After descending Mount Emei on Friday, we returned for one night to a downtown shopping area in Chengdu which has a pedestrian mall that is similar in feeling to Times Square in New York. Saturday afternoon our tour bus took us to Pastor Liao's hometown of Luzhou on the bank of the Yangtze River, where we will attend a church service this morning. Well-tended farms as well as some tea plantations stretch on both sides of the highway from Chengdu to Luzhou, many of them terraced on the sloping hillsides.
The video below contains excerpts from an hour-long conversation at the Buddhist research institute we visited a couple of days ago in the town of Emei. Dr. Peter Shen translated English and Mandarin to facilitate dialogue among Buddhist monks, Chinese and North American students, and United States professors.
The Buddhist monks with whom we met are celibate. One of them raised the topic of celibacy in the Christian priesthood as it relates historically to the Reformation, to which Dr. Theresa Latini replied. They were also curious about the impact of Buddhism in the West, a question outlined here by Dr. Ed Yee.
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