers, where the Center for Creative Inquiry has its home.
The  walk passed through the campus of the University of California, a lovely and serene place. As the procession passed by the math building, the life sciences building, the main library, the East Asian library, and so on, I found myself thinking that this procession of Buddhist monastics was literally connecting Western fields of knowledge that do not usually make it a priority to communicate with each other. It seems to me we need much more of that–an ongoing dialogue that brings all the fields of Western knowledge, developed down through the centuries with love and dedication, into conversation with a very different tradition, one with its own ways of knowing. Knowledge on the march!