Buddhist nun returns to Missoula for public teachings

Home The Americas US Central

Missoula, Montana (USA) -- Ven. Robina Courtin will return to Missoula next week to teach at Osel Shen Phen Ling, Missoula’s Tibetan Buddhist Center.

<< Ven. Robina Courtin

Courtin was ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun in 1977 and since then has been traveling and teaching around the world. She has served as the editorial director for Wisdom Publications, the journal Mandala and she founded the Liberation Prison Project. Courtin has also led pilgrimages to Buddhist holy sites in India, Nepal and Tibet.

In Missoula, Courtin will teach a variety of topics called “Understanding Buddhism,” which are integral to Buddhist investigation and practice. These teachings will be suitable for anyone, Osel Shen notes, whether they are merely interested or practicing the Buddhist path.

The teachings will begin on Tuesday, Feb. 5, with an examination of the Buddha’s first teaching of “The Four Noble Truths” and continue each evening through Friday, Feb. 9. All presentations will take place at 7 p.m. at 441 Woodworth Ave.

On Saturday and Sunday, February 9 and 10, Courtin will teach from 2 to 4 p.m., also at 441 Woodworth. Anyone is welcome to attend any of these events. There is no charge, although a suggested donation of $15 per session to cover expenses will be appreciated.

On Tuesday, Feb. 12, at 7 p.m., Ven. Robina will join the Rev. Peter Shober of University Congregational Church for an interfaith dialogue to discuss “Interfaith Understandings.” This is the third time Courtin and Shober have joined to have this type of discussion. Speaking from Buddhist and Christian perspectives, they will explore issues of emerging inter-spiritual realities and the hopes and fears surrounding these movements. This event takes place at the Missoula Public Library at 301 E. Main St.

For a complete schedule and more information, visit fpmt-osel.org.

View the original article here

In Rumtek, a Generation of Buddhist Monks Loses Hope

Home Issues

RUMTEK, Sikkim (India) -- In their 13th year of waiting for their spiritual leader, the Tibetan Buddhist monks at a mountainside monastery in Sikkim are starting to give up hope.

<< Anjani Trivedi for The New York Times
The inner courtyard at Rumtek monastery in Sikkim.

“Our hearts have fallen - the master isn’t coming,” said Karma Yeshi, a monk and teacher at the Rumtek monastery, home to 150 monks in the Himalayas in the erstwhile kingdom annexed to India in 1975. “It’s like a house without a father.”

The person the monks are eager to see is Ogyen Trinley Dorje, the 27-year-old man deemed to be the leader of the Kagyu order of Buddhism, one of the four main schools in Tibetan Buddhism.

Tibetan Buddhism stresses the importance of meeting the Karmapa. Teachings in the Kagyu order are passed on from master to student, and the Kagyu’s Web site says that “all great Kagyu teachers regard his Holiness Karmapa as the embodiment and source of all the blessings of the lineage.”

The young man known as the 17th Karmapa is currently based in Dharamsala at the Gyuto Tantric University, having been granted official refugee status in 2001 after fleeing from Tibet in late December 1999. But since 2000, the Indian government has blocked the Karmapa from entering Rumtek and the state of Sikkim, citing security concerns.

To travel outside Dharamsala, the Karmapa needs prior approval from various government agencies and ministries, and he is given security once he does begin his travels, said a Home Ministry official, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Rumtek is the most important seat of the Kagyu tradition outside the Tsurphu monastery in Tibet. Rumtek has also been the site of much controversy, as different factions have fought over who is the real Karmapa, or incarnate lama. At least two others have laid a claim to the title, but the Dalai Lama and China have officially backed Ogyen Trinley Dorje. The monastery’s valuable relics have also been the source of contention among two rival factions, leading to fistfights.

The gated monastery and community in Rumtek is more of an armed garrison, with India’s border forces patrolling it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. While some say the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force, which also maintains vigil on the nearby India-China border, is guarding the treasure and symbols of authority at the monastery, others say the forces were placed there after clashes among the monks.

“This has lowered the morale among the monks and Buddhist community at large,” Karma Yeshi said.

The government has two concerns about letting the Karmapa travel: his security and the legal battle over ownership of the relics, according the official in the Home Ministry.

State officials say they believe that the national government thinks the Karmapa is a spy. “There is a strong feeling that he might be an agent of China,” said a state government official, who did not want to be identified because he is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue. “It’s very difficult to escape from China, as far as Tibetans are concerned.”

However, China, which does not recognize Sikkim as a part of India, has dismissed these claims by the Indian government.

In 2011, the Karmapa came under scrutiny by Indian police officials after trunks filled with foreign currency were discovered at his residence in Dharamsala, drawing even more suspicion from the government. The Karmapa’s lawyer said the money was donations from devotees from all over the world.

The Karmapa’s presence is a “very, very sensitive” issue that involves multiple ministries, including External Affairs, said the Home Ministry official, although he denied it had anything to do with security.

However, the official said, “He’s been living here, so it’s our duty to protect him. Rumtek being a controversial matter, it’s not in his interest to go there because there are other claimants. So it’s as simple as that.”

“The government of India has adopted a policy of refraining from any succession controversy. We are not favoring or supporting anyone. This policy has been consistent – it was the case 10 years ago and it is still the same,” he added.

Sikkim’s state government backs the Kagyu monks. Sikkim’s chief minister, Pawan Chamling, who has governed for 18 years, has appealed to Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, many times to allow the Karmapa to visit the state.

“The chief minister had taken up this matter when he last visited Delhi,” the state government official told India Ink. “At least, if you don’t allow him to visit Rumtek, his official seat, let him visit Sikkim and bless the people of Sikkim, who are great followers. Even that is not being done by the government of India.”

However, the Home Ministry doesn’t want to take a risk with his security, according to officials in the ministry, which deals largely with internal security matters. Ultimately, they say, the responsibility for his safety rests with the central government, and not the Sikkim government.

Karma Yeshi of the Rumtek monastery said that this issue is not just a local matter, as India is a place of pilgrimage for all Buddhists, masters and monks alike, as the birthplace of Buddhism.

“This is very important not only for the Karmapa issue but for Buddhism. The Buddha dharma is from India, from India it went to China, from China to Tibet – this is how the lineage came about,” the senior monk said.

The inability to meet the Karmapa is nothing less than a tragedy for these Tibetan Buddhists.

“We have been waiting for long enough now,” said Monay Rai, a 24-year-old guide at the monastery, who was born and raised inside the gates of the Rumtek community. “Sometimes when V.I.P.’s visit, the aged people tell me, ‘Please tell the V.I.P.’s to help us, to allow our guru. I can’t travel. It is my dream before I die to see the Karmapa here.’”

View the original article here

Inscription hints at Buddhist treasures

Home Archaeology

Gangsu, China -- A block of stone inscription, believe to be a thousand years old, was discovered in a temple burial ground in Gangsu, China.

<< The characters on the brick mark its origins. It says the inscription was carved in 1013, exactly one-thousand years ago. It also says the coffin contains two thousand pieces of Buddha's remains that were collected by two monks from a nearby temple.(CNTV Photo)

Also uncovered near the 240 Buddhist statues was an underground room, housing a small coffin. At the bottom of the coffin was a square-shaped brick with a clear inscription on it.

The characters on the brick mark its origins. It says the inscription was carved in 1013, exactly one-thousand years ago. It also says the coffin contains two thousand pieces of Buddha's remains that were collected by two monks from a nearby temple.

Chu Shibin, former director of Gansu Provincial Museum, said, “This coffin is made of ceramic. We haven’t found ceramic coffins before. We have only found metal and wooden and silver ones.”

The ceramic coffin has already been broken, and seems to contain a wooden box inside. But because it’s covered by mud, further excavation is still needed to determine if, like the brick inscription says, there are indeed 2,000 pieces of Buddhist remains inside.

Chu said, “Each piece of the remains might be very tiny, so it’s possible there are 2,000 pieces in total.”

Buddhist remains are normally buried in an underground room under a pagoda. Archaeologists here have also found another buried chamber above the statues. What objects it contains, and from what era, we will have to wait to discover.

View the original article here

Is Universal Metta Possible?

Home Dharma Dew

Singapore -- Now that the year-end holidays have passed, so have the barrage of entreaties to nurture a sense of “good will to all mankind,” to extend our love and care to others beyond our usual circle of friends and family. Certainly, this is a message we are meant to take to heart not just in December but all year long. It is a central ideal of several religious and ethical systems.

In the light of the new year, it’s worth considering how far we actually can, or should, extend this good will. To some, the answer might seem obvious. One of the more deeply engrained assumptions of Western liberalism is that we humans can indefinitely increase our capacity to care for others, that we can, with the right effort and dedication, extend our care to wider and wider circles until we envelop the whole species within our ethical regard.

It is an inspiring thought. But I’m rather doubtful. My incredulity, though, is not because people are hypocritical about their ideals or because they succumb to selfishness. The problem lies, instead, in a radical misunderstanding about the true wellsprings of ethical care, namely the emotions.

Two of the leading liberal social theorists, Jeremy Rifkin and Peter Singer, think we can overcome factional bias and eventually become one giant tribe. They have different prescriptions for arriving at ethical utopia. Singer, who is perhaps the world’s best known utilitarian philosopher, argues in his book  The Expanding Circle  that the relative neocortical sophistication of humans allows us to rationally broaden our ethical duty beyond the “tribe” - to an equal and impartial concern for all human beings.

