The Dancing Buddhist Bear

Wednesday October 12, 2005

I’ve been spending my morning with a dancing bear. Before you succumb to outrage that I was putting a poor, innocent creature through such undignified suffering, I should explain that it was all in the service of Buddhism.

My morning cup of coffee before me, as I was finding things to do to avoid getting down to any serious work I stumbled across DharmaGames, a site offering a series of online Buddhist games which apparently teach “important Buddhist principles”. There are several games available on the site, including one bizarre affair where a mouse up a palm tree with a pea-shooter has to feed peas to a load of turtles as they pop up from the ocean below…

My favourite, however, has to be Dharma Dancer, where you have the opportunity to take the role of a Buddhist disco-bear, strutting your stuff to the sound of morally elevating songs. There are four different bears to choose from, and I went for the fellow shown here, because he looked most like me. Look at me go! I am only sad that I couldn’t show a picture of what I looked like in motion. The image here is a real-time screen-capture of me in full swing, dancing my socks off to the sound of an instructive tune called We Are All One Family.

At the end of this, I must confess I am unsure whether I have learned any important Buddhist principles. But, hey, I was throwing some pretty impressive moves back there… and that counts for something.

Tags: buddhism, games, internet

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