Dear Burning Refuge Registrants, 

Thank you so much for joining us for our inaugural conference March 7 – 9! As the date for our highly anticipated conference draws near, we are thrilled to share some important details to ensure a seamless and enriching experience, whether you’re attending in person or online. We have been absolutely stunned by the extremely high level of interest and registration numbers which have exceeded our wildest dreams!!! Therefore, to ensure this is a smooth, meaningful, and safe experience for all, we ask you to please carefully review all these details below.

**Conference Dates**: March 7 – 9, 2024

**Location**:  Swartz Hall (Harvard Divinity School) and Zoom 

For IN-PERSON registrants, please keep the following in mind: 

Registration: Upon arrival to Swarts Hall, please follow our signage to the registration table, where you can collect your conference materials and nametag. Please note that for this conference it is REQUIRED to wear your nametag at all times, as this is essential to our security team’s important safety measures. This will also facilitate meeting your lovely fellow attendees! Of course, if you are receiving this email, you have successfully registered for the conference. HOWEVER, if you know of people interested in attending, please advise them that registration is absolutely mandatory to attend. This is for all our safety and wellbeing.

Health and Safety: Your well-being is our top priority. Due to the high number of registrants and a resurgence in Boston in respiratory illness, including Covid, we will be providing masks for people to wear at their own discretion. Additionally, the doors to Swartz Hall and other parts of HDS’ campus are locked, which means that we will have one main entrance that a member of our conference team will oversee. Please keep an eye out for signage to direct you to this entrance. 

Accessibility: We will have signage indicating the ADA accessible entrance to Swartz Hall, as well as directions to the elevator should anyone prefer or require this. We will also have a designated room that will be a low-stimulation room (Swarts 114) for people to rest in silence, should this need or preference arise at any time. We are also able to provide a dedicated lactation space, a dedicated faith/spiritual/religious/worship space, and all other currently described accessibility needs on the registration form thus far. Should other accessibility needs arise during the conference, please be in touch with anyone on our conference team, and we will be happy to assist. In particular, please do let us know ASAP if there is a need for ASL interpretation.

Transportation and Lodging: As posted on our website, we are unfortunately not of the capacity to support registrants’ transportation or lodging concerns, including but not limited to hotel bookings and parking passes. Parking in Cambridge is often difficult because most street parking is reserved only for permanent city residents. Thus, we highly recommend using public transportation or rideshare to come to HDS campus from your lodging. There is some paid parking scattered around Harvard, but we cannot provide specific guidance on that matter.

Internet Access: Please use this link to access wifi while on HDS’ campus. (getonline.harvard.edu)  

Breakout Sessions and Panels: Our breakout session will include both panels and workshops. Our fourth breakout session will be led by our keynote speakers, who will lead a practice workshop and/or Q & A. Panels will feature 3-4 graduate student speakers and/or professional academics who will offer their research insights on a specific topic related to our conference themes.  Be prepared to participate actively and share your insights. 
Catering and Food: We are fortunate to have raised sufficient but very limited funding for providing food for some meals at the Conference. We will not be catering any breakfasts. At this time, we are still negotiating what is possible within our budget, so we cannot yet commit to which lunches and dinners we may be able to cater. As a free-to-attend conference, we ask for your understanding that our all-volunteer student team has done their absolute best to raise funds for food, but that there are significant budgetary constraints in consideration.
Overflow: Due to the extremely high number of registrants, it is likely we will need to use “overflow rooms” during keynote talks. These will be rooms right next to the main keynote speaker auditorium within the same campus building that will livestream-project the keynote talk. This is to adhere to fire and safety codes. Rest assured these will be easily accessible. We will provide more guidance if necessary during the Conference itself.

For ONLINE registrants, please keep the following in mind: 

• Zoom Access Link: Here is the Zoom link to access the live-stream. Please ensure you have a stable internet connection for uninterrupted participation. 
• Technical Support: We will have one technical support member monitoring the Zoom meeting. Unfortunately, due to the high number of in-person registrants, we will reserve Q & A time for responding to in-person questions only. Furthermore, due to our limited resources as an all-volunteer graduate school team, we will be able to provide very little technical support to Zoom attendees. Online participants should keep this in mind.
• Live Sessions and Recordings: All sessions will be streamed live, allowing you to view in real-time. Additionally, recordings of the sessions of speakers who consent to be recorded will be made available to registered attendees for future reference.  

Regardless of whether you’re attending in person or online, we’re committed to delivering a conference experience that is enriching, engaging, and memorable. It is our deep hope that this conference will foster a sense of Buddhist community across difference, and that we all walk away more knowledgeable of the conditions of our global sangha and more empowered to enact positive change in our local communities.  

If you have any questions or require further assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. We look forward to welcoming you to our conference and facilitating meaningful connections and discussions. You can also expect further communications as we continue to get closer to the event.

Again, you can also look for any live updates at our website and Instagram page below:

https://burningrefuge2024.site/

https://www.instagram.com/burning.refuge/

Thematic Statement:  

What does it mean to be free? Even more important, how do we get free? These age-old questions remind us that what links so many seemingly unrelated social and spiritual movements together is a shared hope for an ultimate kind of freedom – a freedom which is true, complete, even indelible.  