Like mathematics, which can continue its recursive operations infinitely upward, ethical reasoning can spiral out (should spiral out, according to Singer) to larger and larger sets of equal moral subjects. “Taking the impartial element in ethical reasoning to its logical conclusion means, first, accepting that we ought to have equal concern for all human beings.”

All this sounds nice at first - indeed, I would like it to be true - but let me throw a little cold water on the idea. Singer seems to be suggesting that I arrive at perfect egalitarian ethics by first accepting perfect egalitarian metaphysics. But I, for one, do not accept it. Nor, I venture to guess, do many others. All people are not equally entitled to my time, affection, resources or moral duties - and only conjectural assumption can make them appear so. (For many of us, family members are more entitled than friends, and friends more entitled than acquaintances, and acquaintances more than strangers, and so on.)

It seems dubious to say that we should transcend tribe and be utilitarian because all people are equal, when the equal status of strangers and kin is an unproven and counterintuitive assumption. Singer’s abstract “ethical point of view” is not wrong so much as irrelevant. Our actual lives are punctuated by moral gravity, which makes some people (kith and kin) much more central and forceful in our daily orbit of values. (Gravity is actually an apt metaphor. Some people in our lives take on great “affection mass” and bend our continuum of values into a solar-system of biases.  Family members usually have more moral gravity -what Robert Nozick calls “ethical pull.”

One of the architects of utilitarian ethics, and a forerunner of Singer’s logic, was William Godwin (1756-1836), who formulated a famous thought experiment. He asked us to imagine if you could save only one person from a burning building. One of those persons is Archbishop Fénelon and the other is a common chambermaid.
Furthermore, the archbishop is just about to compose his famous work  The Adventures of Telemachus  (an influential defense of human rights). Now here’s the rub. The chambermaid is your mother. Godwin argues that the utilitarian principle (the greatest good for the greatest number) requires you to save the archbishop rather than your mother. He asks, “What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’ that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?”

Singer has famously pushed the logic further, arguing that we should do everything within our power to help strangers meet their basic needs, even if it severely compromises our kin’s happiness. In the utilitarian calculus, needs always trump enjoyments. If I am to be utterly impartial to all human beings, then I should reduce my own family’s life to a subsistence level, just above the poverty line, and distribute the surplus wealth to needy strangers.

Besides the impracticalities of such redistribution, the problems here are also conceptual. Say I bought a fancy pair of shoes for my son. In light of the one-tribe calculus of interests, I should probably give these shoes to someone who doesn’t have any. I do research and find a child in a poor part of Chicago who needs shoes to walk to school every day. So, I take them off my son (replacing them with Walmart tennis shoes) and head off to the impoverished Westside.
On the way, I see a newspaper story about five children who are malnourished in Cambodia. Now I can’t give the shoeless Chicago child the shoes, because I should sell the shoes for money and use the money to get food for the five malnourished kids. On my way to sell the shoes, I remember that my son has an important job interview for a clean-water non-profit organization and if he gets the job, he’ll be able to help save whole villages from contaminated water. But he won’t get the job if he shows up in Walmart tennis shoes.

As I head back home, it dawns on me that for many people in the developing world, Walmart tennis shoes are truly luxurious when compared with burlap sack shoes, and since needs always trump luxuries I’ll need to sell the tennis shoes too; and on, and on, and on.

This brings us to the other recent argument for transcending tribe, and it’s the idea that we can infinitely stretch our domain of care. Jeremy Rifkin voices a popular view in his recent book The Empathic Civilization  that we can feel care and empathy for the whole human species if we just try hard enough. 

This view has the advantage over Singer’s metric view, in that it locates moral conviction in the heart rather than the rational head. But it fails for another reason. I submit that care or empathy is a very limited resource. But it is Rifkin’s quixotic view that empathy is an almost limitless reserve. He sketches a progressive, ever widening evolution of empathy. First, we had blood-based tribalism (in what Rifkin calls  the time of “forager/hunter societies”), then religion-based tribalism (after the invention of agriculture and writing), then nation-state tribalism, but now we are poised for an empathic embrace of all humanity - and even beyond species-centric bias to Buddha-like compassion for all creatures.
He argues that empathy is the real “invisible hand” that will guide us out of our local and global crises. Using a secular version of Gandhi’s non-attachment mixed with some old-fashioned apocalyptic fear mongering, Rifkin warns us that we must reach “biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse.” The way to do this, he argues, is to start feeling as if the entire human race is our extended family. 

I have to concede that I want cosmic love to work. I want Rifkin to be right. And in some abstract sense, I agree with the idea of an evolutionary shared descent that makes us all “family.” But feelings of care and empathy are very different from evolutionary taxonomy. Empathy is actually a biological emotion (centered in the limbic brain) that comes in degrees, because it has a specific physiological chemical progression.

Empathy is not a concept, but a natural biological event -an activity, a process. The feeling of care is triggered by a perception or internal awareness and soon swells, flooding the brain and body with subjective feelings and behaviors (and oxytocin and opioids). Care is like sprint racing. It takes time - duration, energy, systemic warm-up and cool-down, practice and a strange mixture of pleasure and pain (attraction and repulsion). Like sprinting, it’s not the kind of thing you can do all the time. You will literally break the system in short order, if you ramp-up the care system every time you see someone in need. The nightly news would render you literally exhausted.

The limbic system can’t handle the kind of constant stimulation that Rifkin and the cosmic love proponents expect of it. And that’s because they don’t take into account the biology of empathy, and imagine instead that care is more like a thought.
If care is indeed a limited resource, then it cannot stretch indefinitely to cover the massive domain of strangers and nonhuman animals.
Of course, when we see the suffering of strangers in the street or on television, our heartstrings vibrate naturally. We can have contagion-like feelings of sympathy when we see other beings suffering, and that’s a good thing - but that is a long way from the kinds of active preferential devotions that we marshal for members of our respective tribes.

Real tribe members donate organs to you, bring soup when you’re sick, watch your kids in an emergency,  open professional doors for you, rearrange their schedules and lives for you,  protect you, and fight for you - and you return all this hard work. Our tribes of kith and kin are “affective communities” and this unique emotional connection with our favorites entails great generosity and selfless loyalty.

There’s an upper limit to our tribal emotional expansion, and that limit is a good deal lower than the “biosphere.” For my purposes, I’ll stick with Cicero, who said, “society and human fellowship will be best served if we confer the most kindness on those with whom we are most closely associated.” Why should our care be concentrated in small circles of kith and kin? I’ve tried to suggest that it can’t be otherwise, given the bio-emotional origin of care, but more needs to be said if I’m making a normative claim. If we embraced our filial biases, we could better exercise some disappearing virtues, like loyalty, generosity and gratitude.

Cultivating loyalty is no small thing. George Orwell, for example, considered preferential loyalty to be the “essence of being human.” Critiquing Gandhi’s recommendation - that we must have no close friendships or exclusive loves because these will introduce loyalty and favoritism, preventing us from loving everyone equally - Orwell retorted that “the essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty … and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”

In general we have circles of favorites (family, friends, allies) and we mutually protect one another, even when such devotion disadvantages us personally. But the interesting thing about loyalty is that it ignores both merit-based fairness and equality-based fairness. It’s not premised on optimal conditions. You need to have my back, even when I’m sometimes wrong. You need to have my back, even when I sometimes screw up the job. And I have to extend the same loyalty to you. That kind of pro-social risky virtue happens more among favorites.

I also think generosity can better flourish under the umbrella of favoritism. Generosity is a virtue that characterizes the kind of affection-based giving that we see in positive nepotism. So often, nepotism is confused with corruption, when it really just means family preference. And favoritists (if I can invent a word here) are very good at selflessly giving to members of their inner circle.

Gratitude is another virtue that thrives more in a favoritism context. The world of Singer’s utilitarianism and Rifkin’s one-tribism is a world of bare minimums, with care spread thinly to cover per capita needs. But in favoritism (like a love relation) people can get way more than they deserve. It’s an abundance of affection and benefits. In a real circle of favorites, one needs to accept help gracefully. We must accept, without cynicism, the fact that some of our family and friends give to us for our own sake (our own flourishing) and not for their eventual selfish gain. However animalistic were the evolutionary origins of giving (and however vigorous the furtive selfish genes), the human heart, neocortex and culture have all united to eventually create true altruism. Gratitude is a necessary response in a sincere circle of favorites.

Finally, my case for small-circle care dovetails nicely with the commonly agreed upon crucial ingredient in human happiness, namely, strong social bonds. A recent Niagara of longitudinal happiness studies all confirm that the most important element in a good life (eudaimonia) is close family and friendship ties - ties that bind. These are not digital Facebook friends nor are they needy faraway strangers, but robust proximate relationships that you can count on one or two hands - and these bonds are created and sustained by the very finite resource of emotional care that I’ve outlined. As Graham Greene reminds us, “one can’t love humanity, one can only love people.”

Source: http://sdhammika.blogspot.com/2013/01/is-universal-metta-possaible.html

View the original article here

An unusual Buddhist center spreads a West Coast author's teachings to Middle Tennessee

Home The Americas US South

Nashville, Tennessee (USA) -- It's all fun and games until the bell rings, as Against the Stream Nashville founder and meditation teacher David Smith would say. Prior to propping himself on the cushion promptly at 7 p.m., at a spiritual center housed in an eerily beautiful old restaurant-equipment facility on Charlotte Pike, Smith is just one among several cronies participating in a raucous scene of chatter and bear hugs that would burst any newcomer's bubbles of Buddhist preconceptions.

