Utah Buddhists divided in legal battle over temple
- Utah Buddhists divided in legal battle over temple
- Seeing Fresh: Contemplative Photo(s) of the Week
- Gentle Urgings And Promptings
- His Holiness the Dalai Lama Attends Common Ground for Peace Forum in Syracuse, NY
- Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi talks about Buddhist Global Relief’s “Walks to Feed the Hungry”
- Take a look at Adam Yauch’s “Bodhisattva Vow” skateboard decks…
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A legal dispute has arisen between members of the Vietnamese-American Unified Buddhist Association of Utah and the Vietnamese-American Unified Buddhist Congress in the United States of America over a temple property in Salt Lake City's Rose Park neighborhood.
Apparently the Utah group had donated the property to the national congress, though members of the local group say that the deed was given without their consent. Protesters in the local group gathered outside another temple in a Salt Lake City suburb on Saturday, where a national conference of monastics was being held. The protesters chanted the slogan, "Give back our temple. Give back our temple." According to the Desert News piece by Jasen Lee, the legal battle over who owns the temple has been the source of much division within the Salt Lake City Buddhist community (with a potential burglary tie-in, to boot). Utah Senator Luz Robles, who represents the district where the temple is, showed up Saturday to lend her support to both sides. The local group was evicted from the temple a year ago, after the monk who received the deed for the building prevented all but a few local congregants from using the building; this article explains more of the history of the dispute. (Photo by Robert and Cathy via Flickr using a CC-BY license.) Read More @ Source  | ||||||||
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Contemplative photography is a method for working with the contemplative state of mind, seeing the world in fresh ways, and expressing this experience photographically. Each week we choose an image that's been submitted to seeingfresh.com that really exemplifies this practice.
This week's photo is one from a series of three on the same theme, submitted by Kelsang Rinzing. You can see the other two after the jump.
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The interplay of texture, line, and reflection in these images is quite magical — three great examples of fresh seeing.
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For more about contemplative photography, and lots of other great photos, visit seeingfresh.com. And don't miss this video or this article on contemplative photography. You can see all our Seeing Fresh posts on Shambhala SunSpace here.
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The dentist nearly alwaysWith bows to John who left a comment which inspired this post. Read More @ Source | ||||||||
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October 9th 2012
Syracuse, NY, USA, 8 October 2012 - After a very long flight from New Delhi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama arrived yesterday in Syracuse, New York, where he was met at the airport by Syracuse University Chancellor, Nancy Cantor, Vice President Tom Walsh and Oren Lyons, Native American Faithkeeper of Onondaga Nation. A short drive through maple forest in an array of autumn colours brought him to the residence of Samuel and Carol Nappi, who were there to greet him. Mr Nappi, founder and director of World Harmony Productions, is the inspiration for the Common Ground for Peace forum that His Holiness is participating in during his stay. This morning, the weather was crisp and bright as His Holiness met his fellow panellists backstage at the Goldstein Auditorium of Syracuse University. The audience who had come to listen to them were first regaled with the haunting strains of the musical group Voices of Afghanistan. Dean's Professor of Humanities, Gregg Lambert opened the proceedings. NBC anchor at large, Ann Curry, introduced the panellists and SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor introduced His Holiness.
"If you watch children playing together, they don't ask each other about their background, race or beliefs they simply recognise others like themselves, smile and play together. I believe that as human beings all 7 billion of us are the same. The way we are born and the way we die is the same; the way we eat, sleep and dream is the same. As human beings we are the same, and this something we need to think more about." Shirin Abadi, Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate, said the cause of peace is social justice and democracy. She pointed out that recent changes in the Arab world may have got rid of dictators, but that alone is not democracy. Mohamed ElBaradei, also a Nobel Peace Laureate, said that wherever we come from we all seek dignity, fairness and justice. Where there hasn't been democracy before, we have to build it. He felt that the Middle East is at that threshold. Former UN Ambassador Andrew Young suggested that asserting the simple right to live as a human being was a ground for peace, but that when this also involves regime change violence often occurs. The wish for regime change needs to be parallelled by a non-violent approach. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey likened revolution to a three act play. In act one the dictator is kicked out and in act two the rule of the people by the people is established. However, too often this is followed by an act three in which the ruthless step in and take over. He recommended that in the Middle East, act three can be prevented if the world weans itself off the use of oil. Lastly, Irshad Manji, founder of the Moral Courage Project at NY University, said that asking questions is a basic human right. Democracy isn't just about who rules the country, but also about being able to ask who you can fall in love with, what music makes you dance. When the right to question is acknowledged, democracy is on the rise.
