Limited tickets available. Registration required

Please do not show up without pre-registration

Saturday 14th December. 5.30pm – 7pm

Balmain Town Hall. Main Hall

Jesus counselled his followers to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect, and for centuries, mystical union with God—understood as perfect love and omniscient wisdom—was the ideal of Christian contemplatives. Buddha counselled his followers to realise perfect freedom from suffering by irreversibly dispelling all the afflictions and obscurations of the mind. The ideals of personal liberation and perfect enlightenment have been pursued by Buddhist contemplatives over the past 2,500 years.

While these two contemplative traditions appear to have had little contact throughout their long histories, they did exhibit remarkable parallels as well as differences. Ideals of perfection and the means to realise it will be explored in this lecture, with the hope that the vitality of both the Christian and Buddhist contemplative traditions may be revitalised in the modern era, which could so deeply benefit from their insights and wisdom.