"The End That Never Ends: How Buddhist Art and Science Fiction Share the Vision of Extinction?", by Eugene Wang

A lecture by Eugene Wang, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art, Harvard University, one of the most internationally renown scholars in Chinese art and in Buddhist art in particular.

Abstract: 

A neurosurgeon had three months to live. He decided to take his fate in his own hand. He finished building an enigmatic form in the desert, inspired in part by a similar structure inside an empty swimming pool left unfinished by a biologist before him. In the final moment, the neurosurgeon went in and attained a different state of existence. What happened to the neurosurgeon? What is this structure - one that emerged in Buddhist art in medieval China and resurfaced in the 1960s in Europe and the US?