Posted by Emily Breder, Buddhism Examiner
Social media has become a hotbed on which the Buddhist sangha has flourished. On Twitter and various other social networking sites, Buddhists have been signing on in droves to participate in the conversation. As we open our hearts and minds in the 21st century (along with our Macs and PCs), let’s review some favorites from Twitter. This may become a monthly feature on Examiner.
The Jade Buddha for Universal Peace, the largest Buddha carved from gemstone quality jade in the world, begins touring North America on Sunday. The Jade Buddha is 2.7 metres high (almost 9 feet) and sits on an alabaster throne. The Jade Buddha itself weighs around 4 tonnes and has been valued at $5 million. Read More
International Buddhist Education Foundation tops $1.1 million in scholarships with major donation
ROSEMEAD, Calif., January 27, 2010: University of the West, the only accredited Buddhist campus in Los Angeles County, will host the International Buddhist Education Foundation Scholarship Ceremony at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2010 in Exhibition Hall.
“This will be a great occasion for students to meet and say thank you to the donors who have sponsored and supported our students at UWest,” said Grace Hsiao, UWest’s Admissions Officer. Read More
From the Tibetan Nyingma Institute
Sponsor a prayer to benefit a cause close to your heart, or a larger wish for the peace and balance of the whole world.
On the morning of February 14th, 2010 members of our community will begin walking clockwise around (circumambulating) the Odiyan Stupa in Northern California with your requests in hand, praying for positive fulfillment of your wishes. Read More
Sylvia Boorstein is one of the world’s most esteemed teachers of Buddhist wisdom and practice. In an exclusive online retreat with Spiritualityandpractice.com, she offers a summation of her years as a preeminent teacher of lovingkindness.
Lovingkindness is called metta in Pali, the original language of the Buddha. Metta is a derivative of the word for “friend.”
“Although metta has often be translated into English as lovingkindness,” Sylvia says, “I like thinking of it as a friendliness practice, the cultivation of a mind that is so saturated with good will that it responds uniformly to all situations with benevolence.” Read More
Quite a bit, say Laura Joman Martin and husband Patrick Bonsho Green of the Zen Community of Oregon. They’re leading a workshop on dharma and debt on February 6 in Portland. In a recent interview in the Oregonian, they talk about the importance of being mindful of spending. “We are bathed in a society where minds are filled with the message that a product can bring us contentment, that these things are the way to happiness. A teaching like the one Saturday is giving people the tools to sit still and look inside. How far you want to take it, how deeply you would like to incorporate it into your life, is up to you.”
Rangjung Yeshe Gomde, a rugged and beautiful Buddhist retreat center in Leggett, California, has an immediate need for a full-time residential land manager with experience in construction trades and environmental management. Project management and experience with building codes and permits also desirable. Basic plumbing and carpentry skills required. Read More
His Holiness the 17th Karmapa recently presided over the 27th Kagyu Monlam in Bodhgaya, India. The Kagyu Monlam is a traditional prayer ceremony of the Tibetan Kagyu lineage dating back hundreds of years. It was reestablished by Kalu Rinpoche in 1983. Every year thousands of monks and nuns and pilgrims from around the world attend the weeklong ceremony. You can view a beautiful slide show of the event, along with stories about it, on the Kagyu Monlam blog.
The Tibet Fund, PeaceJam and others invite you to join Thank You Tibet! — a campaign to send messages to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan people to thank them for preserving and sharing their culture of wisdom and compassion and for inspiring the world to work for peace.
Create a message in any medium—video, music, visual art, photography, and/or text—to express the ways that Tibetan Buddhism and culture have inspired you and changed your life. Messages will be presented during a special program with Nobel Peace laureates Jody Williams and Shirin Ebadi, and Philip Glass, Robert Thurman, Michael Imperioli, Bobby McFerrin, and Tibetan performers at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City on March 4, 2010. Messages will also be given to H.H. the Dalai Lama and leaders of the Tibetan exile community at a later date. Read More
Talks between China and Tibet resumed this week. It was the first time since talks had broken off in November 2008. The Dalai Lama’s special envoy Lodi Gyari led the delegation. While the resumption of talks is an important step forward, a BBC report suggests it’s unlikely to have resulted in any real progress toward resolving the conflict.