Maybe punk Buddhism sounds like a contradiction in terms. Yet despite Smith's shaved head, tattoo sleeves and affinity for the F-bomb, he has found a path to enlightenment that places its own rough-hewn spin on the Enlightened One's 2,500-year-old doctrines. It's affiliated with the Santa Monica and Los Angeles centers founded by spiritual teacher and Dharma Punx author Noah Levine, who visits Nashville 7 p.m. Friday as a fundraiser for Smith's local outpost.

Teaching mindfulness meditation four times weekly at his Sylvan Park center, Smith encourages his students — some of whom, like him, have histories of addiction — to explore their inner horizons instead of checking out through a cocktail, Klonopin, or cruising the Internet.

"You go sit in a room full of people and do some breathing and you feel better," Smith says. " 'This feels almost familiar' is what a lot of people say."

While the Nashville area has a number of established Buddhist organizations (like the Nashville Zen Center, founded in 1982), Smith's unorthodox lectures — coupled with events like Levine's first Nashville appearance this weekend — suggest that the city's spiritual life is taking on new complexity. An offshoot of Levine's California-based Mind Body Awareness Project, his center is in essence a church for people typically turned off by churches, or by the very idea of following.

"Dave looks like he could teach you as much about how to survive a mosh pit as he could about how to cultivate compassion and mindfulness," says Jeff Browning, an alcohol and drug counselor who works as an instructor with Mind Body Awareness Project. "That's what people respond to when they meet him. When we take meditations into the jails, those guys don't want to be preached at for the thousandth time, they want to hear about somebody who understands suffering and has a way out of that suffering."

First introduced to Buddhism by the family of Emotional Intelligence author Daniel Goleman, Smith divided his teenage years in western Massachusetts between retreats at the Insight Meditation Society and a street-punk lifestyle of drugs and debauchery.

"I didn't know what they were doing up there, I just knew the place seemed pretty cool and that the people were friendly," Smith says. "And then I got in this really bad car accident where my girlfriend was killed, and to cope with my PTSD I started doing mindfulness meditation."

Yet Smith acknowledges that at the same time he was still doing drugs. "It was just a big mess," he says. Seeking out recovery at the age of 28, Smith renounced his full-time music career and his hardcore excesses to start his own construction business and delve back into the study of Buddhism. While attending a three-month meditation retreat, he first heard about Levine's 2003 memoir Dharma Punx and found the book paralleled his own sex-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll past.

Relating to Levine's rebellion against his spiritual roots — his father is famed poet and author Stephen Levine, one of the pioneers to popularize Theravada Buddhism in the West — Smith struck up an email correspondence with him. The more they communicated, the more the two saw they shared a desire to redirect their arrested-adolescent angst into a journey "against the stream" — a struggle to cultivate compassion for their faults.

Opting to follow in Levine's footsteps, Smith signed up for the teacher's San Francisco-based Meditation Instructor program. He met with Levine five times over the course of a year for guidance in how to facilitate his own group.

Inspired to share the serenity derived from his practice and dedication to the Four Noble Truths — the creed that essentially suffering is inevitable, and it is actually our resistance to unpleasant emotions that causes us pain — Smith sought out a prospective center where he could conduct his own teachings on "more of a street rather than college level." Approached by Smith in early 2011, the founder of 12South's One Dharma Nashville, Lisa Ernst, agreed to let him teach his Sunday-night guided-meditation class at their facility.

"Against the Stream is a very friendly place to begin a meditation practice for people of all backgrounds, as well as those who are interested in developing a practice and studying Buddhism more in depth," Ernst says. "I respect Dave's sincerity and commitment to his own practice, as the best teachers are those who never stop studying and have the most to give."

Despite Against the Stream's popularity on the West Coast, where the L.A. and Santa Monica centers attract nearly 1,800 visitors per week, Smith's arduous first year of no-show nights and skeptical attendees told him Nashville wouldn't be a pushover. But from his work with the Mind Body Awareness Project, for whom he currently teaches meditation to incarcerated youth, Smith says he's grown accustomed to tough audiences. Eventually he attracted a loyal crew intrigued by his standup-worthy witticism and no-bullshit Buddhist wisdom. Among his adherents is Belmont University student Luke Mayton, one of Smith's first pupils and an occasional substitute for his Wednesday night class.

"I had been interested in Buddhism since I was a kid and had been meditating on and off over the years in a very unorganized and unguided way without a teacher or community to support my practice," Mayton says. "When I attended Against the Stream for the first time, I knew it was something I would come back to many times. The group is approachable, laid-back and has a come-as-you-are feel that's always made me totally comfortable with being myself."

Confident that meditation's psychologically proven benefits will appeal to an overworked and saturated society, Smith believes Buddhism's fluid "question everything" philosophy will universally appeal to both New Age and ex-children-of-the-church crowds. Currently attracting between 150 and 200 people per week, Smith plans for a series of sliding-scale workshops (for instance, the upcoming Saturday Morning Series will deliver a diagram and historical detail-driven study of Buddhism) to finance the center, which like the entire ATS umbrella is nonprofit-certified and relies 100 percent upon attendee donations. Eagerly anticipating Levine's sanction of approval for the country's third official center, which coincidentally aligns with the group's fifth anniversary, Smith admits how surreal it seems to be at the forefront of the Southern division of Levine's burgeoning Buddhist movement.

"I remember being on retreats and watching the Dharma teacher and thinking, 'I wanna do that,' " Smith says. "It was always something I wanted to do at some point, but when I was like 60. When I was old and shit and couldn't play rock 'n' roll music anymore, maybe then I would teach. Never did I think it would happen this quick."

Noah Levine speaks 7 p.m. Feb. 1 at Against the Stream Meditation Center, 3816 Charlotte Ave., and conducts a Kind Awareness Day-long 10 a.m. Feb. 2. Sliding-scale donations range from $20 to $200. For more information, see againstthestreamnashville.com.

View the original article here

Dalai Lama Says Delhi Gang Rapists Should Not Be Executed, Death Penalty Not The Answer

Home Issues

Jaipur, India -- One of the world's most respected spiritual leaders has asked that mercy be shown in the case of the men accused of last month's brutal gang rape and murder of a woman on a bus in New Delhi.

<< The Dalai Lama, left, listens to one of his biographers, Pico Iyer at one of the sessions on the opening day of India's Jaipur Literature Festival in Jaipur, India, Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013. The Dalai Lama said he thiks the men accused in the Delhi rape case should not be hanged. (AP Photo/Deepak Sharma)

During a panel discussion this week at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival in Jaipur, India, His Holiness the Dalai Lama touched on the controversial trial that began Thursday in the bustling Indian city.

The five men on trial could be hanged if they are convicted, according to the Associated Press. The family of the 23-year-old victim, who succumbed to her injuries two weeks after the attack, have called for the execution of all the accused. But the Dalai Lama, during his appearance at the Jaipur festival, demurred.

“I do not like the death sentence,” he said, adding that there are other ways to deal with the alleged perpetrators, according to English-language Indian news outlet the Hindu.

The Hindu went on to write that "the Dalai Lama said the 21 century belonged to dialogue and not to confrontation or violence."

The Tibetan leader has been a steadfast opponent of the death penalty, which contradicts the Buddhist philosophy of nonviolence. In July 2011, the Dalai Lama, then 76 years old, traveled to Chicago, where he praised Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn for abolishing the death penalty in his state.

The Delhi rape case has sparked debate over the Indian legal system, and public anger has been directed at officials in a city informally christened India's "rape capital," according to Reuters.

A Indian government panel this week dismissed calls to allow the death penalty to be considered in cases of sexual assault, Reuters reported on Wednesday. The panel's decision does not have bearing on the Delhi case, as the suspects are also accused of murder, a charge that can carry the death penalty.

View the original article here

Buddhist meet clinches world heritage status cry for Udayagiri

Delivering the valedictory address, governor Murlidhar Chandrakant Bhandare said the meet will go a long way to boost the rich Buddhist heritage of Odisha and urged tour operators to promote Udayagiri internationally. MLA Amar Prasad Satapathy highlighted the glorious contribution of Buddhist sites and pressed for including Udayagiri in the list of world heritage sites.

Impressed with the diamond triangle of Ratnagiri, Udayagiri and Lalitgiri sites in Odisha, professor Anura Manatunga from Sri Lanka called upon participants to motivate tour operators from Sri Lanka to promote this circuit along with traditional Buddhist sites of UP and Bihar.

Principal secretary tourism Ashok Kumar Tripathy highlighted the state government's commitment for promotion of Buddhist tourism aggressively in the domestic and international sector. He hoped there will be a surge of tourist traffic from Southeast Asian countries once the Bhubaneswar airport is opened for the international sector.

Twenty international delegates from seven countries and 65 national delegates participated in the conference. A total of 1,547 domestic and 66 foreign tourists attended the meet as well.

Broad subjects of discussion at the event included Buddhist philosophy and schools of thought, Buddhist remains of Odisha, Buddhism for international peace and relevance of Buddhism in the 21st century, Buddhist art, iconography and architecture, apart from Buddhist vestiges and tourism.