"If we don't respect others, we develop mistrust, suspicion and fear which ultimately lead to conflict. We need to see that others' suffering is our suffering too. In the past we may, like Tibet and at times the US, have been able to exist in isolation, but in the world today, we have to be concerned about everyone else." His Holiness said that the twentieth century to which he belongs is gone, but there are more than 80 years of the twenty-first century yet to come. The past cannot be changed, but the future can be shaped here and now. He declared that we need to take a more holistic approach, to ask more questions and to take reality into account. And to that we need to add determination, whose source is warm-heartedness. Don't act, he cautioned, because the Dalai Lama says so, but investigate things for yourselves, examine things for yourselves. "Peace is not the mere absence of violence; peace must come from inner peace. And inner peace comes from taking others' interests into account."
"However, the Chinese system is hard to change and right now I don't want to speculate. Let's wait 6 months to a year or two and we'll see." Asked if there was one thing that would help in Tibet, His Holiness replied, "Freedom." He went on to say that in the twenty-first century we need to solve problems through dialogue, both sides respecting each others' point of view, not one side giving in to the other. The victory of one side and the defeat of the other is not a solution. The afternoon session of the Common Ground for Peace forum focussed on Global Consciousness. His Holiness made the point that human beings have intelligence and the ability to adapt to different circumstances. He cited the example that after 3-4000 years of placing faith in prayers, in recent times science has given us a new view of reality. Now people place their hopes in science and technology. However, he remarked that if we have mental peace we can cope with physical pain, whereas physical comfort cannot subdue mental unease. It has become clear that genuine peace depends on inner peace. He said we are at a crossroads where we can change our approach to seeking happiness. We need to educate people to understand that material development alone does not yield inner peace. While it is important to see how we can make life better for all, we cannot take our present way of life for granted.
At the end of the discussions, audience and panellists alike were moved by Israeli singer Liel Kolet and the Voices of Peace Choir, which consists of Jewish, Muslim and Christian children, singing about the children of today's dream of tomorrow. As he took his leave, His Holiness made everyone laugh when he said, "I enjoyed these discussions and I was particularly pleased to see that the faces in the audience remained alert."  Read More @ Source  | ||||||||
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All the walk events in 2012 will take place this month in the following cities: Ann Arbor, MI (October 13), Chicago, IL (October 13), New York, NY (October 13), San Francisco, CA (October 13), San Jose, CA (October 14), Los Angeles, CA (October 20), Escondido, CA (October 25). Walks have already taken place in Seattle, WA, and Yorkshire, UK. Buddhadharma News reporter Danny Fisher caught up with the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi – the well-known translator of Pali Buddhist texts into English, and the founder of Buddhist Global Relief – to ask him about the walks. They talked via email; read the interview after the jump. Bhante, for the benefit of those who don't know anything about them, what are Buddhist Global Relief's Walks to Feed the Hungry? Also, why walks in this context? The "Walk to Feed the Hungry" is an event that BGR has been holding for the past three years as a means to raise funds to sustain our projects, which center on providing relief to people worldwide who lack adequate nutrition. The idea of holding these walks started in 2010. In May of that year, for fun and exercise, I took a long walk through New York together with a couple of my students. Starting from Fort Lee, New Jersey, we crossed the George Washington Bridge, and then walked down the length of Manhattan to Grand Street at the lower end of the island. When I told our BGR team members about this walk, one member suggested that we hold a walk as a fundraiser, and this set our plans in motion. Since then the "Walk to Feed the Hungry" has become an annual event. In the first year, 2010, we held one walk, in South Orange, New Jersey, and the participants were almost all people living in the greater New York area. In 2011 three BGR walks took place: in New York City, near Ann Arbor in Michigan, and from San Jose to Palo Alto in California. This year, more people around the U.S. and even abroad have organized BGR walks. We now have ten walks scheduled in this country, due to take place in middle and late October. A BGR walk by supporters in England was already held on September 29th. And to our delight, two Asian communities that we support, in Cambodia and India,have held walks in their own countries to express appreciation for the help we give them. For the past two years, one of our New York supporters, Dan Blake, a professional jazz saxophonist, has organized benefit jazz concerts close to the time of the walks. So these have become an integral part of the season. The walk provides a very convenient opportunity to raise funds. Participants in the walk can set up their own First Giving fundraising pages on the BGR website and raise funds from their friends and relatives. Others can give to walkers to support their walks or simply donate to support a walk in any location of their choice. Of the various causes that could have been primary, why has hunger become the central focus of Buddhist Global Relief? We originally founded Buddhist Global Relief for the purpose of combating poverty, but we saw soon enough that this mission was too broad. We needed a more specific point of focus. Reports I read online continually hammered home to me the vast amount of suffering in today's world due to chronic hunger and malnutrition. I had learned that close to a billion people suffer from malnutrition; that another two billion subsist on inadequate diets; and that ten million people a year die from hunger and hunger-related illnesses, most of them women and children. I found this shocking! I thought that in a world where food is still abundant, especially in a country where mountains of food go to waste each year, such a situation is utterly unacceptable. I