John Willemsens
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Industry | Religion |
| Occupation | Advayavada Buddhism Teacher |
| Location | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Introduction | I am a co-founder and the current chairman of the Advayavada Foundation and the director of its mouthpiece, the Advayavada Buddhism Information Center. I was born in Eindhoven in the Netherlands on March 6th, 1934, but grew up in Argentina, where I lived from 1939 until 1964 (in Buenos Aires and the Chaco). In Dutch, I published Tao is de weg (poetry) in 1987, then a new version of Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching (Bres, Amsterdam 1990), and in 1994 and 1996 two editions of a translation of Chapter 8 of Sir Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia. Although a second-hand copy of T.R.V. Murti's The Central Philosophy of Buddhism had already triggered my specific ideas about non-dual Buddhism on August 12th, 1986 [and I was reading Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki long before that], I only became a Buddhist formally [at the Amsterdam Buddhavihara] on October 8th, 1995. |
| Interests | Nonduality, Buddhism, Madhyamaka, Nagarjuna, Advayavada Buddhism, Taoism, Daoism, Lao-tzu, Laozi, religious freedom, common ground, Spinoza, panentheism, world affairs, European history, Dutch history, Dutch East Indies, Dutch politics, Latin America, Argentina, Spanish language, travel, genealogy |
| Favorite movies | Death in Venice, Philadelphia, Under the Volcano, The Pawnbroker, The Guns of Navarone, E.T., Casablanca, The Mission, Empire of the Sun, Lawrence of Arabia, Missing, Shine |
| Favorite music | Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Saint-Saens, Elgar, Mahler, Rachmaninov, Italian opera, Belle Epoque operetta, musicals, Greek music, Rebetika, Basque and Celtic music, early 20th century tangos, R&B |
| Favorite books | Upton Sinclair: The Lanny Budd Books, Jonathan I. Israel: Radical Enlightenment, Alan Watts: The Way of Zen and The Wisdom of Insecurity, T.R.V. Murti: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, Shree Rajneesh: The Hidden Harmony, Wing-tsit Chan: A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Tao Te Ching, Daodejing, Benedictus (Baruch) de Spinoza: the Ethics etc. |