Buddhists bring mindfulness to college students | News – Meadville Tribune

“Change Your Mind, Change the World” is the name of their class. Now Claude AnShin Thomas and Wiebke KenShin Andersen, a Zen Buddhist monk and Zen Buddhist nun, respectively, will host their last class meeting of the semester Tuesday as scholars in residence at Allegheny College.

Through a wide range of topics — including understanding the nature of violence, the consequences of war, how Buddhism came to the West, basic Buddhist customs, and the benefits of disciplined meditation — Thomas and Andersen seek to introduce students to intensive practices of mindfulness within the frenzied pace of modern, ever-connected living.

Neither Thomas nor Andersen ever pursued a fast track to adopting the practices of Buddhist monasticism. Thomas was born in Meadville and grew up in Waterford in Erie County. When he was 17, he went into the military, serving in combat in the Vietnam War. Many years later, to please a therapist, he went to a meditation retreat for former combat veterans led by a Buddhist monk.

“They invited me to come to the monastery,” Thomas said. “I went with the intention to stay for 30 days, and I stayed for three years.”

A speaking engagement at Naropa University in Colorado led Thomas to an American Zen Buddhist monk from Yonkers, New York.

“How Buddhist practice was showing itself in his life made sense to me,” Thomas said. “He was very socially active. He showed me all of the things he was doing. I came back the following week to talk to him personally, and he invited me to become ordained. I thought, ‘Well, let’s see how this unfolds.’ I just kept doing the next thing.”

Thomas was ordained in Auschwitz, Poland, and subsequently took a pilgrimage, walking from Auschwitz to Vietnam, a journey of eight months.

Prior to ordination, Thomas met Andersen in Germany where she was helping to lead meditation sessions in Berlin out in open, public spaces. She invited him back to help and eventually agreed to become an intern with him and help with his nonprofit foundation. Like his beginning, Thomas started the internship with Andersen by taking a 151-day walk from Yonkers to San Francisco.

“It was definitely an intense way of starting my internship,” Andersen said.

After years in a novice capacity, Andersen became a Buddhist nun and continued to assist Thomas. Three visits to Allegheny College and a residency at Moravian College in Bethlehem, where the two received honorary doctorates, later culminated in the school asking them to teach a course for a whole semester. Mendicants by vow, they were provided housing in Meadville to begin their residency.

“We have the possibility to do a fair amount of academic research, but at the same time, make it personal and have practical aspects,” Andersen said. “Our class, part of their curriculum is that they practice meditation at home, sitting meditation for five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening and keep a journal about it. We did sitting meditation in class. Every class we start it out with five minutes of silence, paying attention to breath, being present.”

In addition, students had times where they would practice what Andersen referred to as “deep listening and mindful speech.” They would divide into groups and one by one talk about a certain topic without comments, advice or crosstalk from the other group members. Meditation as assignments took forms such as sitting, talking and eating.



“I could see in their writings that it was unusual to take time,” Andersen said. “Eating is something usually done on the side while you are doing other things. For many, it was new territory.”

For Thomas, coming back to the region after being gone for so long was a revelation. He said that “his roots” were connected in the dialect, “the way (people from this area) look at different topics (and) the way they process information.”

“What I’ve discovered here is that I’m a western Pennsylvania guy,” Thomas said. “I can feel a real familiarity here.”

He quickly followed up that with a dislike of shoveling snow and scraping ice, and he revealed that he and Andersen will be going to the Gulf Coast of Florida near Pensacola as their next destination. However, he did admire the nature of the region and specifically mentioned French Creek. Andersen said she enjoyed being a part of a greater community of colleagues and supporting their students at sporting events and open mic gatherings.

For their final class, Thomas and Andersen will meet with students at Grounds for Change, the volunteer, student-run coffeehouse on Allegheny’s campus. Although the last meeting will be mostly social in nature, Thomas remarked that the final project was a choice between a 10-page paper or joining Andersen and him at 7 a.m. for 20-minute silent sitting sessions for 10 days along with a 10-mile pilgrimage.

“What they’re embarking on now is setting the tone for a big chunk of their lives and to approach that with thoughtfulness and seriousness,” Thomas said. “We’re making an effort to open their eyes up to different ways of looking at the world, understanding that their perspective is only their perspective. There are multitudes of perspectives and inviting them to develop the courage and the ability to look at any particular topic from different angles.”

Tyler Dague can be reached at 724-6370 or by email at tdague@meadvilletribune.com.


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