See this inflatable Buddha floating on the East River
See this inflatable Buddha floating on the East River |
- See this inflatable Buddha floating on the East River
- Merit Walk
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama Concludes Teachings to Taiwanese Devotees
- 53rd Tibetan self-immolates in protest of Chinese rule
- Buddhist and Muslim leaders jointly condemn violence in Burma
- What a Wall Teaches — Lin Jensen on Zen meditation’s enduring lesson
- Eido Shimano to lead sesshin at Providence Zen Center in 2013?
- Monk protest in Bangkok against Bangladesh unrest
- Religious sensitivities no excuse for violence in Muslim world
- Tonight at Harvard University: Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche talks “Universal Responsibility:A Buddhist View of Happiness”
| See this inflatable Buddha floating on the East River Posted: 05 Oct 2012 09:00 AM PDT  photo via changjinlee.net At Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, New York, a 10-foot inflatable Buddha statue sits in the East River while pedestrians pass by. The art installation, titled "Floating Echo," is the work of Korean-born artist Chang-Jin Lee and will float in the river from now until March 3, 2013. According to a recent piece in the New York Times by Sharon Otterman, people are definitely taking notice of Floating Echo, like 25 year-old Brian Polanco: "In the background, you see the whole entire city, and he's just quietly sitting on the water. It puts some perspective on things." Read More @ Source
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| Posted: 05 Oct 2012 08:00 AM PDT When I look around at the people I am in contact with quite a number are dealing with cancer and all that comes with it. Somebody said to me today in an email that having the cancer diagnosis puts everyday announces in perspective resulting in a brighter outlook on life generally. I congratulate her. This is not merely looking on the bright side. It is transforming where life is viewed from. In my recent post on the Field of Merit site titled Thought With Legs I look at what can be done when thoughts grow strong and active legs. Well, I actually suggested taking the thoughts for a walk. A merit walk you could call that. Spare a thought for those known and unknown who are facing themselves as they face cancer. Field of Merit has a Twitter page. Follow and retweet our posts there.">Field of Merit has a Twitter page. Follow and retweet our posts there. Read More @ Source
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| His Holiness the Dalai Lama Concludes Teachings to Taiwanese Devotees Posted: 05 Oct 2012 07:00 AM PDT October 5th 2012 Dharamsala, India, 4 October 2012 (Samuel Ivor, The Tibet Post International) - Concluding His teachings on Atisha's "Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment" given at the request Taiwanese disciples, His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet culminated the fourth day (October 4th 2012) with a series of vows, blessings and future guidance to the gathering of devotees.
The Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, by Atisha Dipam karashrijnana (982-1054), was further examined and translated by one of the greatest spiritual leaders of our time. Drawing upon the central and final verses of the text, His Holiness cross-examined and explained key points during the teaching, which was held in the main temple in Dharamshala, India. During the teaching, the Dalai Lama re-iterated that the cultivation of Bodhisattva (enlightened existence) should be done gradually, over time. Vows were directed by His Holiness to the laypeople of the audience as the teachings concluded, to assist the cultivation of Bodhisattva in oneself. His Holiness highlighted: "The most important thing to keep in mind is not to harm sentient beings" He added that not having a self-centred attitude is also vital regarding maintaining of the vows. "Dedicate your body, speech and mind to serving others".
Emphasising the need to progress and learn from His teachings, His Holiness addressed the more regular members of the audience: "Those that have attended my teachings over the years, have to make some progress too. 1mm each perhaps" He said, laughing. The teachings concluded with a 'Puja' for His Holiness (act of honour, worship and devotion). The gathering, which included guests from over 60 countries, and a delegation from Taiwan of over 800 disciples, prayed for the Long Life of the revered spiritual leader, who had inspired an engaged with the audience for four inspirational days. A video and audio version of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's teaching on Atisha's "Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment" from October 1-4, 2012 is available on http://dalailama.com/webcasts/post/255-lamp-for-the-path-to-enlightenment. Translations include English, Chinese and Tibetan.    Read More @ Source 
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| 53rd Tibetan self-immolates in protest of Chinese rule Posted: 05 Oct 2012 05:00 AM PDT Radio Free Asia is reporting that a Tibetan man, Gudrub, 41, self-immolated in protest of Chinese rule and died at Driru county in the Nagchu prefecture of the Tibet Autonomous Region. He is the 53rd Tibetan known to have self-immolated as protest within Tibet since February 2009, and the third to do this week. We very recently posted about the immolations of 18-year-old Lobsang Kalsang and 17-year-old Damchoek, who were the 50th and 51st Tibetans to set themselves ablaze. For all past and current Buddhadharma News coverage of the self-immolation protests happening in Tibet, please see here. Read More @ Source
