Jogye Order names Master Jinje Daejonsa as spiritual head
Jogye Order names Master Jinje Daejonsa as spiritual head |
- Jogye Order names Master Jinje Daejonsa as spiritual head
- $15k copper incense holder stolen from Sacramento Buddhist temple
- Tibet House US online auction offers walk-on role in David O. Russell film
- Village Zendo hopes to benefit from substantial matching grant
- Major Exhibition On Tibetan Buddhist Mandalas For The First Time In The Southeast At The Carlos Museum
- Anne Seisen Saunders speaks at San Diego human rights march
- Arising to the Interconnectedness of Life? A Buddhist Perspective on the Occupy Movement
- Buddhist monks hope to find artifacts lost in fire
- Free To Decide?
- China targets India for Buddhist monks' stir in Sichuan
- 450 Buddhist monks march for peace in Maharashtra, India
- Buddhist university prepares for new start
- The untold love story of Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi
- Vietnam sentences 2 Buddhist activists to prison for ‘abusing democratic freedoms’
| Jogye Order names Master Jinje Daejonsa as spiritual head Posted: 14 Dec 2011 10:00 AM PST
Photo via Sweeping Zen Read More @ SourceThe Laws of the Sun5 / Buddha 2 (Truth Buddhist ) 
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| $15k copper incense holder stolen from Sacramento Buddhist temple Posted: 14 Dec 2011 03:00 AM PST
Click here for the video. (Photo by Robert Couse-Baker via Flickr, using a CC-BY license.) Read More @ SourceBuddhism and a Sustainable World: Some reflections 
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| Tibet House US online auction offers walk-on role in David O. Russell film Posted: 13 Dec 2011 10:00 PM PST  Photo by David Shankbone Tibet House US, the Tibetan cultural preservation project headed by Robert Thurman, is currently holding an online auction to raise funds for the organization. Among the items offered is the unique chance to win a walk-on role in the next film from Academy Award-nominated director David O. Russell (The Fighter, Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees). Russell, a graduate of Amherst College, is a former student of Dr. Thurman's. Click here to bid on this unique opportunity; there are just hours left. Read More @ SourceQUICK TASTE OF ORIGINAL EARLY BUDDHISM 
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| Village Zendo hopes to benefit from substantial matching grant Posted: 13 Dec 2011 09:00 PM PST  Pat Enkyo O'Hara, Roshi New York's Village Zendo, cofounded by Pat Enkyo O'Hara, Roshi, and Barbara Joshin O'Hara, Sensei, has an opportunity to turn $ 20,000 into $ 60,000 with everyone's help. From the Village Zendo website: "The Village Zendo is fortunate that two donors have offered a matching grant: $ 20,000 on the basis of $ 1 for every $ 2 donated by others in support of the zendo, from now through January 31. If the terms of the match are fully met, then the zendo will have raised $ 60,000 through this gift. Please help us sustain our Zen Center and the community that makes it possible for you and all of us to transform our world." (Photo by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis via Flickr, using a CC-BY license.) Read More @ SourceAbdur-Raheem Green - Why did you convert from Buddhism to Islam? 
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| Posted: 13 Dec 2011 08:00 PM PST Mi2N.com, Dec 12, 2011Atlanta, GA (USA) -- The Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University will showcase the sacred art of Tibet in the special exhibition Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhist from January 21 through April 15, 2012.
Mandala is a Sanskrit word meaning "circle." Depicting a realm that is both complex and sacred, the mandala is a visualization tool meant to advance practitioners toward a state of enlightenment. The exhibition explores the various manifestations of these objects, simultaneously explaining their symbolism, describing how they fulfill their intended function, and demonstrating their correlation to our physical reality. Visitors will find mandalas conceived as concentric circles, circles within squares, squares within circles, lotus blossoms, six-pronged stars, or inverted, crossed triangles. A deity, sometimes with a partner, is usually situated in the middle of the central disk, surrounded by four, six, eight, ten, twelve, or more assembly deities set in an additional circle. As such, the mandala's very construct graphically mirrors the Buddhist notion of the cosmos and of the human being. In addition to paintings, reliquaries, and amulets, the exhibition includes tapestries, sculptures, and utensils used in sacred ceremonies and a time-lapse film of a mandala formed in sand.
