Longtime spiritual home comes down
Longtime spiritual home comes down |
- Longtime spiritual home comes down
- Regrets
- 'Serve humanity', urges Dalai Lama
- Video: All about “Finding True Refuge”
- Buddhists’ Delight
- What’s an American Buddhist?
- Photo: The Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi meet in London
| Longtime spiritual home comes down Posted: 20 Jun 2012 04:00 PM PDT By DEBORA VAN BRENK, THE LONDON FREE PRESS, June 20, 2012
Once a Presbyterian church and now a Buddhist temple, its members could not fight deterioration and choose to demolish and build anew London, UK -- An east London presence for more than a century is coming down, brick by brick and pillar by pillar.
It will be replaced by a new smaller sanctuary of wood and marble and Asian-influenced statuary. Opened in 1910 as Hamilton Road Presbyterian Church, and operating more recently as the Duc Quang Buddhist Centre, the building had developed deep structural issues. For weeks, deconstructors have been taking it apart: first, asbestos assessment and removal, then windows and interior walls.
Now the roof is off, leaving rubble on the grass and neat symmetries of structural steel open to the sky. Because of its proximity to busy traffic -- at the confluence of Hamilton Rd., Egerton St. and Trafalgar Rd. -- most of the disassembly has been painstakingly slow. "You can't use heavy equipment" or parts of the building would jump the construction fence, project foreman Jim Grant said. A crane is expected to start this week removing the I-beams that once held up the roof. Then, barring any complications, levelling it to the ground should take about two more weeks. "The old building was unfortunately falling apart beneath us," said Jody Belan, a member of the Buddhist community who is involved in the building project. The foundation and the roof were both leaking badly and the walls had developed some mould. Its four furnaces were costly to operate and even then didn't heat the building well. The Buddhist members -- there are about 40, most Vietnamese -- plan to build a new centre on the same site. The monk who leads the group said the land was originally dedicated to a holy purpose and should remain so. " "It was built for a spiritual reason and we hope to keep it that way," Belan said. Plans for the new building haven't yet been approved at city hall but include a west-facing pagoda-style structure that will have a smaller footprint to the building being taken down. A walkway beside a small pond will include 18 marble statues representing followers of the Buddha as well as four dragon statues, Belan said. Heritage advocate Joe O'Neil sat on the London Advisory Committee on Heritage when the community first raised its plan to raze the building. He said the decision was "bittersweet" for everyone concerned because the Buddhist community did want to save it. But, like a smaller church on Southdale Rd. where reality intruded on the congregation's genuine wish to restore it, "there were fundamental structural flaws," O'Neil said. Hamilton Road Presbyterian Church dispersed in 1995. For a time, the building was a centre for LUSO (London Urban Services Organization) before serving as a Buddhist temple. Read More @ Source(黃慧音) Imee Ooi - Chant Of Metta (English Narration) Từ Kinh 
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| Posted: 20 Jun 2012 03:00 PM PDT Here is a video of Aung San Suu Kyi being interviewed on TV. Towards the end of the interview, having been pressed for an answer to how she dealt with leaving her children, she explains that she is Buddhist and makes the point several times about being responsible for ones actions and not to wallow in regrets which get one nowhere. Quite so. 
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| 'Serve humanity', urges Dalai Lama Posted: 20 Jun 2012 02:00 PM PDT UKPA, June 20, 2012London, UK -- The Dalai Lama has urged religious people to work for the good of humanity and care for the environment in an address at Westminster Abbey.