"The topics for discussion were important and suitable for the time. For example, higher education and promotion of Buddhist practices are crucial for the religion. The event was attended by more than 110 overseas guests, 25 Indian tour operators, many international Buddhist scholars and others," said Amiya Patnaik, vice-chancellor of Utkal University of Culture, which collaborated for organizing the event.

"The event was a big success. Odisha has a rich Buddhist heritage, with several important sites associated with the life of Lord Buddha, which are of great interest for followers of Buddhism the world over. The conference was held with a view to showcasing and projecting the Buddhist heritage of the state. The Buddhist conference highlighted the relevance of Buddhism in today's age, more than 2,000 years after king Ashoka took it upon himself to spread the message of Lord Buddha," said Jiban Patnaik a senior official of Archeological Survey of India, Bhubaneswar.

View the original article here

Application of Buddhist principles can help reduce stress and improve mental health

Home Healing & Spirituality

Colombo, Sri Lanka -- With the rapid spread of Buddhism in the western United States, boosted by increased immigration from Asia, Americans should consider applying Buddhist principles to solve their everyday problems. Although Buddhism has two major sects - Theravada and Mahayana - both agree on the crux of Buddhist philosophy based on the Four Noble Truths (FNT), the Noble Eightfold Path (NEP), and the associated 12-factor formula of conditioned genesis (paticca samuppada).

Buddhist population worldwide range from 350 million to 1 billion. The 2010 religious census estimated the Buddhist population in the U.S. at 1 million, mostly located in metropolitan areas with population greater than a million. The census found San Jose, California, to be the most Buddhist city in the country with approximately 1.25 percent identifying as a Buddhist adherent.

Buddhism, in contrast to the three major Abrahamic religions, is not interested in conversion. Buddha was an enlightened human being who discovered the path to nirvana the state of non-existence. Adherents of all religions can practice Buddhist principles without incurring the wrath of the omniscient God because they have universal universality.

Here is how the FNT are relevant to our problems. First truth: [Existence is] dukkha (“suffering” both mental and physical). Second truth: Samudaya [the cause] of dukkha is tanha/trsna (“thirst”/greed) conditioned by avijja (“ignorance” of the reality of self), upadana (clinging), and a cluster of other mental, biological, and physical factors.  Third truth: Nirodha (cessation) of dukkha is possible by following the path to nirvana. Fourth truth: Magga (the path) or the NEP provides the way to nirvana,

The original Pali terms is used in this essay because no single word in English can capture the connotative depth of the terms that Buddha used.

Buddha concluded that no sentient being could avoid ongoing dukkha in his/her bhavacakra (wheel of becoming), which rotates from fetus to birth, and then experience jaramarana (sickness, old age, and death) within the ambit of samsara (cyclic existence).

Buddha illustrated the operational dynamics of the first three noble truths in his paticca samuppada formula. The bhavacakra of every sentient being took a circular form because it had no beginning or end. He did not answer questions on the First Cause or expand on the nature of nirvana because they were beyond human comprehension. He gained his insights by purifying his mind and   using the techniques of bhavana (meditation) to comprehend the causes and effects of existence.

Buddha identified a cluster of 12 mental, biological, and physical nidanas (conditioned factors) that invariably engendered dukkha in the samsara. He surmised that living beings should follow the NEP, also called the Middle Path, to control their tanha (“thirst”/greed/desire/craving), which is interconnected, interdependent, and interactive with all other nidanas. In particular, tanha was reinforced by the impact of the five nidanas surrounding it - phassa (contact), vedana (feeling), upadana (clinging), and bhava (becoming).

Bhava identifies a sentient being as a namarupa (name and form)—a composite of panca skanda (five aggregates), where rupa stands for the physical form, and nama for the mental/nonphysical aggregates of feelings (18 types), perceptions (six types), mental formations (50 types), and consciousness (six types). These five interdependent aggregates are in continuous flux (anicca). Because every existing thing, both mental and physical, is anicca, the presumption of a permanent soul (atta) is inaccurate. The reality of existence is asoulity or no self (anatta). Thus, no person is the same except for the duration of the present moment, and the addiction to think in terms of the first person singular (I, me, my, mine) will merely prolong an organism’s dukkha in samsara. The three marks of existence, Buddha said, are anicca, anatta, and dukkha.

Descartes’ assertion Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) led to the belief that mind and body were two independent static nidanas. But Buddha had correctly seen more than 2100 years earlier that at one’s death the panca skanda discarded its rupa component while the four nama components remained intact in a state of flux until the cluster entered a new rupa in samsara (cyclic existence) depending on its karma (volitional actions). This is what is called punarbhava (rebirth or re-becoming). It is different from Hinduism’s re-incarnation.

The preceding sketch of the crux of Buddhism enables us to solve our everyday problems in ways that are alien to Western culture:

Before rushing into committing any physical or mental action (karma), meditate on its short-and long-term consequences on every sentient being in your environment, including your adversaries.  You can reduce your dukkha by realizing your asoulity (anatta) and impermanence (anicca).

Train yourself to control the three roots of evil: greed and desire; ignorance or delusion; hatred and destructive urges, which are embedded in your five aggregates (panca skanda). Use systems thinking, applying the principle that all elements in the system are interdependent, interconnected, and interactive.

Follow the middle path to tone down excessive emphasis on individualism, which breeds selfishness, self-righteousness, egotism, arrogance, etc. The second amendment to the U.S. Constitution cannot pass muster under Buddhist principles. Buddhism does not endorse weapons for individual protection or use of guns for pleasure hunting.

----
Gunaratne is professor of mass communication emeritus at MSUM. He is the author of an autobiographic trilogy. He conducts a Buddhist discussion group in Moorhead once a month on the second Saturday evening.

View the original article here

Indonesia Islam leaders stir row over 'Buddhist' Chinese New Year

Home Asia Pacific South East Asia Indonesia

Jakarta, Indonesia -- As Indonesia and other countries with Chinese diasporas welcome the Year of the Snake, some Islamic leaders have ignited a religious row by declaring the celebrations “haram” and off limits for Muslims.

<< Two Muslim women visit a Buddhist temple in Jakarta. Photo: AFP

After decades of repression under the dictatorship of Suharto, who rose to power after a bloody purge of communists and Chinese in the late 1960s, Chinese-Indonesians are now accepted in mainstream society of the largely Muslim nation.

Lunar New Year is also now a public holiday in Indonesia, where it is known as “Imlek”.

But a local leader of the country’s top Muslim clerical body has declared the celebration “haram” (forbidden), saying its rituals are tied up with Buddhist practices, particularly those that take place in temples.

“We cannot separate religion from culture, so we’re being cautious,” Zainal Arifin, head of the Indonesian Ulema Council in the city of Solo, told news agency AFP.

“And if it’s part of a religious ritual, we must not celebrate it. It’s the same case with Christmas and other religious celebrations.”

The hardline Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) said clerics would spread the message to Muslims through mosque loudspeakers, and warn Chinese-Indonesians not to invite Muslims to celebrations.

But ethnic Chinese leaders say such comments about a traditional festival are illogical and a sign of outdated thinking in some Islamic organisations.

“Chinese New Year is not a religious celebration and it’s especially not a Buddhist celebration,” said Andrew Susanto, president of the Chinese-Indonesian Youth Association.

He said marking the Lunar New Year was no different to celebrating the new year in other cultures.

“I don’t think that’s what most Indonesians think,” he said, adding the festivities have over time become an Indonesian tradition.

Despite the cleric’s comments, a Javanese-style Lunar New Year celebration was held in Solo last week, with thousands joining a procession akin to those commemorating Islamic holidays.

Local monks released 888 songbirds and catfish – eight being a lucky Chinese number – and distributed cakes to the jovial crowd.

Chinese-Indonesians make up around nine million of the nation’s 240 million people, most practising Christianity, Buddhism or Confucianism.

Suharto, who ruled Indonesia with an iron fist for more than three decades until 1998, banned Chinese languages and symbols, and forced Chinese-Indonesians to change their names.

His rule began after an anti-Communist purge in 1965-1966, in which at least 500,000 people considered communists or sympathisers – many Chinese – were killed and others tortured. Rights activists say two million perished.

Abdurrahman Wahid, an Islamic religious leader and politician who became the first elected president after Suharto stepped down, lifted the ban on Chinese culture in 2000, allowing ethnic Chinese to once again openly celebrate Lunar New Year.

In Glodok – Jakarta’s Chinatown which was reduced to rubble in the 1998 riots at the end of Suharto’s rule – two Muslim women wearing headscarves soaked up the atmosphere, as vendors sold traditional red money envelopes and cobra oil to mark the Year of the Snake.

“I’m Muslim, so I don’t myself take part in celebrations,” said one of the women, Widi Astudi, 37, as she visited a Buddhist temple Friday.

“But Indonesia is a tolerant country, and the Chinese here are Indonesians, so there’s no harm in visiting the temples and appreciating how they celebrate.”

View the original article here

Former US president Bill Clinton turns to Buddhism

Home Personality

San Francisco, CA (USA) -- According to thebuddhism.net news site, in an article dated January 10th, 2013, former US president Bill Clinton has hired his own personal Buddhist monk to teach him how to properly meditate.

Bill is learning to meditate and has reportedly turned to a vegan diet as well. All this change has apparently been influenced by his recent heart scare where in February 2004 when he was rushed to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City because he started experiencing some awful chest pains.

At that time, he had to have two coronary stints put into his heart and a few months later, in September, he had to undergo quadruple bypass heart surgery. In 2010 he then had a clogged artery that the surgeons had to reopen which was his second heart operation in five years.