felt that, out of compassion and a sense of social justice, we had to do something to alleviate the plight of those afflicted with chronic hunger. This commitment, moreover, squared well with the Buddha's stress on the benefits of giving food. Our emphasis, however, has not been on providing emergency relief to communities hit by catastrophe. That type of relief, to be effective, requires a budget in the multi-millions, and we don't have anything in that range. Thus we had to adopt a more modest and realistic approach. What we do is to partner with organizations already working in the countries where we decide to launch projects. Our projects focus on helping people use small-scale, ecologically sustainable methods of cultivation to acquire more food for their families and communities. We also support projects that educate people about right nutrition and healthier dietary practices. And, to tackle the roots of poverty and malnutrition, we provide food assistance to poor families so they can permit their daughters to continue their education and to give women the chance to launch right livelihood projects by which they can earn more to support their families. Readers can find much more detailed information about our history and our projects on our website. I've interviewed you before about your work with Oxfam, CIFA, and the White House on large, cooperative poverty initiatives. Would you say something about you as an individual Buddhist and the organization Buddhist Global Relief cooperating with other religious and secular organizations on large-scale efforts? This seems like it has been a priority for you and BGR. As a small organization run entirely on a volunteer basis, we do not have the funds or personnel to operate in the countries that need the type of assistance we can provide. As I said earlier, the way we work is by forming partnerships with organizations working in those countries, which range from Cambodia and Vietnam, through India and Sri Lanka, to Kenya, Niger, and Malawi in Africa, and Haiti and the U.S. In this way we can take advantage of their greater expertise, yet we can enter into active partnerships by which we look at their specific needs and help them to formulate specific projects. So far our partners have been mostly secular organizations, though we have also linked up with a few fellow Buddhist partners such as Dharmagiri Outreach in South Africa and Bodhicitta Foundation in India. Some of our partners are larger organizations such as Helen Keller International, but most often we collaborate with smaller, locally-based organizations such as Lotus Outreach and Rachana in Cambodia, Ecology Action in Africa, and the What If Foundation in Haiti. The part of BGR's website devoted to the walks quotes something you have said: "We're living at a transformative moment of history when humanity is faced with a critical choice: either we continue to flow with the currents of greed and ignorance and risk devastating the earth, or we adopt a scheme of values that gives pride of place to compassion, care, and social justice." In a broad sense, what do you think practicing Buddhists can do to promote movement towards the latter option? Buddhism already gives "pride of place" to such values as compassion, kindness, and generosity, so stressing these values would not be teaching Buddhists something they are not already familiar with. However, traditionally these qualities are esteemed as personal values conducive to one's own spiritual growth and beneficial to those in one's immediate sphere of influence. Today, however, aggressive and destructive forces, relentlessly bent on profit and domination, have put in jeopardy the very survival of human civilization as we know it. Thus, in my opinion, compassion and kindness as purely personal values are no longer adequate to the demands of the era in which we live. There is also, in Buddhist, a tendency to treat such qualities as love and compassion as purely subjective states, to be cultivated in meditation and personal relationships. This would be a type of compassion that is like a piece of classical art: beautiful and praiseworthy but inert. What we need, in my view, is a kind of love and compassion that can gush forth and reshape our social milieu. This would be a compassion conjoined with a wider global vision and spurred on by the courage to engage the hard, even brutal reality of greed, militarism, lust for power, and heartless exploitation so rampant in the modern world. To respond effectively to our contemporary crisis, I believe we must elevate the sacred Buddhist values of love and compassion to the position of guiding principles that can drive the choices we make on matters of social, political, and economic policy. Further, while I think the idea of social justice is implicit in the Buddhist tradition, it has not been articulated as clearly as it has been in modern Western political theory. Quite independently of what the Buddhist scriptures might say, I feel that it is necessary for contemporary Buddhist to incorporate principles of social and economic justice into our thinking and programs of social action. The commitment to social and economic justice, and the mobilization of a common will to implement this commitment through courageous non-violent action, is something that Buddhists can learn from the West, especially from the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. How can those who would like to participate or donate help? To learn more about the walks, how to register for a walk near you, and donate to support the walk, please see the BGR website: http://www.buddhistglobalrelief.org. All the information you need is right there. But please don't delay because the walks in the U.S. will begin on October 13th. Read More @ Source  | ||||||||
 Detail of Adam Yauch/Bucky Lasek collaboration: Lyrics to "Bodhisattva Vow" on skateboard ridden by X Games multi-medalist and Tibetan Freedom advocate Bucky Lasek. Image Copyright © Tony Hawk Foundation 2012. Photo by Miki Vuckovich, courtesy of Tony Hawk Foundation. Click to expand. .  Lyrics to "Bodhisattva Vow," written by Adam Yauch, on skateboard ridden by X Games multi-medalist and Tibetan Freedom advocate Bucky Lasek. Image Copyright © Tony Hawk Foundation 2012. Photo by Miki Vuckovich, courtesy of Tony Hawk Foundation. Click for larger view. And by the way, for more on the Bodhisattva Vow, don't miss "A Greater Happiness," Pema Chodron's article on undertaking it, from our November 2012 magazine, on newsstands everywhere today. Read More @ Source |
