By Candace Walworth, Peace Studies Program Chair
“You must watch my life, how I live, eat, sit, talk, behave in general. The sum total of all those in me is my religion.” –Mohandas K. Gandhi
Thank you, Dr. Kritee Kritee and Dr. Sudarshan Kapur for participating in a recent “Socially Engaged Spirituality” class to explore the legacy of Gandhi’s life and work for our times.
Kritee (dharma name Kanko) is a Zen teacher, scientist, activist, dancer and permaculture designer. She directs and teaches at Boundless in Motion Sangha in Boulder in the Rinzai-Obaku Buddhist lineage of Cold Mountain and is a Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Boulder Eco-Dharma Sangha. She currently works as a senior scientist in the Global Climate Program at the Environmental Defense Fund and is helping implement environment and climate-friendly methods of farming at large scales in Asia.
Kritee’s presentation (The Role of Spirituality & Community-Building: Satyagraha for All Life on the Planet”) is available on the top of this webpage as a PDF.
Sudarshan Kapur, the author of Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi, retired from his post as a Naropa Peace Studies professor in 2010. As part of the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the visit to India of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor Kapur went to India to lecture on the long tradition of contact between African-Americans and Indians leading up to the King visit in 1959.
Following the class, I received an email from Dr. Kapur in which he wrote, “It is always a joy to be with such energetic learners. Naropa is fortunate to have students such as these who will make ours a better world even as they seek to advance intellectually and spiritually.”
As if in reply, Tyler Dewey, Peace Studies junior from Rochester, New York, sent the following note: “To meet two individuals who deeply know the life of Gandhi and the impact that Gandhi’s beliefs can have on our communities was an honor. I was deeply inspired by what Kritee and Sudarshan had to say and cannot thank them enough for taking the time to share their wisdom and knowledge with us.”