Thich Nhat Hanh has issued a new statement regarding the situation of monastics at Bat Nha Monastery in Vietnam’s central highlands. Last September 400 monastics were driven out of the monastery during a government crackdown and the monastery was vandalized. In his statement, Thich Nhat Hanh offers a teaching on koans, which you can read here. For more on this story, go to SunSpace.
The Rev. Danny Fisher rounds up the world Buddhist news on the Sun Space blog. Read the latest entry here.
From the Konchok Foundation
Konchok Foundation has two new photos of the 12th Trungpa Rinpoche, recently taken this past September 2009 at Surmang. (He is now 20 years old!) Please go to http://www.konchok.org/trungpa.html to see these photos. We will give a 4×6 copy of the close-up photo as a complimentary gift to any donor to Konchok Foundation. Read More
From Lee Weingrad of the Surmang Foundation
“Children of Light” is a short video documenting the work of the Surmang Foundation in building schools in some of the poorest villages in Tibet. Prior to the Modi School Project, children sat on tree stumps in poorly constructed schools with mud walls. The video shows the dramatic transformation to a real schoolhouse, where kids also receive public health education. You can view the short doc as a beta streaming video at http://www.surmang.org/media/light.html.
Buddhist Geeks interviews Rev. Jiun Foster, a Zen priest and teacher actively involved in pioneering the teaching of the dharma in the virtual world of Second Life. Vince Horn speaks with him about what it’s like being a participant in Second Life (where his name is Jiun Bodenhall), and what the limitations and strengths of Second Life are, compared to other social media technologies. Listen to the podcast.
Great Cloud Zen Center, a Five Mountain Zen Sangha in the lineage of Seung Sahn, has opened the doors to its new Zendo in Cincinnati, Ohio. Great Cloud is led by Rev. Jiun Foster, and hosts weekly meditation, chanting, and koan interviews as well as monthly day-long mini-retreats.
For dates, times, and more information, please visit http://cincinnatizen.org
From the Peacemaker Institute
In the tradition of the Peacemakers Bearing Witness Retreat at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, we will conduct a five-day retreat, bearing witness to the horror and tragic impact of the 1994 Rwandan genocide as well as the current state of healing and reconciliation efforts in Rwanda. Grounded in our Three Peacemaker Tenets – not knowing, bearing witness and loving action – the retreat will offer Rwandans of all backgrounds and visitors from other countries new means for bearing witness to the realities and aftermath of genocide in ways that lead to healing, reconciliation, community-building and ultimately genocide and violence prevention. Read More
The Buddha, a film by David Grubin, premieres April 7, 2010 at 8 p.m. EST on PBS stations nationwide. The film, according to PBS, is a two-hour documentary by award-winning filmmaker David Grubin. The story will be narrated by Richard Gere, and tells the story of the Buddha’s life, a journey especially relevant to our own bewildering times of violent change and spiritual confusion. Read More
From UrbanDharma’s review of Can God Intervene? How Religion Explains Natural Disasters by Gary Stern
This first book of an award-winning journalist pursues the explicitly theological question announced in the title. Motivated by the tsunami of December 2004 and the experience of hurricane Katrina the following year, the bulk of the volume–nine of the eleven chapters–is devoted to representing the spectrum of theological and religious views regarding what philosophers call “natural evil” in Judaism, Roman Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, Evangelicalism, African-American Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and what Stern calls “The Nonbeliever’s Perspective,” which includes secular humanists, agnostics, and atheists. Read the full review.
From Carl Castro
Dear Noble Shambhala Sangha,
I wanted to share with you an email that I sent first to several Ripa sangha friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, and copied to several close Shambhala friends who attended the Royal Wedding of The Sakyong and The Sakyong Wangmo in February 2007 at the site of His Eminence Namkha Drimed Rinpoche’s new monastery, Rigon Thupten Mindrolling, in Jeerang, Orissa, India.