"I think millions of people have a genuine sense of spirituality, we must work together to serve humanity," he said. "We now also have responsibility for the care of the planet. "I am quite sure that religions still have an important role to make a better humanity," he added. The 76-year-old was addressing representatives from different religious groups and denominations including Anglican, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, and Hindu leaders at the event described as a service of prayer and reflection. The Dalai Lama, who shook hands with a row of schoolboys as he entered the abbey, was welcomed at the start of the service by the Dean of Westminster The Very Rev Dr John Hall. The service heard a reading from the Venerable Bogoda Seelawimala, head priest of the London Buddhist Vihara, and prayers read by Lord Singh of Wimbledon, representing the Sikh community and Anil Bhanot, of the Hindu faith. The service was part of an eight-day UK tour by the Dalai Lama to promote his message of non-violence, dialogue and universal responsibility. The address comes after the Dalai Lama's official website said he met Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi privately on Tuesday. According to his website, he told her: "I have real admiration for your courage. I am very happy we've been able to meet." Read More @ SourceSeth Piritha _ Jaya Pirith සෙත් පිරිත් 
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| Video: All about “Finding True Refuge” Posted: 20 Jun 2012 01:00 PM PDT
I was stunned by the news that Jesse was in critical condition with pneumonia and heart failure. We had just talked the week before about his passion — bringing mindfulness to teens. He was in his early thirties and one of the most bright, vibrant people I knew. How could Jesse be on a life support machine? How could this happen? On Mothers Day the doctors met with Jesse's parents to tell them they should begin to prepare themselves for his death. But in the weeks that followed, they managed to stabilize him sufficiently to perform the most complex, risky heart transplant this expert team at the University of Virginia had ever attempted. Jesse survived, and was with us the following April at our spring meditation retreat. Recently, in a videotaped interview, we asked him what had helped him make it through such a harrowing experience: Jesse's response — his story about finding unconditional love in the face of his own mortality—is one of many videotaped stories that are now available through an online video project called Finding True Refuge. Other participants include senior teachers Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Sharon Salzberg, leaders such as Congressman Tim Ryan, experienced meditation students and those new to practice. The stories will be told by increasingly diverse peoples as we bring our camera to youth and the elderly, to schools, prisons, places of work and worship, hospitals and community centers. In the stories we have recorded, people tell us how their meditation practice has served them in challenging circumstances. We've been awed and inspired by the ways that training in presence has opened them to compassion, resiliency and great wisdom. Lin talks about meditation deepening her connection with her young son after her husband left her for another woman. Steve has found meditation helps him deal with the stress accumulated from 27 years in the army. Terry shares how meditation eases the trauma of being an incest survivor. Laura has been able to find freedom from an eating disorder and alcohol addiction. For each, the discovery of true refuge has allowed them to live and love more fully. "All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry 'Help!'" wrote nineteenth century American psychologist and philosopher William James. Our lives are fundamentally insecure, and when we contact that vulnerability, we naturally cry out for help: "How do I handle this clutching fear… this sense of failure, of unworthiness… this anguish of loss?" We are each seeking refuge, a sense of safety, love, peace. Our misguided attempts to soothe or fill ourselves with substitutes—false refuges—further distance us from the peace we long for. A true refuge is always here in the sanctuary of our own awakened hearts. And as Jesse discovered in opening to loving presence, a true refuge can hold whatever is going on in our life, no matter how difficult. This is what we witness through the intimate stories shared in this videotaped series. The Finding True Refuge project is now live online. I hope you will visit it on our website, view the videos, and if you feel drawn, subscribe to the ongoing series. (Click here to get started.) Read More @ Source Tibetan bells 
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| Posted: 20 Jun 2012 12:00 PM PDT By JAMES ATLAS, New York Times, June 16, 2012New York, USA -- WHY was I in a tent in northern Vermont? Much less a tent in the woods at a Buddhist meditation center, reading Sakyong Mipham's "Turning the Mind Into an Ally" by the light from my smartphone?
The fundamental insight of the Buddha (the Awakened One) is this: life consists of suffering, and suffering is caused by attachment to the self, which is in turn attached to the things of this world. Only by liberating ourselves from the tyranny of perpetual wanting can we be truly free. Not that I am ready to renounce this world, or its things. "I am still expecting something exciting," Edmund Wilson confided in his journal when he was in his mid-60s: "drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: an uninhibited exchange of ideas." So do I. But I need a respite from those things, too. I wasn't eager to end like the Buddhist couple who went on a retreat in Arizona and turned up, one dead, one nearly dead from dehydration, in a remote cave. But I am far from alone in my choice of spiritual nourishment. The Vermont retreat was so oversubscribed that people slept on futons in the Shrine Room. (I was lucky to get a tent.) Dr. Paul D. Numrich, a professor of world religions and interreligious relations, conjectured that there may be as many Buddhists as Muslims in the United States by now.
