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Venue: Spurlock Museum

Address: 600 S. Gregory St. , Urbana

Cost: Free

Entry Age: all

posted 8:58 pm Oct 24
modified 9:12 pm Oct 24

The Asian Educational Media Service, Spurlock Museum and Tashi Chöling Buddhist Dharma Center have partnered to present this program featuring Arjia Rinpoche, director of the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center in Bloomington, IN, and former Head Abbot of Kumbum Monastery in Eastern Tibet. Arjia Rinpoche will offer an introduction and post-screening discussion to the film "Daughters of Wisdom", a documentary on the Tibetan Nuns of the Kala Rongo Monastery, as part of the AsiaLENS series. Information regarding "Daughters of Wisdom" can be found at http://www.aems.uiuc.edu.

Directed by Bari Pearlman, the documentary film "Daughters of Wisdom" (2007, 68 min.) provides an intimate portrait of some of the nearly 300 nuns who receive unprecedented educational and religious training at the Kala Rongo Monastery, located on the remote Eastern Tibetan plateau north of the Himalayas. Films screened in the AsiaLENS series are organized by the Asian Educational Media Service (AEMS) in collaboration with the Spurlock Museum.

Arjia Rinpoche is the former Head Abbot of Kumbum Monastery in Amdo, Eastern Tibet, one of the most important monasteries in Tibet. Fleeing Tibet in 1998, Arjia Rinpoche eventually found political asylum in the United States, establishing in 2000 the Tibetan Center for Compassion and Wisdom, based in Oakland, CA. A master of many art forms, as well as architectural design, his three-dimensional Kalachakra Mandala has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. In 2005, the Dalai Lama appointed Arjia Rinpoche Director of the Tibetan Buddhist Mongolian Cultural Center in Bloomington, Indiana, which will evolve to become Kumbum Monastery in the west.