As most of you may well know, this monastery is currently being inaugurated by none other than His Holiness The XIV Dalai Lama, with The Sakyong Wangmo in attendance, along with the Ripa family. Alas, I’m not there!
But while feeling some longing, I came across a humorous photo from the monastery on the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Day in Pictures” webpage! Through this, I was able to find more photos of the event by an Associated Press (AP) photographer in attendance, Mr. Anupam Rath. These include photos of His Eminence with His Holiness, and of our Sakyong Wangmo and her sisters, the Ripa Semos.
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama will make his first visit to Palm Beach County, Florida. He will be present on Wednesday, February 24, visiting Florida Atlantic University (FAU) for a public lecture titled “Compassion as a Pillar of World Peace.” His Holiness will address FAU’s students, faculty, staff and members of the general community, beginning at 10 a.m. in the FAU arena. The event is one of four events His Holiness will make when he visits South Florida.
“Bad news for Buddhists and others seeking enlightenment: the Bodhi Tree Bookstore is closing. Owners Phil Thompson and Stan Madson informed their staff last Wednesday that the cozy Melrose Avenue shop, a nationally renowned and much beloved spiritual center, will be shutting its doors in a year’s time.” Read the full story at LAWeekly.
The Telegraph reports that, “In what is being described as a ground-breaking school curriculum addition, the school’s pupils aged 14 and 15 are taking part in the courses designed by Oxford and Cambridge psychologists.
The school’s year 10 pupils’ “mindfulness” course, which will last for two months, is said to be one of the first in the country, which was designed to develop skills in concentration and to combat anxiety.” Read the article.
During the September retreat at Crestone, CO, Thrangu Rinpoche spoke about the importance of building and supporting sacred Buddhist centers and shrines. He compared our own brief lifetimes with the ability of these sacred places to last, inspiring beings for hundred of years in the future. Read More
The Hindu reports from Ahmedabad, January 10, 2010: “Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama, his successor Gyalwang Karmapa along with other lamas and scholars will attend a three-day International conference on ‘Buddhist Heritage’ organised by Gujarat government from January 15 -17 at M. S. University, Vadodara.” Read the entire story here.
Read the latest Buddhist news rundown from Rev. Danny Fisher on the SunSpace blog.
From Lotus Speech Canada: Trevor Jones (T.J.), president of the board, interviews Changling Rinpoche (C.R.). Lotus Speech Canada is sponsoring the visit of Dilgo Khyentse Yangsi Rinpoche to Vancouver in August 2010. Rinpoche talks about his teacher Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, the qualities of his successor Yangsi Rinpoche, and his upcoming tour of North America.
T.J. I am here today with Changling Rinpoche. Rinpoche is fresh off the plane from Kathmandu, Nepal, from Shechen Monastery there. We are talking about the upcoming visit in a year or so by Dilgo Khyentse Yangsi Rinpoche. Rinpoche, can you tell us what the purpose of this tour is? Read More
To the Noble Sangha:
For a January, 2010, update on the work of the Shambhala Prison Community, please click on the following URL:
http://www.shambhalaprisoncommunity.org/update.html
Donations of whatever size are, as always, greatly appreciated. With $15,000 in 2010, we could do a lot of good work in the criminal justice systems. We have no central office function, and virtually every dollar raised goes to pay the expenses of volunteers. Read More
It was only a matter of time before digital gadgets like Apple’s iPhone began playing the role of meditation instructors. From the device’s launch, countless apps have tried to make it easier, or appealing, for users to keep their mobiles phones turned on as time keepers or personal meditation instructors.
Latest to the fray is Mayo Clinic Meditation Application (iTunes link) for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch priced at $4.99. Based on a DVD program created by Dr. Amit Sood of the Mayo Clinic, the application boasts a meditation instruction video and visual guide to guide users through a meditation session lasting 5 or 15 minutes. The app promises to “help you feel more focused and relaxed throughout your day.”