He says that learning meditation helps him to relax, which apparently stress is supposedly one of the biggest contributors to this heart condition. He travels a lot and his job is highly stressful, learning to meditate he learns to relax and says he is doing much better after his two life changing decisions.

He reportedly also has a favorite mantra that he loves to chant when things get hectic and says that is really does help him to relax and think more clearer. He used to eat a lot of fast food apparently according to the news reports, but now he has decided to give up all that and replace it with a lot of fruits and vegetables with the occasional fish! Outstanding I say, we need more govt. officials turning to healthy ways of life and Buddhist meditations to relax and maybe our country would start looking up.

As 2010 and 2011 taught us, Buddhist meditation and healthier diets are starting to make a trend with everyone. More and more people are seeing the benefits that come from a life of relaxing meditation and eating healthier and changing their lives.

From Tiger Woods to Steve Jobs (RIP) Buddhism is beginning to be seen in some very high places. It is true meditation has a lifetime of relaxation and peace as well as health with it. Everyone could benefit from the changes that Mr. Clinton has made, and good for him.

View the original article here

Call to construct protective wall around Buddhist stupa

Home Archaeology

Taxila, Pakistan -- The local and foreign tourists have called upon UNESCO and federal as well as provincial government to take stock of the construction of wall around earliest Buddhist stupa and monastery known as Dharmarajika Stupa dated back to second century AD near Taxila by private developers as tourists entrance has been completely restricted leaving no place to visitors.

Dharmarajika Stupa is one of eight shrines constructed in the 3rd century BC during the reign of Emperor Ashoka of the Mauryan dynasty to house relics of the Buddha. The shrine gradually expanded, reaching its largest size in the 2nd century A.D. The name Dhararajika stupa comes from an inscription of the time of the Parthian ruler Azes. The main stupa was probably built by Dhararaja, a title of the Mauryan emperor Asoka. The site is divided into two parts: the stupa area in the south and his monastic area in the north.

The main attraction on a raised terrace, approached by four flights of steps. It was long known as Chir Tope because in the 19th century it was torn asunder (Chir) and the relics robbed by a French general of Ranjit Singh. The foundation consists of a wheel of spokes (Dharam-Chakra). Around the stupa is a paved ambulatory passage outside we have a number of votive stupa erected later by the pilgrims.

On the floor of the main stupa three hoards of coins were found, as a ritual burial by the visiting pilgrims. The coins belong to the Scythian, Parthian, Kushana and Indo-Sassanian rulers. The votive stupas are of different kinds, from one of which a relic casket was recovered and presented to Sri Lanka in 1924. In between can also be seen small chapels containing Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of stucco.

The whole construction here continued to the end of the seventh century A.D. when Buddhism declined and meets its doom for lack of patronage. Keeping in view its importance and significance, UNESCO owned it, declared the site as “world cultural heritage” in 1984 while Government of Pakistan notified them as “protected sites” under the Antiquities Act 1975. It is important to mention here that Section 22 of Antiquities Act 1975 prohibits any structure or construction within 200 feet of protected sites’ outer portion. The rule stats” Not withstanding any thing contained in any other law for the time being in force, no development plan or scheme, or new construction or, or within, distance of two hundred feet of a protected immovable antiquity shall be undertaken without approval of the Director General”.

The construction of wall by the private developers at the entrance of earliest Buddhist stupa and monastery known as Dharmarajika Stupa dated back to 2nd century AD has banned the entry of the domestic and foreign tourists, already collapsed tourism sector of the country. On the local and foreign tourists’ complaints when this reporter visited the site, it was observed that local developer has erected concrete wall and a huge gate at the entrance of site completely banning entrance to the site.

The sign board installed by the department at the entrance of the site for information and guidance of tourists and visitors has also been removed at throw away at nearby poultry farm and the site seems some private building rather than an ancient site. Local and foreign tourists wander on the road leading to the site in search of the site which is available on the guide map for the tourists but not present on the spot. Vjwal Prodhar, a tourist from Nepal has said that he was stunned to see that a wall has been erected by non-government elements around Buddhist site.

He said it has great religious importance to Buddhists and such construction is like trashing its sanity. He said that UNESCO should take stock of the sorry state of affairs. Sukan Yacha, a tourist from Thailand expressed his utmost grief over restricting the entry of the tourists at the Buddhist site. He said that the site has great religious importance to the followers of Buddhism and such act has hurt their sentiments.

Akongi, a tourist from Japan said that after visiting the site it looks like that it is personal property rather that the world cultural heritage. He said that it seems that national and international organizations who claim to be custodians of the world cultural heritage have turned blind eye to the issue due to reasons best known to them. He said that the situation is intolerable to the Buddhists and the Buddhist organizations should play their role to free the site from personal “captivity”.

I came from Rawalpindi along with my some friends who came from Multan to see the ancient sites at Taxila and we travel five times on the road but failed to find the stupa. Said Asad Shah, a local tourist. He said that it is ridiculous that information sign board has been removed from the site and the authorities are in deep slumber over the issue. Dr Aneesa Khan, another tourist who came from Islamabad has condemned the apathy of the department of archaeology, provincial and federal government turning their back to this serious issue and looking the whole issue as idle spectator. She said that construction of wall and installing a gate at the entrance is like making this world cultural heritage site as personal property.

When contacted Deputy Director Department of Archaeology Irshad Hussain said that the matter has been brought into the notice of the local administration and Revenue Department and it would be resolved after demarcation of land. He said that the entrance of the tourists would be ensured and approach road to the site would be made with the consultation of private developer with the help of Revenue Department soon.

It may be recalled here that the Supreme Court of Pakistan on August 6, 2007, had ordered removal of all encroachments in and around the archeological sites throughout the country. The order was passed by apex court while hearing an identical matter of Lahore city under Human Rights case No. 179 of 2007. In the case, the two-member bench, comprising Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry and Justice M. Javed Buttar, has directed the Punjab government to remove encroachments from historical places within three months.

The court also directed the chief secretaries of all the four provinces to take proper action to remove the encroachments around the historical places in their respective provinces. Subsequently all the Chief Secretaries were directed by the federal government with regard to court’s directives.

View the original article here

'Buddhist teachings scientifically true'

Home Asia Pacific South Asia India

VARANASI, India -- "Buddhism has become an area of interest for scientists for they feel that the teachings and principles of Buddhism are scientifically very true," said the Dalai Lama while addressing a congregation at Central University of Tibetan Studies at Sarnath on Wednesday.

He said that he will be meeting scientists in Delhi to discuss the same from January 14 to January 17.

Notably, around 30,000 people have arrived in Varanasi to attend the four-day discourse by the Dalai Lama in Sarnath which began on Monday. Buddhist monks and nuns, monks from Himalayan region, Tibetans from different parts India and Tibet, and people of various other religious faiths were present to listen to the Nobel peace prize winner.

Meanwhile, the entire premises of Sarnath remained packed with Buddhist devotees and followers of Dalai Lama even on Wednesday. Despite the chilly and frosty conditions, devotees took their seats in time at the Kalchakra Mandap, CUTS.

Before the beginning of the discourse, devotees were given bread and salted tea as breakfast. Panna Mistri, a native of Bodh Gaya who has got expertise in preparing the salted tea informed, "The tea is prepared by boiling milk with a little water. Butter and salt are added to the content, followed by tea water.

Around 6000 litres of tea is prepared each time." Besides, the kitchen is also preparing around loaves of 21,000 bread for the devotees.

Tibetan food and local delicacies were also selling on the roads leading to the varsity.

View the original article here

Why Are Sri Lanka’s Policy Makers Not Using Buddhism As A Soft-Power Tool?

Home Asia Pacific South Asia Sri Lanka

Colombo, Sri Lanka -- We are all well aware that both India and China are rivals for supremacy in Asia and both are fishing for new strategies to tap to forge the alliances needed to strengthen that supremacy. If India and China nations that once put Buddhism aside for other priorities are now realizing that their answer for supremacy lies with Buddhism why has Sri Lanka’s policy makers not utilized this power which is under their very nose?

Historical facts have to be first made clear. The Buddha was born in Nepal. Buddha achieved enlightenment, gained spiritual following and achieved nirvana in India (Bodhgaya, Sarnath, Kushinagar – all located in the Indian state of Bihar, one of the poorest in India). Buddhism was subsumed by Hinduism and none of India’s governments sought to even consider reviving the lost place given to Buddhism until now. However, Buddhism was abandoned by India and its leaders never gave any prominence to it though the spread of Buddhism historically is nothing anyone can deny. China too opted to set aside Buddhism until its present realization of how powerful Buddhism exactly is.

Buddhism’s compassion has unfortunately subjected ancient Buddhist nations that have been invaded and natives slaughtered through history. Once Buddhist nations today are occupied by invading forces who now claim their right to these nations – Bangladesh, Maldives, Afghanistan were all Buddhist nations once upon a time. It is a tragic truth that Buddhism’s gentle philosophy advocating right to life for both man and animal attributed to its decline.

In the modern context, much of the blame for the deterioration of religions in the world is primarily due to the teachings of its master being replaced by ideologies of those now functioning as leaders of different faiths driving people away from the fundamental teachings originally advocated. This is why there is so much of confusions and contradictions that prevail in all religions and why by virtue of these differences there is calamities based on religious beliefs and practices. The present day religious heads are totally accountable for the catastrophe’s that prevail globally.