Many converts are what Thomas A. Tweed, in "The American Encounter With Buddhist," refers to as "nightstand Buddhists" — mostly Catholics, Jews (yeah, I know, "Juddhists") and refugees from other religions who keep a stack of Pema Chödrön books beside their beds. So who are these — dare I coin the term? — Newddhists? Burned-out BlackBerry addicts attracted to its emphasis on quieting the "monkey mind"? Casual acolytes rattled by the fiscal and identity crises of a nation that even Jeb Bush suggests is "in decline"? Placard-carrying doomsayers out of a New Yorker cartoon? Uncertain times make us susceptible to collective catastrophic thinking — the conditions in which religious movements flourish. Or perhaps Buddhist speaks to our current mind-body obsession. Dr. Andrew Weil, in his new book, "Spontaneous Happiness," establishes a relationship between Buddhist practice and "the developing integrative model of mental health." This connection is well documented: at the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, researchers found that Buddhist meditation practice can change the structure of our brains — which, we now know from numerous clinical studies, can change our physiology. The Mindful Awareness Research Center at U.C.L.A. is collecting data in the new field of "mindfulness-based cognitive therapy" that shows a positive correlation between the therapy and what a center co-director, Dr. Daniel Siegel, calls mindsight. He writes of developing an ability to focus on our internal world that "we can use to re-sculpt our neural pathways, stimulating the growth of areas that are crucial to mental health." I felt this happening during my four-day retreat. Each day, we sat for hours as bees hummed beyond the screened windows of the meditation room, a converted barn. It was hard to concentrate at first, as anyone who has tried meditating knows: it requires toleration for the repetitive, inane — often boring — thoughts that float through the self-observing consciousness. (Buddhists use the word "mindfulness" to describe this process; it sometimes felt more like mindlessness.) But after a while, when the brass bowl was struck and we settled into silence, I found myself enveloped, if only for a few moments, in the calm emptiness of no-thought. At such moments the seven-hour drive from New York seemed worth it. During the lectures, there was talk of "feelings," "loving kindness" and "the inherent goodness of who we are" — tempered by good-natured skepticism. ("Feel free to resume struggling with things," a teacher concluded after a long "sitting.") But it wasn't all about looking inward. There was also talk of issues I thought we had left behind. "What's affecting the world is the unhealthy state of mind — culture, environment and society," a teacher reminded us: "violence, horror, bias, ecological catastrophe, the entire range of human pain." In Tibet, he noted, monasteries aren't sealed off from the life around them but function as community centers. The resistance to Chinese oppression has come largely from monks, who demonstrate and even immolate themselves in protest. Engaged Buddhist — a concept new to me — has a tradition in the West. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, among its early American proponents, didn't just cultivate their gardens. Kerouac's Buddha-worshiping "Dharma Bums" were precursors of the sexual revolution (their tantric "yabyum" rituals sound like fun); Ginsberg, a co-founder with Anne Waldman of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., the first accredited Buddhist-inspired college in the United States, faced down the police at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago by using meditation as an instrument of passive resistance. Reading "Buddhism in the Modern World," a collection of essays edited by David L. McMahan, I was struck by the pragmatic tone of the contributors, their preoccupation with what Mr. McMahan identified as "globalization, gender issues, and the ways in which Buddhist has confronted modernity, science, popular culture and national politics." Their goal is to make Buddhist active. As I drove out of the parking lot on the last day, ready — sort of — to return to what passes for civilization, I wondered whether I would be able to hold on to any of what I had learned — or if I even knew what I had learned, or had learned anything at all. Perhaps it was simply the lesson of acceptance — and the possibility of modest self-transformation. A teacher had said: "Don't fix yourself up first, then go forth: the two are inseparable." To enact, or "transmit," change in the world, we need to begin with ourselves and "learn how to have a skillful, successful, well-organized, productive life." That was a lot to ask from a four-day retreat, but at least it was a start. My phone pinged. I could check it later. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/buddhists-delight.html?pagewanted=all Read More @ Sourceช็อคโกแลต Chocolate - Warehouse Fight Scene 3 
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| Posted: 20 Jun 2012 11:00 AM PDT By William Wilson Quinn, The Washington Post, June 15, 2012
Los Angeles, USA -- American Buddhism's numbers are booming. Published just over three years ago, an American Religious Identification Survey survey showed that from the years 1990 to 2000, Buddhism grew 170 percent in North America. By all indications that remarkable rate of growth continues unabated.
