This interview is one in an ongoing series exploring the intersection of art and religion in HDS courses.
How can we imagine a better world from within our current context? When Charles Hallisey, MDiv ’78, and Molly Silverstein, MDiv ’22, began discussing their Harvard Divinity School course “The Museum as a Buddhist Institution,” this question directed their investigations and collaboration.
Hallisey, Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer on Buddhist Literatures, met Silverstein while she was a student at HDS. While pursuing her degree, Silverstein helped organize the Faith in Arts Initiative at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in North Carolina, where she previously worked. Faith in Arts was an interdisciplinary program series that explored the role of art in spiritual practice. Her combined experience of working at the museum and her studies at HDS became part of her conversations with Hallisey about the possibilities for reimaging religious experiences outside of denominational religion. Hallisey’s long-term research interests intersected with Silverstein’s on-the-ground experiences in museums, and they started generating course ideas.
The result was an experience-led inquiry into the place of religious encounters within secular institutions and the potential for museums to be places for individual learning, community building, and ministry. While some students brought art history backgrounds, the majority of the students came to the course with experience across a vast expanse of backgrounds, with an interest in Buddhism or curatorial practices. This interview explores how the course originated, some of the student's field experiences as coursework, and the central query: how can museums become sites for ministry?
HDS: Where did the idea for this course come from?
Silverstein: When I first started taking Professor Hallisey's classes, I went to a conference at the Black Mountain College Museum on spirituality and art and told Professor Hallisey I would be out for the conference. He told me that he loved Black Mountain College, and that's how we started talking about museums.
Hallisey: When I learned more about Molly’s background in museums and her academic experiences, I began to think more about museums as sites not only for educating about Buddhist life and practice but also for Buddhist ministry. I had already been keeping track of shows that New York museums were doing on Buddhist art and their cooperation in making the public more aware of things about the Buddhist world. I also knew people who were involved in teaching meditation in museums. I'm also a big fan of the New York Times art critic Holland Cotter, someone I described in the class as one of the great Buddhist thinkers of contemporary America.
It was just like a synergy of long-standing interests of mine that got ramped up by meeting Molly and talking to her and her gentle enthusiasm for ideas that I would toss out that then made me think it was more and more doable. Once we started to investigate more things together, a course became something that was completely feasible and quite interesting.
In addition, my long-term interests were grounded by something I heard from a Lutheran bishop, who said, “We are living in the end times of denominational religion.” Since a school like Harvard Divinity School is premised on the existence of denominational religion, I wondered how a place like Harvard Divinity School might begin to prepare itself for a future without denominational religion.
Combining these three threads, Molly and I decided to harvest the low-hanging fruit and ask, “What's going on in these museums where people do Buddhist practices, and educate about Buddhist ideas, life, and places that are outside more conventional centers of Buddhist practice and life?”
HDS: What educational benefits do you see from exploring museums as a religious space in the instruction of your HDS students?
Hallisey: While most museums won’t be religiously based because they are public and secular institutions, they can still be sites where people do ministry. While not ignoring the profound differences between museums and hospitals, doing ministry in museums might not actually be much different than people being chaplains in a hospital. Perhaps the emerging and evolving practice of Buddhist ministry is leading the way in how this can be so.
A hospital is not a religious institution. You do have religiously-identified hospitals, of course, but even those that are not religiously-identified have chaplains. In other words, there is a space within hospitals that has become institutionalized to allow the spiritual needs of those who come into that building to be addressed. We think that something analogous is beginning to happen in museums.
Currently, the self-understandings and missions of museums are expanding. The museum has become both an educational space and something else already. To take just one example, some museums now offer programs that use art as therapy. For example, the Rubin Museum in New York is dedicated to education about Himalayan Buddhist art, but they also promote various caregiving activities in the museum. They have programs for people with dementia, as well as programs for caregivers of people with Alzheimer's and dementia. They have all kinds of family days with professionals who do art as therapy, and they do stuff with children, whether with their families or on school trips. Such programs make it clear that the public services of a museum are expanding. And some of those services now, I would say, look like what we count as ministry at Harvard Divinity School.
HDS: For this course, did you participate in any experiences outside the classroom?
Hallisey: The members of the class visited a lot of museums. The whole class didn't travel together to museums, but there were a variety of field exercises that individuals and small groups were doing. For assignments, students went and did their own explorations, which came together in the class as a whole. In the Boston area and especially at Harvard, there are lots of museums, so it was easier for members of the class to go to these museums and explore what was displayed there.
The Rubin Museum in New York had a show about Buddhism that was being shown at the Boston College Museum in the fall. So, that became a key case study.
We were also fortunate to receive funding from the Ho Family Foundation that made it possible for everyone in the class to travel to New York to see a major show of Indian Buddhist Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE-400 CE.” The art show also happened to be funded through the Ho Family Foundation. A number of the people in the class took advantage of that to go to the Rubin Museum on the same trip. It was clear, in student conversations and writing assignments following these visits, the real impact they had on the group’s shared understanding.
Silverstein: The one place we also visited together as a class was the CAMLab at Harvard. It's an AI interactive exhibition focused on cultural heritage sites worldwide. The exhibitions right now are focused on ancient Buddhist cave shrines and dances.
