Seeding Buddhism in New Zealand: Namgyal Rinpoche and the Lake Rotoiti Retreat, 1973
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the earliest Buddhist events to take place in New Zealand was a three-month retreat led by a Canadian Buddhist teacher known as Namgyal Rinpoche, on the shores of Lake Rotoiti, in 1973. This article will provide a qualitative case study of the retreat, and show how the practices and motivations of the group reveal and challenge the assumptions of some of the theoretical frameworks scholars have used to interpret the spread of dharma to the West. Instead, more contemporary frameworks such as “lived religion” and “postmodern Buddhism” more accurately classify the group and their practices. In addition, I argue that a set of horticultural metaphors, proposed by Wakoh Shannon Hickey with the additional category of “seeding,” best describes the mechanisms of transmission that brought Buddhism to New Zealand.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".