We should point out that you’re a friend of the Dalai Lama and your new book is called “Why the Dalai Lama Matters.” Does he ever visit you at your apartment in Manhattan?
He used to come to my house in the old days, but nowadays the State Department is all over him, so he stays in a high-security hotel. I get a handshake and a hug in the hall.
Questions for Robert Thurman – Deborah Solomon – Interview – NYTimes.com
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Buddhism 101: Some basic concepts | pnj.com | Pensacola News Journal
The mainly Vietnamese congregants at Dieu De Temple in Pensacola practice a form of Buddhism called Pure Land Buddhism — a branch stressing that all sentient beings possess the Buddha nature and are capable of becoming Buddhas themselves.Buddhists are quick to point out that Buddha was not a god. They believe others can be awakened — essentially becoming Buddhas themselves — by following the Dharma, a complex term that laymen would best understand as Buddha’s teachings.
A look at the relationship of Buddhists to the environment through the lens of the sutras.
In the vision of universal interpenetration, one of the Mahayana flowers of the Buddha’s teaching of Conditioned Co-production (pratitya samutpada), we have a basic insight into our relationship with nature.
A former teen mom rings in with commentary about the teen pregnancy pact…
June 27, 2008 | In 1992, the closest thing my daughter had to a father was my best friend, Alice Moore. Alice and I met as 15-year-old debate partners in Boise, Idaho. When we were both 18, we moved 3,000 miles across the country to start our freshman year at Wesleyan University together, along with my then 2-year-old daughter, Sydney, whom Alice had known since she was only a few days old. The three of us shared an apartment together in Seattle over summer vacation when Alice and I were 20; after college, we moved to San Francisco and, along with Alice’s then-boyfriend, split the rent on an apartment in the Richmond district for another two and a half years. Today, Sydney and I live in Brooklyn, N.Y.; Alice is a couple hours away in New Haven, Conn.Alice was the first person I thought of when I heard the news of the so-called pregnancy pact at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, a story that has been grabbing headlines this week from here to Brazil. …
By Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh (From the book Interbeing)1. Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth. …
Tassajara dates back to the days when Suzuki Roshi was abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. It lives in the hearts of thousands of practitioners.
Sitting with fire
News about the wildfires threatening Tassajara [Zen Center] and other helpful stuff for the dispersed workers.
Ruling Favors Breakaway Congregations in Va. Suit – washingtonpost.com
Eleven Virginia congregations whose members voted to leave the Episcopal Church in late 2006 and early 2007 have remained in the church buildings since, arguing that a Civil War-era state law allows them to keep the property worth tens of millions of dollars.
The Episcopal Church and the Diocese of Virginia argued that the state law is unconstitutional, that the government should not be involved in deciding when a religious organization has legally “divided” and that internal church laws and practices should govern such a spat.
But Circuit Court Judge Randy Bellows ruled today in favor of the breakaway congregations, saying the diocese could have used routine civil documents to protect its property, but didn’t. The law has been around for 141 years and “did not parachute into this dispute from a clear blue sky,” Bellows wrote….
Will Buckingham comments on the issue of there perhaps being more to the “lower animals” than we would prefer to believe.
…The implications of this are rather far reaching, however; because whilst granting pain to animals implies a certain basic level of moral concern, to see animals as capable of more complex pleasures is to permit the possibility of an intrinsic value to animal life that goes beyond the instrumentality that underpins a lot of our practices, and it forces us to start to think about animals as individuals rather than just as species. What if the pig we are tucking into (or the fish, for that matter) is not just one member of the class of objects denoted by the word ‘pig’, but a creature with an inner life, with its interests and pleasures and with its own sense of the value of life?
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Shravasti Dhammika writes:
New age is a term that became current in the 1980’s to describe a nebulous, pseudo-religious set of beliefs that grew out of the Western counterculture of the 1960’s. The term alludes to the belief at that time that a new spiritual age, the so-called ‘Age of Aquarius,’ was about to dawn. Despite the fact that some Buddhist concepts and practises have been incorporated into new age spirituality, Buddhism and the new age movement have little in common.
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Retired billionaire businessman Robert Hung-Ngai Ho, who now makes his home in Vancouver, has gifted $5 million for Buddhist studies to Stanford University
With matching funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the center will use the gift to expand and strengthen Stanford’s internationally recognized Buddhist studies program through enhanced support for faculty and student research, visiting fellows, curriculum development and academic and public events.
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Via Barbara’s Buddhism Blog comes an article from Geoffrey York of the Toronto Globe and Mail:
Lhasa’s monks all but vanish in Chinese crackdown
For two days, the Buddhist pilgrims had been pushed to the sidelines to make room for the Olympic torch relay in Lhasa. The traditional pilgrimage route at the Potala Palace was unceremoniously shut down, in one of many security measures by Chinese authorities, even though a month-long Buddhist festival has drawn thousands of pilgrims to the Tibetan capital.
But as the pilgrims returned, a mystery remained: Where are Lhasa’s monks? A visit yesterday to the Sera monastery, the second-biggest Buddhist monastery in Tibet, found that its 550 monks had virtually disappeared from sight. Most buildings and outdoor areas at the monastery were nearly empty, and only about 10 monks could be seen. …
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Environment News Service reports that Kenya is about to allow the destruction of a huge bio-reservoir to produce biofuel. We know that Kenya is one of the most needy countries in the world, but how much of the gelt from that destruction do you think the poor folks of Kenya will enjoy? Ummmm?
NAIROBI, Kenya, June 26, 2008 (ENS) - Kenya’s Tana River Delta, inhabited by 350 species of birds, lions, elephants, rare sharks and reptiles, is about to be converted to sugar cane production over the objections of conservationists and local communities. The Kenyan government has approved a proposal by a publicly traded company based in Nairobi to covert 2,000 square kilometers of the pristine delta into irrigated sugarcane plantations.
SUGAR FOR
BIOFUEL TO DISPLACE KENYA’S TANA DELTA WILDLIFE
There are some places that have presence. Glastonbury Tor is one of them — and I’m not even a believer — in much of anything. Read on…
The Smart Set: Let the Sunshine In – June 20, 2008
The strangeness starts with the Steven King fog — or, more accurately, with the cackling scarecrow demons that live in the fog. To get to Glastonbury Tor in time for the summer solstice sunrise, I leave London at midnight. Halfway there I’m gazing at the swirling Hammer Horror-movie mist with childlike wonder. I allow myself to hallucinate scythe-wielding straw men racing alongside me, through the twisting and rolling, silvery moonlit high-hedged English West Country lanes. It is horribly easy. And the closer to Glastonbury I get, the easier it becomes.
There are many opinions about the direction and force of religion in the US. I’ve seen any number of folks using all sorts of statistics to make all sorts of points, usually in the favor of one and to the detriment of another religions slant (I include Atheism in that, because a 180° turn still leaves you in the same old rut). The Pew Forum is as close to an unbiased view as we’re likely to find.
There will, of course, be some who disagree with that statement because Pew’s findings disagree with what they want to believe. Whatever.
Religion in American Culture — Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Based on interviews with more than 35,000 American adults, this extensive survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious makeup, religious beliefs and practices as well as social and political attitudes of the American public. This online section includes dynamic tools that complement the full report. For a video overview and related material, go to the resource page.