Freedom, of course, is the beating heart of the transgenerational and transcivilizational arc of Buddhism. Many moral legislators, from Vietnam to Maharashtra, have reciprocally engaged with Buddhadharma in order to theorize and act upon a vision of freedom in which our most ultimate destinies and most provisional struggles are all interlinked. This dialogue is a two-way street which altogether comprises a kind of “social-spiritual liberation” that links personal to political in the most visceral of ways.  

But we need to intervene in this narrative. The more disparate schools of Buddhism propagate beyond their endogenous contexts, the more distant this dream of a social-spiritual freedom seems. Especially in the West, a “new” Buddhism has been promised, one which describes itself as adapted to the needs of “modern” and “Western” people, a Buddhism which is only superficially oriented towards inclusion of women, people of color, and other marginalized people, an “engaged” Buddhism that purports to amend social-spiritual catastrophe. These promises are what queer of color theorist Sara Ahmed would call “empty speech acts” which serve to obfuscate arenas of power rooted in settler colonialism, sex/gender normativity, racial capitalism and white supremacy, and instrumentalization of the nonhuman natural world. We are committed to intervening in this narrative in order to redirect Buddhist community toward a more robust and real engagement with our vow to liberate all beings, from personal to political, individual to collective. 

The promise of this “new Buddhism” has been hailed by many white, male, and wealthy Buddhist converts — and the failings of this promise have resulted in untold violence and harm towards countless marginalized people and communities around the globe. Perhaps worst of all, the bankruptcy of this promise has also led many to give up on the possibility of pursuing Buddhist ministry, leadership, and chaplaincy — as well as on the hope of a truly inclusive, diverse, and equitable global sangha. 

Yet, so many Buddhists, Buddhist-adjacent and non-Buddhist people and collectives have long been hard at work to unravel these self-disguising operations of domination, and to sew seeds of true contemplative justice and liberatory work. But the exhaustion and spiritual drain which comes from this kind of deep labor, especially for those who are themselves marginalized and harmed by these systems of domination, means that we must forge new kinship which will keep us afloat and empower our intergenerational work in sustainable ways. 

In March 2024, an exciting and radical conference will host its inaugural offering at Harvard Divinity School to convene critical and interdisciplinary Buddhist scholarship, activism, and arts to chart a path forward into true social-spiritual liberation. We assert that the dream of ultimate social-spiritual liberation is possible and is thus our great task – we invite you to set out on this mission with us and make a vow of commitment. Will you join us?  

“Burning Refuge” Explained: 

The notion of a “refuge” is central to almost all corners of the Buddhist world. The refuge of the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha – otherwise known as the Three Jewels or Triple Gems. The refuge of nature and the great mountains and rivers of this blessed planet. The refuge of spiritual friendship. Refuge is home, an abiding place we return to, a place where we find our truer, freer selves.  

We conjure this archetypal Buddhist motif yet immediately find it ablaze. We engage in such a radical discursive and imaginal gesture to direct attention to, interrogation to, and change within the current status quo of violence, oppression, and annihilation of entire peoples, histories, and ways of life and death. Too often, the ways that these atrocities intersect into Buddhist community life are minimized, downplayed, and obfuscated – at times, even intentionally. Human domination and obliteration is pressing, it is ongoing, and it has been time to end it for a long while now. Yet, it persists and has even been normalized, hidden behind euphemism, empty speech acts, and more — all those smoke and mirrors characteristic of power. 

But these controlling narratives are delusory. Indeed, we follow the Buddha’s remand back to reality and assert in this gathering of community that we are in the burning house of the Lotus Sutra, we are on a burning earth, we are witnessing the self-immolation of a planet-wide collective that is not yet fully aware of what it is dying for, or at whose hands they are dying. We are humbly inspired by those like Thích Quang Duc and their unfathomable self-sacrifices made in the sincere wish that the world collectively awaken and forever end the horrors of war and devastation. Indeed, the planetary refuge is already ablaze; it has long been ablaze. In this sense, Burning Refuge is not an invented visual metaphor, but a summoning of a clearer, more precise view of reality. 

When we get ahold of this clarity, the bell rings. Yes, this is a moment that demands thoroughgoing intervention into the Buddhist state of affairs. And we say – WE DESERVE BETTER! WE CAN DO BETTER! AND WE WILL! 

Yet the force of Burning is not destructive – it opens an opportunity of cleansing and renewal; a time to feel the warmth of community; a time to see the light that peeks through the cracks of destruction. Drawing on such teachings as exemplified in the Ādittapariyāya Sutta, the “Fire Sutra,” we emphasize that while we are certainly burnt by the vexations of greed, hatred, and ignorance, it may also be our liberatory chance to burn away our poisons, delusions, and karmas. It may be our chance to leave behind our self-limiting social patterns and move towards an opportunity for something new. Burning Refuge is a dream of just that – a dream of full liberation.