While many of the works in the exhibition are from the collection of the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, the exhibition also includes masterpieces from other museums and private collections from around the world, including the Kimbell Art Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich, and Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India. Mandala: Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhist was organized by the Rubin Museum of Art, New York. Support for the exhibition in Atlanta has been provided by the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, the Emory-Tibet Partnership, and Drepung Loseling Monastery, Inc. Education and outreach Public educational programs in conjunction with the exhibition will offer many opportunities for visitors to learn about the complex imagery of these mandalas and their role in the practice of Tibetan Buddhist. Programs will draw on the intellectual depth of Emory University's faculty as well as distinguished scholars from other universities, visiting artists, and members of the Tibetan community in Atlanta. Tours for K-12 students and programs for teachers will serve the World Religions curriculum. Examples of programs include:
Website: http://057960ab.tinylinks.co Read More @ Source
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| Anne Seisen Saunders speaks at San Diego human rights march Posted: 13 Dec 2011 07:00 PM PST  Anne Seisen Saunders, Roshi In a show of unity for the National Day of Action for Human Rights in San Diego this past Saturday, members of various interfaith groups, the Occupy movement, Veterans for Peace, ACCE, LGBT groups, PSS San Diego, and APRL marched together through the Gaslamp District of downtown San Diego. Preceding the march, Congresswoman Susan Davis and Anne Seisen Saunders of Sweetwater Zen Center delivered speeches in support of the march, reiterating that we are all in this together. Marchers chanted, "We are unstoppable, a new world is possible!" See the video here. (Photo via Sweetwater Zen Center) Read More @ Source2 of 5. How to Meditate, Yoga, Meditation 
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| Arising to the Interconnectedness of Life? A Buddhist Perspective on the Occupy Movement Posted: 13 Dec 2011 06:00 PM PST by Bernie Glassman, The Huffington Post, Dec 12, 2011
Indra's Net and the Internet: Arising to the Interconnectedness of Life San Francisco, CA (USA) -- Buddha means the "awakened one." Awakened to what?
A long time ago, in a far away place, there lived a king. His name was Indra. Indra was a great king. In fact, he was king of all the Gods. One day, he called his architect, Johnny. "Johnny! I am such a wonderful king that I'd like you to make a monument of me for all people to see." After thinking for a while, Johnny exclaimed, "I've got it! Let's go to the royal treasurer, Sally, because this will be expensive." They went to Sally and Johnny said, "I want to build a monument for our king, Indra. I want it to be a net that extends throughout all space and time and I want to place a bright pearl at each node of the net. Do we have enough resources to build this net?"
Each pearl contains the reflection of every other pearl. Each pearl is contained within every other pearl. If you touch the net anywhere, it is felt everywhere. Every phenomenon is a pearl in the net. Each of us at a given instant is a phenomenon. Everything at each moment is a phenomenon. Everyone and everything is contained in me. I am contained in everyone and everything. Many years later, somebody came along and turned Indra's Net into the Internet. Instead of pearls, they put computers at each node. They created a physical system of interconnectedness around the world. Then, we started to see languages for communicating across the net. We call them Facebook and Twitter. Soon, we started to see what I call arisings or awakenings around the world. For me, the first big one was the "Arab Spring." The second big one was the "Israeli Summer." Arab Arising I've worked in Jordan, Israel and Palestine. We had Peacemaker staff there. A man that we worked with a lot, Sami Awad, is the nephew of a man known as the Gandhi of Palestine. Sami is one of many people continuing his uncle's work. They've been doing nonviolent peace work in Palestine for years. For many years, they've had concerns that their message of nonviolence was not being taken seriously by many people and governments in the area. I feel that they was being marginalized. Now, after the Arab Spring, both Fatah and Hamas are seriously looking at their work. Government leaders are talking to the peace activists about training leaders in nonviolent methods. To me, that is an arising of the energy of Indra's Net. I was with Sami about a month ago in Bethlehem, where he is based, making plans to assist him in his nonviolent work in Palestine. He had just finished meeting with his staff. He told his staff that if any of them are blaming anyone as an enemy or as an Other, he doesn't want them on his staff. It is important to see how we are all affected by the conditions and to see how our work can change the conditions. He formed this view in 2004 at one of our Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreats. He's done two of them. After doing a retreat he said, "I have been doing nonviolent work for years, but now I see that even thoughts and words can still be violent." He says he's been transformed from seeing himself as a Palestinian activist to seeing himself as a global activist. He now believes that his work can't include thoughts or language of Other or it will only generate more