Nevertheless, both India and China are pulling out all their historical links to Buddhism in a bid to use Buddhism to its highest potential. The efforts of these two nations to scurry for links should have Sri Lanka taking the lead for Sri Lanka weathered the storms of 500 years of colonial rule and despite the fact that it was the Sinhalese Buddhists who were massacred in trying to save their nation Sri Lanka remains a nation with over 68% Buddhists.

Whilst China never forgets to remind India that its Buddhist population is far greater than that of India – though Buddhism came to China several centuries after its spread in India. India in an attempt to prove Buddhism was imported from India to China built a Buddhist temple in Luoyang. Though China’s Buddhist credentials become weak in the face of international opposition to its treatment of Tibet though much of the real situation is often hidden from the world by western owned international media.

The tell tale signs of Buddhism been made a powerful soft-power tool is evident.

China hosted the first World Buddhist Forum in 2006 – attention was diverted to reviving Lumbini with a USD3billion project, the birthplace of Buddha in Nepal. India responded with supporting the Global Buddhist Congregation in Delhi. China has an edge because Buddhism is a fast-growing religion now in China whilst India is simply trying to use smart ways to counter Chinese hegemony. China has often kept India from regional links in South East Asia portraying India as an outsider but we can see through numerous trade agreements and visits that India is countering these drives using the cultural tool of Buddhism.

India is also looking at reviving Nalanda University – an extremely strategic initiative and one that should not escape anyone’s attention because it was a place that imparted far more “teachings” on students than Buddhism alone! India, Japan, Singapore and China is part of this effort which next asks why has Sri Lanka not prominently featured in this effort? India has even gone on to sponsor the International Conference on Buddhist Cultural Heritage in Yangon/Myanmar in an obvious bid to reach out to the 89% Buddhists in Myanmar. India also went on to take the “Kapilavastu Relics” preserved in the National Museum in Sri Lanka which showed how hundreds of thousands of Sinhalese Buddhists queue to pay homage.

It is not too late for Sri Lanka to spearhead Buddhist teachings, Buddhist student cultural links including both East and Western students and the exchange of Buddhist thoughts, views, discussions and other cultural programs – there is a whole world of ways that Sri Lanka is able to use Buddhism to its advantage – our question is why is it lying dormant? India is not a predominately Buddhist country and accept for a handful of Indians more interested in the philosophical aspects of Buddha’s teachings they are not interested or committed to Buddhism and would never desire to give up their Brahmin practices. This is why Sri Lanka needs to exert its supremacy and no one can challenge this.

It is easy for any nation to use hard power – military might is never without drawbacks, economics has its ups and downs but a far greater way is to use soft power and with majority of Asian nations spiritually aligned to Buddhism there is no other soft power that needs to be used. The advantages are many.

To use a soft power tool it must have “native ownership” and India nor China can claim to have given due place to Buddhism in their national policies unlike Sri Lanka where Buddhism is enshrined in its Constitution. The success of Muslim nations has been to use Islam as a soft power which is incorporated into its “nationalistic” thinking and actions. The soft power tools of the West are Hollywood, Music and brand names. However such superficial “cultures” does not have the “muscle” or function as a vehicle to drive the objectives that Buddhism is able to achieve as a soft-power tool. These are the realities that India and China have now understood.

Asia aside, Buddhism has been able to generate a spiritual awakening amongst the people of the West probing for a calmer and philosophical meaning to their lives. Asia on the other hand needs to move away from the terrain of material pleasures that is moving them further from their religious practices.

It is no coincidence that both India and China are now digging ancient links to Buddhism to use for its own strategic advantage and when Sri Lanka does not need to do anything of the sort why do we not use Buddhism as a soft-power tool to forge greater ties with the Buddhist nations as well as tap into a fast growing Buddhist awakening in the Western hemisphere?

While China and India battle aggressive marketing strategies on how to use Buddhism to its full potential we question what Sri Lanka’s Foreign Service is doing by not using a tool already powerful and available with Sri Lanka? With so many missions and manpower why is Sri Lanka not using this soft-power diplomacy that would certainly work to our advantage on international forums like UN/UNHRC etc?

The populations of Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Mongolia and China are a very powerful source to tap using Buddhism as a soft-power tool and Sri Lanka needs to culturally and religiously use these allies to alleviate its political standing.

Nevertheless with all the mechanizations in place, a plethora of Buddhist foundations/organizations/Buddhist Scholars already available it is timely for Sri Lanka’s leaders to use every avenue available to tap into these resources and make Buddhism a soft-power tool instead of watching other nations that abandoned Buddhism to take the lead not out of interest for Buddhism or belief in Buddhism but simply to use it as a political tool.

Sri Lanka on the other hand has ensured whatever the odds that Buddhism has not faced the same fate. It is within Sri Lanka’s right to unite the nations of Asia using the soft-power tool politically and it’s a powerful tool that Sri Lanka’s policy makers need to seriously look upon. It certainly does question the lack of interest and wonders whether it is because non-Buddhist advisors are advising the Buddhist leaders along the wrong path! If this is so it is time the Buddhist leaders realize the folly and address the situation immediately.

View the original article here

Vietnam’s Buddhist response to disaster

Home Asia Pacific South East Asia Vietnam

HANOI/HUE, Vietnam -- Buddhist monks, nuns and their followers have long contributed to Vietnam’s disaster relief efforts. Sometimes equipped with canoes filled with instant noodles, woollen hats and psychosocial counsellors, this local cadre may lack standard operating procedures, but it constitutes a largely undocumented and significant disaster relief system running parallel to governmental efforts.

<< Photo: Phuong Tran/IRIN
Not your typical disaster worker, but one nevertheless

Buddhist temples’ (or any religious organization’s) contribution to disaster relief is still under-studied by international donors and NGOs working on disaster response, despite their growing role in a number of places, says Ian Wilderspin, a technical specialist on disaster risk management for the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Hanoi.

However, Bui Viet Hien, a UNDP programme analyst, co-authored a 2011 study in collaboration with the Ministry of Sciences and Technology on the role of informal organizations in boosting community resilience to flooding in a district of the coastal Binh Dinh Province in south-central Vietnam.

Groups identified in the study included, among others, business leaders in the rice industry; boat owners who lived closest to the pier and provided emergency transportation during flood seasons; and dyke protection brigades nominated by village elders to supervise dykes during rainy seasons. The study broke down each group’s contribution to boosting resilience, concluding that people in the above three groups had the most impact on their villages’ ability to get through disasters.

There has not been a similar effort to assess informal organizations’ contribution to disaster response, she told IRIN last September. “It is an important question to ask [religious organizations’ contribution to disaster relief and prevention], but we simply do not know.”

Eric Debert, a programme manager with international NGO CARE in Vietnam, said though religious groups are not targeted directly in CARE’s work with communities on disaster risk reduction, they may be represented in other community associations and groups CARE consults.

Nevertheless, it could be a “gap”, he noted. Since 2006 CARE has coordinated the Joint Advocacy Network Initiative (JANI) funded by European Union aid body ECHO.

JANI includes 18 international and local NGOs as well as mass organizations (like Vietnam’s Women’s Union, whose stated membership is 13 million) which promote a community-based approach to help residents in disaster-prone areas face increasingly frequent and more intense natural hazards.

Buddhist operating procedures?

“They [Buddhist temples] have good intentions, but little strategy,” said Nguyen Huu Thang, the vice-director of social welfare and disaster for the Vietnam Red Cross (one of two groups nationwide authorized to receive disaster relief donations) which has collaborated with Buddhist temples organizing relief trips. Temples’ lack of formal training in humanitarian response can lead to “confusion or chaos” if relief groups deliver goods haphazardly without coordinating with local officials, said Thang.

But the leader of Quan Dinh temple on the outskirts of Hanoi, who goes by her Buddhist `dharma’ name (given during an initiation ceremony), Sister Peaceful Light, told IRIN the temple always goes through an official structure, whether it is Vietnam Red Cross or provincial authorities.

Pagoda leaders in or close to disaster-stricken areas often meet and guide arriving groups on hikes or by canoe to provincial authorities, who then direct them to villages most in need.

Thang said Buddhist temples were more active in organizing disaster responses than other religious groups.

In a country where more than half the population declares itself Buddhist, the network is wide - some 25,000 temples staffed with monks or nuns nationwide as of five years ago - Vietnam’s Buddhist Association reported to international media.

But the count then, and now, is only approximate. “Not all temples are registered with us. Some villages put joss sticks in an urn with rice and have a nun that visits occasionally. Is that a temple? Perhaps, but not known to us,” said an association staff member.

Tracking informal giving

“Why do you need to know how much we gave? Is it not enough that we did?” asked the nun overseeing one of the most well-known Buddhist pagodas in the central city of Hue, Tay Linh temple, who goes by the name of Sister True Compassion.

Buddhist temples file annual reports with the national Vietnamese Buddhist Association which lists donation amounts and how the money was spent: Surviving families of canoes which sank; children in a leper colony; cancer patient’s home visit. And in late 2011 when storms battered the southern tip of Vietnam, killing an estimated 85 and forcing another 13,000 families from their homes, Tay Linh temple’s disaster relief activities filled almost an entire page.

In 2011, the temple’s charity board, which Sister True Compassion heads alongside her position as vice-director of the regional charity board representing all Buddhist temples in Hue, calculated it gave some US$24,000 to communities hit by disaster.

