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As Joan and I left Cache Valley, we had a distinct feeling of leaving a place that was not quite real and returning to a more consensus reality.  But it became apparent almost immediately that we had landed in yet another version of bizarro world, in which a thin veneer of normalcy disguised a unique Buddhist monastic mind set. It was crazy that we even came here.  I had another offer, from Tulane, a prestigious university in New Orleans.  Anyone in  their right mind would take that over a tiny Buddhist university no one had ever heard of.  But all my instincts said UWest. Part of it was Lew Lancaster.  He's the uncle of one of my Mens Group friends and he had recently become the President of UWest after a long career in Buddhist Studies at Berkeley.  He was looking for a distance ed/extended studies guy and decided I was it.  Transnational education. Living among Buddhists.  I went for it.  A few weeks later, Katrina happened.  If we had gone to Tulane, we would have lost everything.

University of the West (aka Hsi Lai University) is a WASC-accredited private non-profit university owned by Fo Guang Shan, a large and wealthy Buddhist organization headquartered in Taiwan.  Master Hsing Yun is the founder and still the leader of this Humanistic Buddhism order. We brought Master Hsing Yun live on the Internet to his followers worldwide, so they could see and hear his teachings and then approach him wherever they were and ask him a question.  I ran these events and many others. Adjusting to living on-campus as we did, in a small self-contained apartment inside a dormitory filled mostly with monks and nuns and young people from Taiwan and other parts of Asia, was surprisingly easy.  I took to it right away and Joan saw its advantages after a short time back in Portland.

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