violence. Israel Arising In Israel, a women in her early 20s, who couldn't afford her rent, put a tent in downtown Tel Aviv, saying "we need a new system." A week later, as it spread through Facebook, 10,000 people put up tents. Weeks later nearly half a million people arose with a variety of different messages. It continues and it's changing the government structure. The military budget has already gone down. Pundits ask "Who is the leader? What is the goal? What is the strategy?" But there is no single leader organizing things. Then in the United States, something called Occupy Wall Street started. A few months later, nearly 2,000 cities around the world have joined. My hope is that a new paradigm is arising out of Indra's Net. My faith is that eventually that will be true. However, I'm concerned about what's happening now. Occupy Arising? Are the current arisings awakenings to the interconnectedness of life or will they merely create new ways of creating separations between people? In the Zen Peacemakers, we follow the precept of Not Elevating Oneself and Blaming Others. Another statement that gets at the Buddhist appreciation for language is the Verse of Atonement: "All harmful karma ever caused by me since of old, Including mouth and thought in the verse means that what we say and what we think can be just as harmful or more harmful than physical violence. And our words are connected to our actions. In my view, it is even possible to commit acts of physical violence from a standpoint of interconnectedness as long as it is not done from a standpoint of separation. When we treat cancer, we wouldn't say that we are attacking something outside of our bodies and we wouldn't take lightly the side-effects of chemotherapy. At the Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreat, we sit on the tracks where inmates were selected for either immediate extermination or slave labor. In the morning, we share in small groups about what comes up. In my group this year, a German man asked, "How could human beings have created such an efficient system for killing other humans?" My experience is that the first step is through language and thought. First, I identify who is the Other. Then, I convince you of how the Other is so terrible. If I can convince you, we can kill the Other. If I can convince you that those people are rats, you will want to find an efficient way to get rid of rats. For me, arisings to the interconnectedness of life do not use the violent language of separation. When I look for arisings, I ask: Is the language we use violent? Does it use dualistic thinking that separates one group from another? Do the actions taken reduce suffering? Are there different energies arising and coexisting at the same time? Are each of the groups involved open and accepting to other groups? When I hear the word Occupy, it makes my blood cringe. Having worked in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, I feel that Occupation has a negative, military connotation: Israel-occupied Palestine. Soviet-occupied Poland and East Germany. Allied-occupied West Germany. The list goes on. To the Native Americans, the United States occupies their land. When I read "We are the 99% who will no longer tolerate the greed of the 1%" as the Occupy Wall Street website states, I hear: "They are the bad ones." That's not the energy of Indra's Net. I'm not interested in making anyone into an Other. When we talk about awakening in Buddhism, we talk about awakening to the experience of interconnectedness. Everything is interconnected, but we don't always experience it that way. The only reason we don't is that we are attached to our opinions. One particularly powerful opinion that we have is that there is an Other. Through meditation you can let go of your attachments and extend your awakening deeper. And there are other ways. We can see how awakened to interconnectedness we are by the size of the set of people we include as One with ourselves. I call the energy of interconnectedness "love" -- not the love we usually talk about. It's much more natural and intrinsic. It is automatically taking care of other people because we experience them as us. I've lived through many protests. From my opinion, whenever the language of the arising labels someone as Other -- whenever it is against someone -- it leads to more violence. When I awaken to the Oneness of myself, I can't call pieces of myself the Other. I don't attack myself. I take care of myself. When I see everything, including the social system, as myself, I take actions to reduce suffering. I heal the system as healing myself, not fixing someone else who is to blame for all the problems. Green Tara Mantra: Throat Chanting 
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| Buddhist monks hope to find artifacts lost in fire Posted: 13 Dec 2011 05:00 PM PST AP, December 10, 2011WESTMINSTER, Colo. (USA) -- Buddhist monks say it may be a week before they can get back into their temple to look for historic artifacts after a fire destroyed the building. The Lao Buddhist Temple is a total loss after fire destroyed the building on Monday. One monk suffered minor injuries. Tom Pong says some of the artifacts are more than 100 years old and could be lost forever. One of the most significant Buddha statues was removed from the building by Westminster firefighters, but another large Buddha had to be left in the building. Fire investigators are going through debris, but the fire is not believed to be arson. Worries about asbestos are preventing members of the temple from going inside to assess the damage. Read More @ SourceBuddhists, How do you accept DEATH? 