Hallisey: The exhibit we visited was an experiment the CAMLab was running about the experiences that virtual reality can make possible. Museums are doing quite a lot of expansion and rethinking their purposes and what they're capable of. That inquiry has led them to incorporate more of what today is called “intangible cultural heritage.” Museums have become more intentional about the experiences that people have when they're visiting their displays. When we visited the CAMLab, their displays showed us what it would be like to go into ninth-century Chinese caves that were sacred sites for Buddhist rituals.
They had all these paintings of individual dancers, which, if you were studying, you would be limited to viewing them as if they were frames in a film or individual pictures. But when we moved around the space with AI and virtual reality, we could see the dancers' motion, which you miss when you view them as still frames. Now, you can do that artificially with AI and virtual reality.
Some students felt the virtual experience was odd, and others said it was incredible. They would have never been able to see it without that kind of virtual experience. While disoriented, they felt a different sense of moving in space.
Museums are changing a lot. So, imagining possibilities for future Buddhist ministry in museums also needs to acknowledge how museums are imagining different futures for themselves. Sometimes, that may involve people doing Buddhist rituals within the museum to show what is displayed as art as part of a religious or ritual context in the Buddhist world. Within that also is taking advantage of things that new kinds of technology make possible.
HDS: What were the goals that you had while teaching this course for your students?
Hallisey: One of our goals was, how do we prepare ourselves to perceive possibilities for better futures in ministry? A part of the academic field of Buddhist studies has a very strong orientation, looking back, toward tracing the history of Buddhism. While we learn a lot from that, we don't learn how to become what we are not already.
What I wanted to come out of this course was, how do we help ourselves prepare to bring about better futures when what currently exists is not good enough or will not continue? That line of questioning has been so fruitful that I've persuaded Molly that we should keep exploring this kind of thing together.
It may be that museums are a particularly appropriate thing for religious scholars at Harvard Divinity School, which describes itself as a multireligious institution, to pay attention to. It's in museums that we see the possibilities of taking the multiplicity of religions seriously rather than just the sectarian or denominational divisions between religions.
In the museum, we see not only see different religions side by side, we see their histories in which they are shown to be completely interacting with each other. It makes it obvious that each religion can't be fully understood without making sense of its interactions with other religions. There are important lessons in that for our future here at HDS, but also for our world at large.
I came into the course fully understanding and disclosing to students that Molly and I were not experts on the intersectionality of religions and that we were depending on the members of the class to help us learn something about it and figure out what we should carry forward from it. I don't know if we could write a thesis from what came out of the course, but I think all of us experienced a sense of shared exploration and experimentation that pervaded the course. For me, that's a goal in its own right, and that space is valuable as a student to have a course that just wants you to be completely open and ask questions, and it’s not only about accumulating information.
HDS: Are there any artistic spaces you find yourself in?
Silverstein: I recently took an art class at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston where you sketch the different paintings. I was thinking a lot about this course during the process of sketching the paintings and just how sketching forces you to sit with something for long periods of time. When we first started thinking about the course, we discussed several books that speak about sitting with a painting for hours and how that experience changes your relationship with the art.
Hallisey: At the Harvard Art Museums, there is a particularly well-designed space with a number of Buddha images in it. Two of the four walls in the room are glass looking out onto Broadway. There is also an installation of these gigantic round stone balls outside those glass walls, yet still in the museum. They mediate between what's outside and inside. And having gone to the room several times, the glass walls and the stone balls kind of make the images take on an appearance that they're actually facing the world outside of the museum.
One of the things that this particular installation asks of us is to go outside the space of the exhibit room and see the images from the world outside. I am reminded of this almost every day. I may be driving home on Broadway coming toward the museum in the evening when it's dark, but when I see that exhibit room all lit up, I see those Buddha images looking out the windows, looking at all of us out there. And, in my car, I know that while the museum is not a Buddhist temple, it is doing what Buddhist temples commonly do, in the sense of being a space that is both apart and intimately connected to everything around it.
HDS: Do you believe art can change our world?
Hallisey: I think it does, but we must have a strong qualification about that, too. Last night, I was reading Muriel Barbary’s wonderful novel, A Single Rose, and a poem by the Japanese Buddhist poet Issa is quoted a few times in it. The poem says, "In this world, we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers." And so with that in mind, it can seem that in the museum, we are only gazing at flowers, but there is still a world outside that is close to hell or even part of hell. When I see the room of Buddha images lit up inside from the street outside, I remember that it's not that the gazing at flowers and the roof of hell are unconnected. Rather, we must never forget that the two are connected and that we have to figure out how to connect them today in different ways than they were once connected in the past. Otherwise, we just go back outside to walk on the roof of hell all over again.
Silverstein: I think that speaks to some hopeful element of this moment where the museum as an institution is being questioned and viewed with a lot of cynicism and righteous anger. If you think of that shift as a way of really bringing the world and its problems into the museum space and helping the museum remind us that the museum itself is in the world, it's an important moment and can potentially open us up to a whole new realm of human possibilities.
—by Maddison Tenney, HDS communications editorial assistant