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Thursday, January 3, 2013

Not Quite Nirvana: A Skeptic's Journey

Bill Williams (HartfordFAVS.com); Rachel Neumann (notquitenirvana.com); KPFK
Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: "Seek in the present moment" (Not Quite Nirvana).
 
Not Quite Nirvana is Rachel Neumann’s folksy account of her gradual embrace of Buddhist teachings, along with anecdotes of her dealings with Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh, the famous Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and peace activist.
One of her greatest challenges was learning to accept the truth of aging and death. Like many people, she lived with the illusion that aging, illness, and death are events that happen to other people.
 
“Then, within a few months of turning 40, I got in a bad bicycle accident and tore up my shoulder,” she writes. “I got robbed, got pneumonia, got mostly better, cracked a rib… got bronchitis… got shingles, and lost a relatively young friend to lung cancer. Not only that, but every bone and muscle in my body felt like it had stopped working properly.”
 
Neumann now believes that “death stays mostly hidden in U.S. society....Perhaps if death [were] as acknowledged and visible as birth, awareness and acceptance of it would become more commonplace.”

Author, center, with daughters (dieselbookstore.com)
Thich Nhat Hanh often writes and speaks about “no birth, no death,” meaning that we existed in our parents and prior generations long before we were born, and will continue to exist in our children and in the many people we have influenced while alive.
 
When Neumann began work at Parallax Press in Berkeley, California, she was told that the staff gathered to meditate for 15 minutes at the start of each workday. She found the practice close to unbearable. “I would feel myself getting older, wasting my life just sitting there like a blob,” she writes in her light-hearted style.
 
But she gradually saw the value of stopping and meditating. She and her husband began pausing before dinner with their daughters, Plum, age 4, and Luna, age 9, for a brief meditation. More

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble:   On Behalf of Nature ON BEHALF OF NATURE - For her newest evening-length work, Meredith Monk offers a poetic meditation on the environment. Using her highly acclaimed 2012 composition Realm Variations for vocalists and instrumentalists as a point of departure, she employs...different musical realms.
 
Within this world, Monk evokes the Buddhist notion of the existence of different realm categories -- the idea of joining heaven [akasha-deva loka] and earth [manussa loka] by way of human beings.
 
Drawing additional inspiration from writers and researchers who have sounded the alarm on the precarious state of our global ecology, Monk and her acclaimed Vocal Ensemble create a liminal space where human, natural and spiritual elements are woven into a delicate whole, in order to illuminate the interconnection and interdependency of us all.
Back to Back Theatre:  Ganesh Versus the Third Reich
GANESH VERSUS THE THIRD REICH (Back to Back Theatre) is poignant, beautiful, disarming, and full of vulnerability and sly transparency.
 
The story begins with the [Indian] elephant-headed god Ganesh traveling through Nazi Germany to reclaim the swastika, an ancient Vedic/Hindu symbol. As this intrepid hero embarks on his journey a second narrative is revealed: the actors themselves begin to feel the weighty responsibility of storytellers and question the ethics of cultural appropriation. 
 
Cleverly interwoven in the play’s design is the story of a young man inspired to create a play about Ganesh, "the god of overcoming obstacles."

Buddhism before Theravada (audio)

John Peacock (audiodharma.org)  "Buddhism Before the Theravada"; Wisdom Quarterly
(Auto_Mattic/flickr.com)

 
The Buddha did not teach in a vacuum. His teachings were directed to those who shared the social world in which he lived. 

John Peacock, a British scholar who studies and translates in more than a dozen languages and is familiar with the philosophical environment of the Buddha’s day, maintains that by framing the Buddha’s teachings in their original context, it is possible to RECOVER the original meaning of teachings that have been ignored and lost by later Buddhist schools -- including the Theravada.
  • Thera + vada = "Elders' Teaching" or "The Teaching of the Elders." Who are these "elders"? They are the immediate enlightened monastic disciples of the Buddha, the monks (theras) and nuns (theris) of ancient India.
These talks examine many of the ways in which Buddhist practice was radically different from the Brahminical and Upanishadic thinking of the time and, indeed, how it differs in substantive ways from much present-day understanding of the Dharma. 

This exploration details the Buddha’s shift away from metaphysical thinking to a focus on internal experience and ethical activity. In the process there will be consideration of how the Buddha’s earliest teachings diverge from much of the Western philosophical tradition and often from what has become the traditional view of the Dharma today as well.
 
Part 1 John Peacock2011-09-031:36:43
Part 2 John Peacock2011-09-030:42:32
Part 3 John Peacock2011-09-031:53:13
Part 4 John Peacock2011-09-031:13:40
Part 5 John Peacock2011-09-041:16:31
Part 6 John Peacock2011-09-041:54:06

Pernyataan Khidmat dari True Buddha Foundation



TRUE BUDDHA FOUNDATION

Pernyataan Khidmat!

Menjawab dan Mengimbau Agar Satu Suara Mengecam dan Menyerang Kaum Amoral dalam Jaringan Global!

1 Januari 2013

Mengingat akhir-akhir ini "kaum amoral" di internet menyebarkan fitnah terhadap Mulacarya Zhenfo Zong Y.A. Dharmaraja Liansheng Sheng-yen Lu, serta di banyak tempat membuka blog pribadi, berulang-ulang memuat dalam jumlah besar artikel dan foto yang menghina Mahaguru Dharmaraja Liansheng dan Dharmaduta Zhenfozong; bahkan dengan berbagai cara, seperti menggunakan nama samaran atau identitas rekayasa, melakukan tanya jawab sendiri dan dengan sengaja menciptakan fenomena palsu untuk menyesatkan publik. Perbuatan jahat yang hampir tidak waras ini memang mengandung niat jahat untuk menyakiti, tanpa menghargai serta memutuskan jiwa kebijaksanaan manusia, dan merusak hati manusia!

Selama ini, Zhenfo Zong menghadapi berbagai macam fitnah yang mengandung niat jahat dan liputan yang tidak benar dengan prinsip "tiada pertengkaran", berulang kali memaafkan, bahkan menghadapi dengan sikap mengajar dengan mahir dan sabar; namun, kini, sekawanan kaum tidak bermoral di internet berulang kali menfitnah seperti ini, bahkan menghina Mulaguru Y.A. Dharmaraja Liansheng Sheng-yen Lu yang paling dihormati di Zhenfo Zong; kita sebagai siswa mana boleh lagi terus-menerus bersabar?!

Oleh karena itu, True Buddha Foundation mengimbau umat Zhenfo Zong di seluruh dunia untuk melindungi Mahaguru, menjawab dalam jaringan global! Serta satu suara mengecam keras kaum amoral internet yang menyebarluaskan, mengemukakan isu fitnah yang tidak benar, berikut ini adalah pernyataan khidmat dan peringatan dari TBF:

1. Harap segera hapus tulisan dan foto yang tidak benar dan dibuat-buat untuk menfitnah! Jangan sekali-kali melanggar hukum dengan taruhan jiwa, sehingga mencelakai orang lain maupun diri sendiri!

2. Berlandaskan kekuatan ikrar dari Vajra Dharmapala Tantrayana, TBF pasti akan menghukum kaum amoral di internet lewat jalur hukum tanpa ada satu pun yang bisa lolos sebagai wujud kedahsyatannya!

3. TBF akan mempertahankan hak menggugat lewat jalur hukum!

Demikian pemberitahuan khidmat ini khusus kami sampaikan.

Hormat kami,

True Buddha Foundation
30 Desember 2012