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| Posted: 13 Dec 2011 04:00 PM PST Back in 2003 I sat by while the late head of our order battled for his life in hospital. Hour by hour, procedure after incredible procedure until he said enough and we took him back to Shasta Abbey. He died hours after getting there. Life and death dramas are being lived and died constantly in all corners and mostly in private. The following quote is from thoughtful article by Christopher Hitchens. In the face of what he is dealing with, terminal cancer, he questions the jolly epithets around death and survival. Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger. attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche is one of them.
I'm left wondering what I would decide, should I ever have to, if faced with the sorts of choices the monk mentioned had to. Sick people, terminally ill people, people who are actually needing to make life or death decisions are not in the strongest position to make them. How free would I feel myself to be, in the face of eager medical people, to decline treatment. Thanks to Tony for sending in the link. Much appreciated. Read More @ SourceThe Buddhist Taliban 
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| China targets India for Buddhist monks' stir in Sichuan Posted: 13 Dec 2011 03:00 PM PST by Indrani Bagchi, TNN, Dec 8, 2011NEW DELHI, India -- Rattled by a seemingly unending stream of self-immolations by young Buddhist monks in Sichuan, China, the Chinese authorities are blaming the Tibetan government-in-exile in India as well as what they call overseas organizations, press and media institutions.
Self-immolations by monks could be one of the reasons for China to become more sensitive than usual to the Dalai Lama and the unusual pressure on India to restrict the Tibetan spiritual leader's movement. A commentary in the official Xinhua News Agency this week reflected the growing anger over the protests by monks, and annoyance with India for not clamping down on Dalai Lama. "Besides the mastermind behind the self-immolations, the instigation by some overseas organizations, press and media institutions, the 'living Buddha' and politicians also played a part."
But by these actions, New Delhi believes Beijing is changing the field of play - in all these years, China's problems with the Dalai Lama were reasonably insulated from its dealings with India. The continuing immolations, especially coming just ahead of a politically fraught leadership transition, appear to have prompted Beijing to cast the net wide - reaching for the "foreign hand". China analysts here believe Beijing's response to New Delhi may become more shrill and even condemnatory and could risk bilateral ties. The living Buddha is known as Kirti Rimpoche by Tibetans here. He belongs to the Kirti monastery in Sichuan, having fled to Dharamsala in 1959 and has been a close associate of the Dalai Lama. The Kirti monastery has been the scene of many of the immolation bids by Tibetan monks in recent months. About 11 immolations have occurred in the Sichuan province since March, while reports of the 12th incident came in from the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). The Xinhua commentary said, the immolations were meant to mar normalcy and the people's aspirations for stability, peace and welfare. "The monks will not be monks if they do not abide by Buddhist precepts, and monasteries will not be monasteries if they interfere with politics. Tibetan Buddhism is worried about whether it has been tarnished by these people," he said. China has spent billions in development of TAR, even sending Han Chinese to Tibet to tilt the demographic balance and resorting to hard-line crackdowns during riots and other incidents. "It doesn't seem to be working," Indian officials tracking China observed. Read More @ SourceLord Buddha - Kids Animation Cartoon Movie 
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| 450 Buddhist monks march for peace in Maharashtra, India Posted: 13 Dec 2011 02:00 PM PST DNA India, Dec 11, 2011Mumbai, India -- A strong contingent of 450 monks and nuns, led by His Holiness the Gyalwang Drukpa (spiritual head of the 1000-year-old Drukpa Lineage) embarked on a "pad yatra" (march for peace) from Mumbai to Sanchi via Ajanta Ellora spreading the message of peace, harmony and respect for the environment.