Why is a faith founded under a Bodhi tree in India 2,500 years ago enjoying a newfound popularity in America today? There is no such thing as a historic North American Buddhist tradition, a fact that is crucial to understanding and facilitating Buddhism's blossoming. This growth is all the more remarkable given that Buddhism was arguably the most recent import of a major religion to North America from the East. It's important to note that Western practitioners meditating in Massachusetts or applying the Eight-fold Path in Portland often reach back to the established Buddhist traditions of Sri Lanka or Thailand, Tibet, or Vietnam, Myanmar or Korea, China, or Japan. But that's not the only way to be Buddhist.
Still, some wonder: Does a practitioner born and raised in North America more easily adopt Buddhism if he takes it wholesale from the East? One way to look at this question is through the example of practice. When done correctly, what Buddhist meditators refer to as "sitting"–whether following the vipassana or zazen (or other) approaches to sitting meditation–does not rely on ceremonial chanting and recitations and actions that typically surround collective meditation sessions. This is not to say such ceremonial activities normally performed in an ancient or modern Eastern language are not useful or helpful. This is only to say they are not a necessity for the gradual expansion of consciousness that is the result of regular meditation. If one accepts this basic premise, which can be supported by the sutras attributed to the Buddha, then the conclusion that North Americans could conceivably develop their own Buddhist tradition some day is perfectly rational, if not probable. After all, none of the cultural accessories of Buddhist practices in the East came into being overnight; they themselves developed over time. In Buddhism, that which does not differ from culture to culture or era to era is the state of a meditator's mind and presence when that person is sitting in true mediation. In association with other core teachings of the Buddha, such as compassion, non-violence, and loving-kindness all found within the Eight-fold Path, the attainment of the expanded states of consciousness almost always occurs only through regular and constant and diligent meditation practice, or sitting. This fact supersedes every associated ceremonial activity, whether Eastern in origin or some new (as yet unrealized) North American form. While such culture-based ceremony can be useful and helpful as a docent to meditation, if it becomes the practitioner's focus, it becomes a distraction. North American Buddhists are likely to create their own traditions and schools of thought, but they should do so with the awareness that they are forging a new Buddhist culture, not the 'true' Buddhist culture. If they don't recognize this fact, the same problem of adaptation would also apply, hypothetically, to any developed North American Buddhist tradition 900 years in the future either by its devout ecclesiastical adherents or when first introduced to the population of some other culture that had never been exposed to the teachings of the Buddha. ----------- Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/whats-an-american-buddhist/2012/06/17/gJQAJCQrjV_blog.html Read More @ SourceMonk Radio: Meditation Courses with Mental Illnesses 
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| Photo: The Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi meet in London Posted: 20 Jun 2012 10:00 AM PDT Via DalaiLama.com comes this photo from yesterday's momentous private meeting between His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the recently freed Aung San Suu Kyi.  Photo: Jeremy Russell / OHHDL For most of us, that would be enough for one day. But Tuesday also saw His Holiness give a lecture ("Values of Democracy and Tibet"), sit for an interview with the BBC, give a second talk called "Real Change Happens in the Heart" — at the Royal Albert Hall, no less — and more. And His Holiness has a whole second day in London today. Click here to see more photos from Tuesday at DalaiLama.com. Read More @ Sourcegongyo slow SGI. gonghio lento SGI 
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<< Opened in 1910 as Hamilton Road Presbyterian Church and operating more recently as the Vietnamese Duc Quang Buddhist Centre, the building at had developed deep structural issues that only huge amounts of money could fix. (DEBORA VAN BRENK, The London Free Press)
From Tara Brach — senior teacher and founder of the 
<< In this Sunday, June 19, 2011 photo, Rev. Karen Do-on Weik and her husband Rev. Jay Rinsen Weik meditate at the Toledo Zen Center in Holland, Ohio. The two have created a Sunday school and other programs to be especially welcoming to families. Many U.S. Buddhists say that meditation centers aren't especially welcoming of children, and some worry it will cost them the next generation of adherents. (JD Pooley - AP) | You are subscribed to email updates from BuddhaRocks ☸ Buddhist To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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