When IRIN asked the national Buddhist association for a breakdown of how much money from overseas was sent to Buddhist temples in Vietnam, and how much money was donated to disaster relief efforts, officials said they had not formally analysed giving or disaster relief activities.

Not an uncommon response, noted local NGO Vietnam Asia Pacific Economic Centre, which published a study in 2011, with support from Asia Foundation, on philanthropic giving in Vietnam. The study noted that while in recent decades there has been “substantial individual giving... to alleviate the suffering of others particularly in times of disaster,” there has not been “systematic research or reports on giving patterns”.

Based on interviews with 200 households and 100 businesses nationwide, the NGO learned that “informal channels” - including pagodas, churches and community groups - received most charitable giving, while “official channels”- corporate organizations and funds for the poor - received but a fraction (27 percent in urban areas, 9.4 percent in rural ones).

“We do not work like formal organizations. Please do not call me a leader of anything,” said Sister True Compassion. “We are only trying to alleviate suffering and build compassion. That is all.”

View the original article here

Dalai Lama hails secularism practised in India

Home Asia Pacific South Asia India

Patna, India -- Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama Saturday praised secularism practised in India and emphasised that the message of peaceful existence of different religions in the country should be taken all over the world.

"India is a symbol of secularism. It shows how different religions coexist in harmony in the country," the Noble laureate said in his inaugural speech at the International Buddhist Sangh Conference.

The Tibetan monk praised Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar for promoting Buddhism and also for development in the state.

"Bihar is moving ahead under dynamic leadership of Nitish Kumar," he said and thanked him for initiatives for promoting Buddhism.

He referred to establishment of new Nalanda university and converting old jail building into a Buddha Smriti park to drive home his point.

The Dalai Lama stressed on mental peace along with scientific development. He also stressed on converting Buddhist stupas and libraries besides places of religion as a seat of learning.

The Tibetan leader also spoke against change of religion and appealed to people to spread goodness of ones religion to the world.

The three-day Buddhist conference which started on Saturday is being attended by over 200 delegates from 17 countries including the US, UK, France, Japan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Mynamar, Nepal and Bangladesh in addition to India.

Welcoming the delegates, the chief minister said that his government was trying to move ahead in accordance with the teachings of Lord Buddha that power should not come into ones head.

He said besides the Centre, the state government has also decided to excavate sites related to Buddhism which is not known to the world so far.

The Bihar CM said the state government has taken steps for developing Buddhist circuit to attract visitors, including those from around the world.

He said Bihar has derived its name from the Buddhist viharas and the state would work hard to live upto this.

Kumar thanked the Dalai Lama for his love and affection for Bihar and sought his constant guidance for strengthening peace and harmony in the state.

Kumar said Buddhism precepts were still relevant in the contemporary world and stressed on spreading the message of Buddha.

Deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi said Patliputra (ancient name of Patna) was capital of King Ashoka and the city would do everything to maintain its past glory.

The Buddhist meet was hosted by Bodh Gaya Temple Management Committee with the assistance of state government's Art and culture department.

Minister for art and culture Sukhda Pandey said that the state government was taking effective steps to preserve and conserve everything related to Buddhism, which has its origin in Bihar.

The meet at the Buddha Smriti park began with utterance of Buddhist hymns and key note addressed by senior monks -- Ven Somdet Prawannarat from Thailand, Khinin Da Thar Sayadaw from Myanmar and Ryojun Sato from Japan.

View the original article here

Social media guidelines for so-called Vajrayana students

Home Dharma Dew

Timphu, Bhutan -- If you think or believe that you are a student of Vajrayana - whether or not that’s true is another matter - but as long as you think you are a Vajrayana practitioner, it becomes your responsibility to protect this profound tradition.

It’s important to maintain secrecy in the Vajrayana. The Vajrayana is called ‘the secret mantra yana’ because it is intended to be practiced in secrecy. It is not secret because there is something to hide, but in order to protect the practitioner from the pitfalls and downfalls that ego can bring to the practice.

In particular, practitioners tend to fall prey to “spiritual materialism,” where their practice becomes just another fashion statement intended to adorn their egos and make them feel important, or have them feel that they’re part of a ‘cool’ social tribe, rather than to tame and transform their minds. When practiced in this way, the Vajrayana path becomes worse than useless.

Also, the Vajrayana teachings are ‘hidden’ in the sense that their meaning is not apparent to someone who has not received the appropriate teachings. It’s like a foreign language. Because some of the imagery and symbolism can seem strange or even violent to the uninitiated, it’s generally recommended to keep it hidden so that it doesn’t put off newer practitioners, who might develop wrong views about the Buddhist path in general and the Vajrayana path in particular.

While posting on social media, please bear in mind that you are not only posting for your own reading pleasure, but to the whole wide world who most likely don’t share your amusement over crazy photos, nor your peculiar adoration and fantasies of certain personalities you call as guru.

Given this, here are some suggestions I offer fellow so-called Vajrayana students about how you can protect yourself - both by avoiding embarrassment and by protecting your Dharma practice—and also protect the profound Vajrayana tradition:

(1) Maintain the secrecy of the Vajrayana (this includes secrecy about your guru, your practice, tantric images, empowerments you have received, teachings you have attended, etc.)

- Don’t post tantric images: If you think posting provocative tantric images (such as images of deities with multiple arms, animal heads, those in union, and wrathful deities) makes you important, you probably don’t understand their meaning.

- Don’t post mantras and seed syllables: If you think mantras and seed syllables should be posted on Facebook as mood enhancement and self-improvement aids, a makeover or haircut might do a better job.

- Don’t talk about your empowerments: If you think images from your weekend Vajrayana empowerment are worthy of being posted up next to photos of your cat on Facebook, you should send your cat to Nepal for enthronement. Unless you have obtained permission from the teacher, do not post any photo, video or audiorecording of Vajrayana empowerments, teachings or mantras.

- Don’t talk about profound/secret teachings you may have received: Some people seem to find it fashionable to hang words like “Dzogchen” and “Mahamudra” in their mouths. If you have received profound instructions, it is good to follow those instructions and keep them to yourself.

(2) Avoid giving in to the temptations of spiritual materialism and using Dharma in service of your ego (do not attempt to show off about your guru, your understanding, your practice etc. Likewise, do not speak badly of other practitioners or paths.)

- Don’t share your experiences and so-called attainments: If you think declaring what you think you have attained is worthwhile, you may have been busy bolstering your delusion. Trying to impress others with your practice is not part of the practice. Try to be genuine and humble. Nobody cares about your experiences in meditation, even if they include visions of buddhas, unicorns or rainbows. If you think you are free of self deception, go ahead, think again.

- Don’t boast about your guru: No matter how great you think your guru is, it would probably serve better for you to keep your devotion to yourself. Remember that being buddhist is not joining a cult. If you think your guru is better than another’s, you probably think your equanimity and pure perception are better than another’s.

- Don’t attempt to share your so-called wisdom: If you think receiving profound teachings gives you license to proclaim them, you will probably only display your ignorance. Before you “share” a quote from the Buddha or from any of your teachers, take a moment to think if they really said those words, and who the audience was meant to be.

- Don’t confuse Buddhism with non-Buddhist ideas: No matter how inspired you might be of rainbows and orbs, and how convinced you are about the end of the world, try not to mix your own fantasies/idiosyncracies with Buddhism.

- Be respectful to others: Without Theravada and Mahayana as foundation, there would be no Vajrayana. It would be completely foolish of Vajrayana practitioners to look down on or show disdain towards Theravada and Mahayana. If you think attacking other buddhists will improve Buddhism, do a service for Buddhism, take aim at your own ego and biasedness instead.

- Don’t create disharmony: Try to be the one who brings harmony into the sangha community with your online chatter, instead of trouble and disputes.

- Always be mindful of your motivation: Please do not attempt to display “crazy wisdom” behaviors online, just inspire others to have a good heart. If you think you are posting something out of compassion, try first to make sure you are doing no harm.

Whenever you can’t let go of the itch to post something, make sure that it helps whoever who reads it and the Dharma.

View the original article here

Questions of Faith: Knox Buddhism

Home The Americas US South

Knoxville, Tennessee -- (USA)Walking into the shrine room of Losel Shedrup Ling of Knoxville, a Tibetan Buddhist center, is something of a contradiction. It’s situated in a small, gray-colored building of professional suites on Kingston Pike.

<< Photo by Shawn Poynter
Mindfulness: Jim Conant chants during a sevice at the Losel Shedrup Ling Tibetan Buddhist Center.

But inside, the carpet covering the entire room is bright red, the altar at the end of the room is covered in symbolic offerings, the pillows up against the wall are jewel-toned, and the portraits of spiritual figures around the room are painted in all different colors. The space is quiet, and the two men in the room are calm, even though one is trying to soothe a fussy baby.

Jim Conant and Brian Carniello are board members of the Buddhist center, and are sitting quietly against the wall in chairs on the opposite end of the room from the altar. Essentially, that’s what Buddhism is about: finding a peaceful and enlightened state of mind.

Conant follows a Tibetan Buddhist tradition (as does the most famous Buddhist in the world, the Dalai Lama), which is the form of Buddhism on which the center was founded in 1993. Tibetan Buddhism is mostly practiced by people who live in Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, and North India, and to a lesser extent in Northeast China, Mongolia, and parts of Russia. Conant found a teacher who practiced Tibetan Buddhism, and discovered that practicing it worked well for him.