This is the fifth yatra by His Holiness, who since 2006, has taken students on foot journeys through Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Ladakh, Manali, Sikkim and Darjeeling. On each of the yatras, the yatris picked up more than one ton of non-biodegradable waste and educated people in remote areas about the importance of keeping environment clean. The yatra, which aims to bridge spirituality and materialism through promoting a life in harmony with nature, will cover other destinations like Kanheri Caves, Elephanta Caves, Kondana Caves, Karjat, Rajmarchi, Karla Bhaja and Aurangabad. Talking about this quest and spiritual adventure Gyalwang Drukpa said, "This yatra symbolises the journey from self to selflessness. It is an effort to raise awareness about the environment, and ensure that there is education on sustainability." Gyalwang Drukpa, the Indian-born spiritual teacher and philanthropist, is an active proponent of universal peace and harmony, and a United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Award recipient and Green Hero of India. He founded the school in Ladakh which featured in 3 Idiots, and is popularly known as "Rancho's School". Read More @ SourceCompilation of Ajahn Chah's Teaching, หลวงปู่ชา (Ajahn Chah, Theravada Buddhism) 
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| Buddhist university prepares for new start Posted: 13 Dec 2011 01:00 PM PST The Bangkok Post, Dec 12, 2011
Monks race to get campus up and running after it suffered damage estimated at B200m (US$ 7 mil) Bangkok, Thailand -- Monks are hard at work cleaning and repairing Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University after the floods.
The university is still surrounded by water, more than two months after runoff arrived. Monks are cleaning a tower where the Tripitaka (Buddhist scriptures) and textbooks are kept, as others wash pathways, in preparation for when the university resumes its Buddhism course for 1,500 novices next week.
Many buildings are still vacant. Many occupants were forced to move elsewhere when runoff arrived on Oct 12. Today, fewer than 100 monks are staying at the university, though they are slowly tricking back as repairs gather pace. Phra Sigambhirayarn, vice-rector for academic affairs, said the university will draw on donations and state financial support to fix its electricity system and restore its damaged landscape. "I don't think the government could meet all our requests, so we have to fix the most important things first," said Phra Sigambhirayarn. He said the damage would be greater if soldiers, police and volunteers had not helped move more than 100,000 textbooks from the first floor of buildings inside the campus when the flood hit. Only 5,000 books ended up damaged. Without a concrete wall to protect itself, the university ground was flooded when the run-off arrived, forcing the partial evacuation of 500 flood victims who had taken shelter at the university. "I don't like concrete wall so an earth wall is an interesting option. But for next year, I hope the government will be able to warn us if floods are coming. "The government should not hide any information as we should know how much water will be moving our way," he said. Last Friday, 21 families hit by the flood bade farewell to the university when it closed its evacuation centre. A monk blessed them before they left. Chayathip Tungpatcha, who attended the farewell ceremony, thanked the university for looking after her and her seven-month-old son. "The centre is very special for me. We have monks who teach us religious principles. We pray every day, which helps reduce stress. 'Buddha's teaching makes us understand life and learn to accept loss. We were also taught handicrafts. Some people made more than 2,000 baht while staying here," she said. During her stay at the centre, her son fell ill with a lung infection. Soldiers took them to Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok. They stayed at the hospital for one week, before returning to the evacuation centre. "HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn visited the camp and gave us encouragement to fight on," she said. The evacuation centre at Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University was set up under the princess's royal initiative to help provide shelter to flood victims. Bhakamol Rattaseri, assistant treasurer of the Chaipattana Foundation, said the evacuation centre was the first the foundation had been involved in. Usually, the foundation offered only relief assistance in other forms. However, HRH Princess Sirindhorn thought an evacuation centre would be needed. The foundation also set up two other centres in Ayutthaya and one each in Lop Buri, Chon Buri and Bangkok. She said the venture was a success thanks to cooperation from soldiers, police, medical teams from Rajavithi and Chulalongkorn hospitals and the business sector. Read More @ SourceWe Are All Egyptian - A Buddhist View 
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| The untold love story of Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi Posted: 13 Dec 2011 12:00 PM PST By Rebecca Frayn, The Telegraph, 11 Dec 2011
Aung San Suu Kyi, whose story is told in a new film, went from devoted Oxford housewife to champion of Burmese democracy - but not without great personal sacrifice London, UK -- When I began to research a screenplay about Aung San Suu Kyi four years ago, I wasn't expecting to uncover one of the great love stories of our time. Yet what emerged was a tale so romantic – and yet so heartbreaking – it sounded more like a pitch for a Hollywood weepie: an exquisitely beautiful but reserved girl from the East meets a handsome and passionate young man from the West.