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| Buddhist and Muslim leaders jointly condemn violence in Burma Posted: 04 Oct 2012 05:00 PM PDT American Buddhist and Muslim leaders have issued a joint statement condemning recent violence between the two religious communities in Myanmar. The letter, written by William Aiken of Soka Gakkai International and signed by several other representatives of Buddhist and Muslim groups, condemns the recent sectarian clashes between the Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in western Burma, which have killed more than 80 people and displaced thousands more since June. "Both of our religious traditions uphold the dignity of all persons, and assert that all people, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion, should be treated with dignity and compassion," the letter reads. "We affirm that the suffering of any one person or any groups is our suffering and that our faiths instruct us to do all we can to relieve this suffering." You can read the full statement here. This summer, several Buddhist leaders wrote an open letter from the Buddhist community condemning Islamophobia. You can read and sign the letter here. Read More @ Source
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| What a Wall Teaches — Lin Jensen on Zen meditation’s enduring lesson Posted: 04 Oct 2012 04:00 PM PDT
Bodhidharma, the Indian monk credited with having brought Zen to China, is said to have spent nine years facing a wall in a cave a mile from northern China's Shaolin Temple. If so, the Zen he originated was a Zen of wall sitting. A Soto nun, Katherine Thanas, first taught me to sit one summer when I was building a studio for my friends, Tey and Elliot Roberts, at their home in the Carmel Highlands on the Big Sur coast of California. The project took several weeks, and Tey, who was a practicing Buddhist, encouraged me to come and sit with the Zen group that met in Carmel. "If you come on the first Tuesday of the month," she told me, "Katherine will teach you how to sit." So I went, and priest Thanas taught me proper sitting posture, what to do with my hands and eyes and with the thoughts that might arise. I asked, "What am I supposed to learn from facing a wall like this?" She said, "The sitting will teach you that." Then the rest of the sitters arrived and I was left to work it out on my own. Katherine Thanas was right: that very first night's sitting must have already taught me something, something simple like it was good for me to sit like this. Forty-five minutes facing a wall with my legs aching, and I was somehow compelled to continue. I sat the very next morning before going to work on the studio project, and then sat again that night, and every morning and night from then on. I never quit. It seemed from the beginning that my proper place in the world was somehow clarified and amplified by this simple practice of sitting. After a few weeks of sitting with the Carmel Zen group, the studio was finished and I headed home to the mountains where Karen and I lived in a remote mountain valley. For the next five years, I sat alone, without a teacher other than the sitting itself and without any companionship other than that of a pine board bedroom wall thirty inches from the tip of my nose. As it turned out, the wall held all the teaching I needed and Bodhidharma's ancient example has proven to be enough. What is it about a wall that so penetrates the consciousness of one who sits with it? For one thing, there's nothing you can make of a wall but a wall. It's obstinately resistive to imagination. My pine board wall never tried to be anything other than a wall. It didn't try to be a floor or ceiling or even a sunset, the color of which lit up its pine surface of a summer evening. It was perfectly content to be what it was. I found that hard to match, often wanting instead to be other than I was. But I saw how naturally the wall fulfilled its function as a wall. I saw that it met the horizontal floor and ceiling with a vertical exactness of its own. And the particular section of wall that I daily faced met two other sections of wall at a perfect ninety-degree angle. But the impression grew in me as well that the wall wasn't so much a wall because it supported the bedroom ceiling, but that its wallness was more inward than that of its outward function. It wasn't a wall relative to anything else: it was a wall in and of itself. By hours, days, and years of intimate juxtaposition with a pine board bedroom wall, I too was gradually becoming just what I am regardless of outward circumstance – a self in and of itself. So that's how it is to this day. The wall does its sitting as I must do mine. Sitting with a wall is a teaching that has seeped in over the hours and years without any awareness of what I was being taught, and with only the wall for witness. Read More @ Source 
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| Eido Shimano to lead sesshin at Providence Zen Center in 2013? Posted: 04 Oct 2012 03:00 PM PDT By Adam Tebbe, SweepingZen.com, Oct 2, 2012One must really pause to question the wisdom of any Zen institution that would offer Eido Shimano a place to teach and lead sesshin, knowing about his long and well-documented history of sexual and ethical misconduct that began when he first came to the United States in 1960.  << Providence Zen Center (the international headquarters of the late Zen master Seung Sahn's Kwan Um School of Zen) has reportedly offered Eido Shimano to lead a sesshin in 2013From where I am sitting, for any Zen institution to offer Shimano a place of teaching authority on their grounds is unconscionable. According to a letter from George Zournas to the Trustees of the Zen Studies Society dated 9/14/1982, one Dr. Tadao Ogura (then Senior Psychiatrist of the South Oaks Hospital) agreed, saying of Shimano: "Wherever he goes, he s[h]ould never again be given a position of primary authority." That was the opinion of a highly respected psychiatrist dating as far back as 1982! "Eido Roshi kindly agreed to lead sesshin in USA in May 2013.The sesshin will be four and half days, starting Friday evening May 24th and finishing Wednesday May 29th, after lunch. We have a reservation in beautiful place Diamond Hill Monastery at Providence Zen Center (http://www.providencezen .org)." Fair enough. The assumption would be that the Providence Zen Center mistakenly booked the reservation for May of 2013, not knowing that the sesshin was to be led by Eido Shimano. This, sadly, is not the case. In an email exchange between the Providence Zen Center's director Jeff Partridge and Rev. Kobutsu Malone dated October 02, the Kwan Um School of Zen's head temple confirmed that Mr. Shimano would indeed be leading sesshin at Diamond Hill Monastery in 2013. Kobutsu Malone: Dear Friends, I am writing to inquire if the Providence Zen Center has actually booked a reservation to host a sesshin conducted by Eido Shimano in May of 2013 as per the attached email? Thank you in advance for your prompt reply, Rev. Kobutsu Malone Jeff Partridge: "Hello! Yes I'm working with Ekyo now on the details. Please let me know if I can help with anything else. Thank you, Jeff Partridge Director Providence Zen Center" Unreal… Source: http://sweepingzen.com/eido-shimano-to-lead-sesshin-at-providence-zen-center-in-2013 Read More @ Source 
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| Monk protest in Bangkok against Bangladesh unrest Posted: 04 Oct 2012 02:00 PM PDT CNA, October 4, 2012BANGKOK, Thailand -- About 300 Buddhist monks demonstrated in the Thai capital Bangkok on Wednesday against recent attacks by Muslim mobs targeting temples and houses in Bangladesh.
Holding signs reading "No More Violence We Want Peace" and "Stop Muslim Terrorism on Bangladesh Buddhist", the monks from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand massed outside the UN offices to call for a probe into the unrest. "We don't want to blame anyone, but we want this barbaric incident to stop because now Buddhist followers have to seek protection from police around the clock," one of the event organisers, Kanraya Tasanasarit, told AFP. Bangladesh police said Tuesday they had arrested nearly 300 people in connection with the violence, which saw Buddhist temples and homes damaged or set on fire. Buddhists, who make up less than one per cent of Bangladesh's 153 million mostly Muslim population, are based mainly in southeastern districts, close to the border with Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Sectarian tensions have been running high since June when deadly clashes erupted between Buddhists and Muslim Rohingyas in Myanmar's western Rakhine state. Read More @ Source
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| Religious sensitivities no excuse for violence in Muslim world Posted: 04 Oct 2012 01:00 PM PDT The Globe and Mail, Oct 2 2012Ramu, Bangladesh -- Religious sensitivities cannot be used to justify violent attacks. A perceived insult against one's faith is simply not an excuse for breaking the law. And it is not an excuse to persecute people with different religious beliefs.
The mob's rationale: they were angry about a photo of a burned Koran allegedly posted on Facebook by a Buddhist boy. While these protesters demand respect for their religion, where is their respect for the religion of others? The Buddhist minority in Bangladesh, a country of 150 million, has traditionally coexisted peacefully within the majority Muslim society; however, there are now fears of further sectarian violence. For its part, the government blamed the attack on Islamists, as well as on Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. But the incident is not an isolated one; it comes on the heels of last month's protests in Muslim countries over the offensive depiction of the Prophet Mohammed in a low-budget film produced by an Egyptian Copt living in the U.S.
In Egypt, Christian Copts are concerned about the erosion of their religious rights. In Pakistan, the country's blasphemy laws were recently used to arrest a Christian girl with mental disabilities who was accused of desecrating the pages of the Koran. A furious mob demanded she be punished. Last year, the country's national Minister for Minorities – a Christian and a critic of the blasphemy law – was shot dead, In Nigeria, churches in the North have been destroyed by Boko Haram, the militant group trying to establish an Islamic state. These acts of persecution against should be condemned. Entire communities should not have live in terror that a perceived insult of one's faith will prompt indefensible acts of aggression. Read More @ Source
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| Posted: 04 Oct 2012 11:14 AM PDT
The talk will take place from 7-9 pm at Harvard Divinity School's Sperry Room, Andover Hall, at 45 Francis Ave., Cambridge MA. Click here for more details on Harvard's Buddhist Studies Forum lecture series. Read More @ Source
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<< Bangladeshi monks studying Buddhism in Thailand display signs and pictures of destruction in their country as they hold a demonstration calling for an end to attacks against Buddhist communities in Bangladesh, in front of the United Nations regional office in Bangkok. (AFP - Christophe Archambault)
The looting and destruction of Buddhist temples and monasteries in Bangladesh by thousands of Bangladeshi Muslims is the latest example of this dangerous and warped way of thinking. 
Tonight (Thursday, October 4) at Harvard University's Divinity School, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche will give a talk called "Universal Responsibility: A Buddhist View of Happiness." It will be free and open to the public.| 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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