Lewis Lancaster is professor of East Asian languages and Buddhist studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently in charge of the Ph.D. program in the Group in Buddhist Studies on that campus. He has recently written "The Sources for the Koryo Buddhist Canon: A Search for Textual Witnesses" and "The History of the Study of Twentieth Century Forgeries of Dunhuang Manuscripts" and is editor of Religion and Society in Contemporary Korea (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1997). He has been active in the world of computers, organizing the Electronic Buddhist Text Initiative, a consortium of more than forty groups around the world dealing with Buddhism and the new technology. A CD-ROM containing Sanskrit Buddhist texts is underway.
Abstract of paper given at Buddhism and Ecology conference:
The Cultural Collective
and Buddhist Ecological Issues
Buddhism has been able to move from one cultural
area to another, adapting to local situations and collective perceptions
held by the various societies that adopted its teachings. Ideas about
nature, animal life and cthonic spirits in the canonical literature and in
the cultural patterns of Buddhist areas, give us a glimpse of how the
collective operated. Present ecological interests provide another example
of ways in which Buddhism was interpreted and practiced.