“I had a lot of emotional problems that I wasn’t able to deal with and I felt like I needed an answer,” says Conant, who grew up in a Christian household. “I was kind of open to exploring new things, and I came across Buddhism, and I was immediately attracted to it because of its emphasis on compassion and its very all-inclusive type of compassion. Nobody excluded. I just thought that it was right.”

Carniello, on the other hand, came to Buddhism just a couple of years ago after spending a lot of time in the Catholic church (and living for three years in Italy). He’s a professor at the University of Tennessee who studies European Medieval history, which is rooted in Catholicism. By way of a world civilization class he taught, he studied Buddhism more than he ever had before and decided the practices suited his life.

“The teachings themselves that I found useful were the idea of keeping life simple, to calm my mind in order to investigate all phenomena, including the phenomena of my own mind,” Carniello says.

Siddharta Gautama, the man whose teachings became Buddhism, is believed to have been born sometime between 411 and 400 B.C., and the most popular version of his biography refers to him as a Hindu prince kept sheltered in his palace by his father. When curiosity got the better of him, Conant explains, he left the palace to meet his subjects. As he met more and more people suffering and struggling, he became less interested in remaining in his palace, and left it to begin his life’s quest of seeking enlightenment.

The Buddha’s teachings spread throughout India, and up to Central Asia. It reached as far west as the Mediterranean Sea, and then east to China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. Each region practices its own traditions of Buddhism, which have inevitably evolved over time. But the goal is the same in each tradition: nirvana, or the state of highest happiness and enlightenment.

It’s said that the Buddha taught 84,000 different lessons that were directed at 84,000 states of mind people can have. Conant notes that some of the lessons contradict others. But, he says, each lesson was aimed at a unique quandary.

“They’re all tools to get you to a better state of mind. It’s like [there are] successive levels of understanding, and the ultimate level you’re shooting for is enlightenment, and that state is said to be totally nonconceptual, so at that point, there are no more concepts. They were sort of a way to get you to the goal, but once you’re at the goal, they’re no longer necessary.” Conant says.

When Carniello first came to the center, there was a lot he didn’t understand, like the Tibetan chants in which Conant participates. So Carniello continued to study the religion. He came across the website of a Buddhist teacher in Canada, whose teachings in the Theravada tradition of Buddhism appealed to him. Theravada Buddhism is thought to be the tradition originally practiced by the Buddha in southern India.

“Theravada emphasizes more the removing of obstacles, to see what’s beneath, to see what’s behind, to see what’s really there. It doesn’t emphasize as much rituals,” Carniello says. “[But] I think that Buddhism, rather than saying there’s a one-size-fits-all belief, would say that there are different views that can help different people with different points toward something that is spiritually beneficial.”

There’s also an inherent mysticism in Buddhism. Buddhists generally believe in karma, which is good energy accumulated over every lifetime that can either promote a soul to a better realm or demote it to a lower realm when the soul is reincarnated. Carniello says Buddhists believe there are heavenly realms and hellish realms, much like the Christian concepts of heaven and hell.

“It sounds totally bizarre,” Conant admits. “I was against the supernatural at first, but I found that being open and accepting is easier than fully rejecting it. I don’t fully believe it in my heart, but I’m open to it.”

Carniello agrees and says considering beliefs that he doesn’t necessarily agree with 100 percent allows him to develop more compassion towards others and their beliefs and expand his own spiritual experience. “Even just thinking in these terms, you don’t actually have to believe in them strictly,” he says, pointing out the find-what-works nature of the religion. Meditation also plays a role in Conant’s practice of Buddhism, though he says it’s not at all about emptying the mind and sitting stock-still for hours on end all the time.

“In different Buddhist traditions there’s a different emphasis on how much you want the thoughts to disappear sort of naturally over time,” Conant says. “You can go to very deep absorption states where you’re concentrating on the tip of your nose, and that’s essentially the only sensation in your consciousness, the sensation of the breath on your nose. In the Tibetan tradition, you’re very open to the outside world, you’re very open to the environment, you’re very open to sensations. And the thing is, you want them to pass through your consciousness without attaching to them, without grabbing them, so just letting them arise naturally and then disappear.”

But the main day-to-day application of this goal to reach enlightenment is simply mindfulness.

“Buddhism is all about mind training and controlling your mind. When I can remember to be mindful throughout the day, I’m applying it. I’ve already noticed a change in the many years I’ve been practicing Buddhism. Things don’t bother me as much,” Conant says.

Carniello points out that Buddhism doesn’t encourage repression of feelings, it teaches to let these negative emotions flow right through the consciousness, acknowledging they’re bad for your state of mind.

And perhaps it’s that sense of peace and acceptance that appeals to others, even if they’re not Buddhists.

“There’s actually a general level of respect toward Buddhism. It’s a religion that has a very positive public perception,” Conant says.

Carniello, too, has had few run-ins with anyone who had a problem with his beliefs. “With a few exceptions, my experience in Knoxville has been positive,” he says.

Like pretty much every other religion, Buddhists say prayers and listen to sermons. Conant goes to the shrine room on Sundays to say prayers and listen to a recorded lesson since the center doesn’t have an official teacher at the moment. There have been leaders, called geshes, at the center intermittently, and the board is currently looking for another geshe to teach Tibetan Buddhist practices. But unlike Christian prayers, which usually involve asking for specific things, Conant says Buddhist prayers simply ask for the Buddha’s blessings.

“You’re asking for his blessing and he sort of radiates it toward you,” Conant says.

At the end of what’s called the Seven Branch prayer, Conant says, it states “Everything I’ve done here, may it go toward all sentient beings,” which dedicates the merit or karma one acquires during the prayer to all living beings in the world.

Both Conant and Carniello say that people of any religion can apply Buddhism or Buddhist practices to their lives.

“We have several people here who consider themselves Christians, or part Christian, part Buddhist,” Conant says. “There’s nothing in Buddhism that says you can’t also follow another religion. That doesn’t mean you can’t also respect teachings from another tradition. A lot of Buddhist techniques, like meditation—and there’s lots of other techniques for dealing with emotions ... are useful to everybody, not just Buddhists.”

“There is absolutely no reason within Buddhism...to disrespect anyone’s beliefs. You hope it brings them happiness and are actually appreciative of whatever happiness they’ve achieved,” Carniello adds.

Conant boils the religion down to this: “It’s about how to deal with the world more skillfully.”

View the original article here

A Buddhist ruin

Home Asia Pacific South East Asia Cambodia

Siem Reap, Cambodia -- Ta Prohm is the modern name for one of the temples of Angkor, Cambodia. Built in the Bayon style, largely in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, it was founded by the Khmer King Jayavarman VII as a Mahayana Buddhist monastery and university and was originally called Rajavihara.

The temple got swallowed up by the jungle and remained forgotten till it was discovered again in the 19th century.

This most romantic of Angkor temples, it is a double-moated royal monastery that Jayavarman VII dedicated to his mother in the form of Prajnaparamita, the female form of Avalokiteshvara (Prajnaparamita symbolises Wisdom, as Avalokiteshvara symbolises Compassion).

Unlike most Angkorian temples, Ta Prohm has been left in almost the same condition in which it was found. The atmospheric combination of trees growing out of, and over, the ruins and the jungle surroundings make it one of Angkor’s most photogenic temples.

There are many things that one can see at Ta Prohm - from great trees tower and delicately carved reliefs on the walls to moss and creeping plants.

Another popular site is the “Tomb Raider tree” in the central sanctuary, where Angelina Jolie picked a jasmine flower and was sucked beneath the earth.

View the original article here

Katina Pinkama at the Berlin Vihara

Home Europe

Berlin, Germany -- A Katina Pinkama was held at Das Buddhistische Haus (Berlin Vihara) on November 4, 2012 and in the preceding Vassa period special Dhamma activities including Dhamma discussions, lectures, meditation classes and retreats were conducted at the Berlin Vihara.

The participants at this Kathina Pinkama included Germans, Thais and Sri Lankans, among others. The programme for the day comprised a Buddha Puja, Sangha Dana and Kathina Chivara Puja.

Nine Buddhist Monks participated in the Katina ceremony. They were – Ven. Dr. Wijayarajapura Seelawansa Nayaka Thera (Nyanaponika Dhammazentrum Lecturer, Vienna University, Austria), Ven.Godauda Ariyadhamma Thera from Sri Lanka, Ven. Dodampahala Rahula from Sri Lanka, Ven. Pujapitiye Santhusitha Thera from Sri Lanka, Bhante Anusak from Thailand, Ven.Lediyangala Sudassi Thera (Chief Incumbent Sri Lanka Vihara, St. Gallen, Switzerland), Ven. Thalpawila Kusalagnana Thera, M.A. (Hamburg Buddhist Centre, Germany) , Ven. Kongaspitiye Santharakkhltha Thera, M.A., Das Buddhistische Haus (Berlin Vihara), and Ven . Badalkubure Dhammasiri Thera (Buddhist Temple, Milan, Italy)

The Berlin Vihara also known as ‘Das Buddhistische Haus’ was built in 1924 by Dr. Paul Dahlke, German Philosopher and a pioneer of Buddhism in Germany. The German Dharmaduta Society founded by Asoka Weeraratna in 1952, purchased the premises from the heirs of Dr. Dahlke in 1957 and converted it into a Buddhist Vihara with resident Buddhist monks on a long term footing. It is the oldest Theravada Buddhist Centre in Europe.

View the original article here