For Michael Aris the story is a coup de foudre, and he eventually proposes to Suu amid the snow-capped mountains of Bhutan, where he has been employed as tutor to its royal family. For the next 16 years, she becomes his devoted wife and a mother-of-two, until quite by chance she gets caught up in politics on a short trip to Burma, and never comes home. Tragically, after 10 years of campaigning to try to keep his wife safe, Michael dies of cancer without ever being allowed to say goodbye. I also discovered that the reason no one was aware of this story was because Dr Michael Aris had gone to great lengths to keep Suu's family out of the public eye. It is only because their sons are now adults – and Michael is dead – that their friends and family feel the time has come to speak openly, and with great pride, about the unsung role he played.
For the next 16 years, Suu Kyi was to sublimate her extraordinary strength of character and become the perfect housewife. When their two sons, Alexander and Kim, were born she became a doting mother too, noted for her punctiliously well-organised children's parties and exquisite cooking. Much to the despair of her more feminist friends, she even insisted on ironing her husband's socks and cleaning the house herself. Then one quiet evening in 1988, when her sons were 12 and 14, as she and Michael sat reading in Oxford, they were interrupted by a phone call to say Suu's mother had had a stroke. She at once flew to Rangoon for what she thought would be a matter of weeks, only to find a city in turmoil. A series of violent confrontations with the military had brought the country to a standstill, and when she moved into Rangoon Hospital to care for her mother, she found the wards crowded with injured and dying students. Since public meetings were forbidden, the hospital had become the centre-point of a leaderless revolution, and word that the great General's daughter had arrived spread like wildfire. When a delegation of academics asked Suu to head a movement for democracy, she tentatively agreed, thinking that once an election had been held she would be free to return to Oxford again. Only two months earlier she had been a devoted housewife; now she found herself spearheading a mass uprising against a barbaric regime. In England, Michael could only anxiously monitor the news as Suu toured Burma, her popularity soaring, while the military harassed her every step and arrested and tortured many of her party members. He was haunted by the fear that she might be assassinated like her father. And when in 1989 she was placed under house arrest, his only comfort was that it at least might help keep her safe. Michael now reciprocated all those years Suu had devoted to him with a remarkable selflessness of his own, embarking on a high-level campaign to establish her as an international icon that the military would never dare harm. But he was careful to keep his work inconspicuous, because once she emerged as the leader of a new democracy movement, the military seized upon the fact that she was married to a foreigner as a basis for a series of savage – and often sexually crude – slanders in the Burmese press. For the next five years, as her boys were growing into young men, Suu was to remain under house arrest and kept in isolation. She sustained herself by learning how to meditate, reading widely on Buddhism and studying the writings of Mandela and Gandhi. Michael was allowed only two visits during that period. Yet this was a very particular kind of imprisonment, since at any time Suu could have asked to be driven to the airport and flown back to her family. But neither of them ever contemplated her doing such a thing. In fact, as a historian, even as Michael agonised and continued to pressurise politicians behind the scenes, he was aware she was part of history in the making. He kept on display the book she had been reading when she received the phone call summoning her to Burma. He decorated the walls with the certificates of the many prizes she had by now won, including the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. And above his bed he hung a huge photograph of her. Inevitably, during the long periods when no communication was possible, he would fear Suu might be dead, and it was only the odd report from passers-by who heard the sound of her piano-playing drifting from the house that brought him peace of mind. But when the south-east Asian humidity eventually destroyed the piano, even this fragile reassurance was lost to him. Then, in 1995, Michael quite unexpectedly received a phone call from Suu. She was ringing from the British embassy, she said. She was free again! Michael and the boys were granted visas and flew to Burma. When Suu saw Kim, her younger son, she was astonished to see he had grown into a young man. She admitted she might have passed him in the street. But Suu had become a fully politicised woman whose years of isolation had given her a hardened resolve, and she was determined to remain in her country, even if the cost was further separation from her family. The journalist Fergal Keane, who has met Suu several times, describes her as having a core of steel. It was the sheer resilience of her moral courage