The Game of Samsara
Travel the realms of the Bhavacakra debating ideas big and small from the perspective of your realm!
What does it mean to consider Greed from the perspective of the Hell realms?
A game as absurd, creative, strange, quirky, and magical as your group of friends.
The rules are suggested, and the variations dependently arise.
Discover new truths about each other as you drive through the wheel of life, earning merit through the virtue of debate. Is there a path to Nirvana? Or will we always be trapped by the beastly conditions of ignorance, aversion, and attachment?
Brought to you by the same folx who once heard of a game called LEELA!
****Fictitious Games does not make any claims around obtaining enlightenment or accumulating spiritual merit while playing this game, it is a mere pastime.
Travel the realms of the Bhavacakra debating ideas big and small from the perspective of your realm!
What does it mean to consider Greed from the perspective of the Hell realms?
A game as absurd, creative, strange, quirky, and magical as your group of friends.
The rules are suggested, and the variations dependently arise.
Discover new truths about each other as you drive through the wheel of life, earning merit through the virtue of debate. Is there a path to Nirvana? Or will we always be trapped by the beastly conditions of ignorance, aversion, and attachment?
Brought to you by the same folx who once heard of a game called LEELA!
****Fictitious Games does not make any claims around obtaining enlightenment or accumulating spiritual merit while playing this game, it is a mere pastime.
Travel the realms of the Bhavacakra debating ideas big and small from the perspective of your realm!
What does it mean to consider Greed from the perspective of the Hell realms?
A game as absurd, creative, strange, quirky, and magical as your group of friends.
The rules are suggested, and the variations dependently arise.
Discover new truths about each other as you drive through the wheel of life, earning merit through the virtue of debate. Is there a path to Nirvana? Or will we always be trapped by the beastly conditions of ignorance, aversion, and attachment?
Brought to you by the same folx who once heard of a game called LEELA!
****Fictitious Games does not make any claims around obtaining enlightenment or accumulating spiritual merit while playing this game, it is a mere pastime.
Artist Statement: The Naropa Wisdom Department has given me the grace of creating a fun game instead of submitting a formal Chicago Style paper. Monera Mason is a chaplaincy student who seeks to build playful theatrical containers where non-dogmatic spiritual work can occur within the context of the emerging legal psychedelic market. As such, my path is play and creativity over publishing academic papers, and Naropa allows me to show my semester’s learnings within the context of my heart’s work. I wanted to create a game that would allow people to think through a problem from multiple perspectives with the option of playing with additional lenses. This first semester taught me that one can examine a situation from multiple points of view and find compassion for all parties through this process. It has been an astounding journey to learn how small the units of perception are and how those units create constellations of thoughts, emotions, and consciousness. How cosmology can map to the mind, and how these seemingly infinite ideas can be zoomed back down to everyday life. The microcosm is the macrocosm. Understanding oneself helps one understand how we impact those around us. We also learned many tools of conflict positivity and the lineage of debate that Buddhism stems from.
Words on Decolonizing: This semester, we had a panel about the APA apology, and as a literature student, the most haunting linguistic idea that stuck with me was that English itself was a colonizing technology. My interest in contributing to the body of oppression that Academia has historically been has waned. More than that, my interest in indigenous, feminine, countercultural, revolutionary, alternative wisdom holders, and oral transmissions has grown. My interest in how games have been a mother-to-child transmission of ethics, a yin way of passing culture and ideas down to the next generation, has grown. I am curious about what kinds of games we can play instead of the old war games and Monopoly. I’m still playing an Academic Game but with new win conditions. What a future Academia can have if it tends the soil of many types of expression beyond just writing,
I have deep gratitude and hope for institutions that meet students on their transformative path. Naropa has been counter-cultural since 1974!
Bibliography:
Carpenter, Amber D. Indian Buddhist Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
2014.
Gethin, Rupert. Foundations of Buddhism.Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Holder, John. Early Buddhist Discourses. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006.
Jacobs, Beth. The Original Buddhist Psychology: What the Abhidharma
tells us about how we think, feel, and experience life. Berkeley, CA: North
Atlantic Books, 2017.
Image Credits:
Board Game Materials Designed in Canva
Game was created using collage materials from the following sources:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wheel_of_life_Kopan_Monastery.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_wheel_of_life,_Buddhism_Bhavachakra.jpg
https://www.lionsroar.com/what-are-hungry-ghosts/
Stickers from Antiquarian Sticker Book
Animal Images from a copy of: Twenty Jataka Tales