that filled me with awe as I wrote my screenplay for The Lady. The first question many women ask when they hear Suu's story is how she could have left her children. Kim has said simply: "She did what she had to do." Suu Kyi herself refuses to be drawn on the subject, though she has conceded that her darkest hours were when "I feared the boys might be needing me". That 1995 visit was the last time Michael and Suu were ever allowed to see one another. Three years later, he learnt he had terminal cancer. He called Suu to break the bad news and immediately applied for a visa so that he could say goodbye in person. When his application was rejected, he made over 30 more as his strength rapidly dwindled. A number of eminent figures – among them the Pope and President Clinton – wrote letters of appeal, but all in vain. Finally, a military official came to see Suu. Of course she could say goodbye, he said, but to do so she would have to return to Oxford. The implicit choice that had haunted her throughout those 10 years of marital separation had now become an explicit ultimatum: your country or your family. She was distraught. If she left Burma, they both knew it would mean permanent exile – that everything they had jointly fought for would have been for nothing. Suu would call Michael from the British embassy when she could, and he was adamant that she was not even to consider it. When I met Michael's twin brother, Anthony, he told me something he said he had never told anyone before. He said that once Suu realised she would never see Michael again, she put on a dress of his favourite colour, tied a rose in her hair, and went to the British embassy, where she recorded a farewell film for him in which she told him that his love for her had been her mainstay. The film was smuggled out, only to arrive two days after Michael died. For many years, as Burma's human rights record deteriorated, it seemed the Aris family's great self-sacrifice might have been in vain. Yet in recent weeks the military have finally announced their desire for political change. And Suu's 22-year vigil means she is uniquely positioned to facilitate such a transition – if and when it comes – exactly as Mandela did so successfully for South Africa. As they always believed it would, Suu and Michael's dream of democracy may yet become a reality. ------------ 
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| Vietnam sentences 2 Buddhist activists to prison for ‘abusing democratic freedoms’ Posted: 13 Dec 2011 11:00 AM PST by Associated Press, December 13, 2011HANOI, Vietnam -- Vietnam sentenced two Buddhist activists to prison Tuesday for distributing anti-government leaflets and CDs, a relative and state media said.
Nguyen Van Lia and Tran Hoai An were sentenced on charges of "abusing democratic freedoms to infringe upon the interests of the state," state media reported Tuesday. Lia received five years and An received three years on the same charges, state media reported. Lia, 71, denied the charges in the half-day trial, said his daughter, Nguyen Thi Ngoc Lua, who followed the trial via loud speakers outside the courtroom. Officials at the People's Court of Cho Moi District in southern An Giang province declined to comment.
New York-based Human Rights Watch demanded Lia's immediate release and called the sentence "outrageous and unacceptable." "One wonders what exactly the government of Vietnam is so afraid of that an elderly man like Nguyen Van Lia, who has dedicated his life to religion, should frighten them so much that they feel they need to lock him away in prison," said Phil Robertson, deputy director of the group's Asia Division. Robertson said Lia, who is suffering from high blood pressure and several broken ribs, should be released and allowed to seek medical treatment. Further information on An was not immediately available. Vietnam does not tolerate challenges to its single-party rule. Read More @ Source
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For the first time in the Southeast more than 100 masterworks will bring to light the intricate, transcendental, and evocative manifestations and functions of the "perfect circle" or mandala used as an aid in meditation and as a tool to obtain enlightenment. The exhibition and accompanying educational programs will celebrate the rich religious and artistic tradition of Tibetan Buddhist and the spiritual significance of the mandala.
The definition of Enlightenment in Buddhism is awakening to the interconnectedness of life. This is illustrated through the story of Indra's Net from the Avatamsaka Sutra.
<< Rattled by self-immolations by Buddhist monks in Sichuan, Chinese authorities are blaming the Tibetan government-in-exile in India
<< People at the flood relief shelter at Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University attend the baisee sookwan ceremony to boost their morale. Those who sought refuge are now leaving the university as the shelter is closing down and the areas inside the campus are now dry. SOMCHAI POOMLARD
<< Michael Aris, Aung San Suu Kyi and their first son Alexander, in 1973 Photo: ARIS FAMILY COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
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