|
'THE BUDDHIST HOUR' RADIO BROADCAST
|
|
|
KNOX FM 87.6 Sundays 11:00am to 12:00pm |
|
|
Knox FM Radio Broadcast for 8 October 2000 Today’s Program is called: The sophistication factor of a person’s contributions to Charity The notion of lending a helping hand to others is part of our culture. But as we achieve our wish to spread ourselves to help more persons, and we are given donations of publications and given monies to assist the printing and postage of our publications, we have to let go some of our ideas that only money spent on paper based publications is valid. We need to be careful of what we ask for, because now we see clearly we have become step by step a distance educator using our seven Internet sites rather than just an educator who took 20 years to deliver about the equivalent of one million pages of A4 printed paper to many persons or organisations. Yet over about nine months from our first website, visitors downloaded the equivalent of three quarters of a million pages of A4 material. Somehow, we had become cost effective by using a sophistication factor that we had not been able to predict when we began carrying out our distance education and community service. The degree of our success may be judged by the fact we received an e-mail from Sydney asking if we knew the address of any Buddhist Centres in the Olympic city. We could reply within one day giving a recommended address. When we look at ourselves and what we wish for, often we think we are unable to envisage that we may be operating in a somewhat closed frame of reference. We did not predict that interstate trade between our Centre would rise to this micro level despite partial success in an industrial sense because we operate at a macro level because we regularly post our printed publication to a hundred or more organisations in New South Wales. We have charitable registration status from the Gaming Commission of New South Wales. According to The Australian Year Book 1999, and citied in the Australian Bureau of Statistics Special Report, non-profit organisations including those registered as charitable, are an important part of the non-profit sector, which is the largest provider of community services. The Government recognises the special status of almost all non-profit associations by exempting them from income tax. Nonprofits in the community services field include organisations that in Australia are commonly called charities, such as the Smith Family, Mission Australia, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, World Vision and the Red Cross, but also many aged care providers, organisations providing services for people with disabilities, many child care providers and hundreds of small community organisations providing counselling and cash assistance to families in crisis, refuges to women escaping domestic violence and homeless people (ABS, 1999). We are able to grasp some of the micro and macro approaches to charity that are sponsored and implemented in official quarters. We must check if any deficiencies arise as we think more and more at the micro economic level. Sydney based Monks teach at our Centre when they visit Melbourne and our Teacher has received many requests to visit Sydney Temples and stay with the Monks and teach persons in New South Wales. Our Teacher has taught in New South Wales in the past and will do so in the future. Our planning for audiences for our programs is not merely quantitative, we include first through to forth generation distance education models. We accept that face to face is the ideal setting for teaching and learning. However, we do realise that it is not always possible for all J. D. Hughes’ students to be taught under the ideal face to face circumstances. This is because they reside in over 14 different countries around the world and are from various cultural, social and economic backgrounds. This sophistication factor requires thinking far beyond first order analysis. There are many interstate students who are sad our Teacher does not visit them and are not in a position to travel to our Centre in Melbourne. We would prefer that the causes for our Teacher to travel to Sydney, such as fundraising for airfares, be created in Sydney. This helps the students in Sydney make the merit required to meet with their teacher to learn the Buddha Dhamma. In the past if our Teacher were to travel to Sydney to teach, the student would be left alone again on his return to Melbourne. The students in Sydney can now access ongoing Teaching materials in multi-media form from some of our seven web sites. This use of forth generation education is a virtual form of the traditional ideal face to face scenario. Computer Mediated Communications provide the platform for learners to move beyond linear mindsets to participate in dynamic environments. From the Organisation Tracking statistics we can see that in the last week our web site has hosted visitors from Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany and these persons are from a variety of domains including networks, educational institutions and commercial companies. So we open up a new level of sophistication when we use digital equipment to film John D. Hughes teaching in other Centres in any country in the world and loading that program onto our web site. By the means of modern communication our Upwey Students do not feel abandoned while our Teacher is visiting other places. Our Students are mature enough not to have too much disillusionment about such a scenario. The sophistication factor applies globally so that students overseas do not feel abandoned when our Teacher is in residence at the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. Whenever disillusionment about something appears, we ought dig to the next level of analysis or the one above that before we condemn that something. In the course of looking for alternative world views that are supposed to enable us to live in greater peace and harmony with nature, some persons raise their version of focus on religions such as Buddha Dhamma. Thinking that disparate things ought to have interconnectedness is a common enough error. To Persons in the Western tradition who have decided, rightly or wrongly, that theist religions are not of use for problem solving, have assumed many things can be ‘fixed’ by Buddha Dhamma models BUT they ignore there is a need to let go of some strong foundations about the need to exploit some popular ideas. The World Conservation Strategy suggested by United Nations figures about loss of 3000 square kilometers of prime farm land each year disappearing under buildings and roads in developed countries are widely quoted but the notion of abandoning over-consumption and short-term speculations in favour of non-material values is not talked about in factual analysis terms. One of the more interesting scientific projects currently underway at our Centre is some fundamental measurements of the ecosystem of our Centre’s heavenly garden and predications on the longer term nature of what we can predict if we can afford to make it sustainable into the future. We have just issued the Buddha Dhyana Dana Review Vol. 10 No. 2. The article entitled Approaching Boundless Light By Remembering our Heritage and Averting from Tarnished Light was written during the five day Bhavana course held in April 2000 and contains considerable literature on what is a suitable location and a suitable size for a monastery. We have another new website that is called www.companyontheweb.com/buddhamap. We uploaded it this week with some Ch’an paintings and a series of hot links to our other five websites. We intend to load the full text of our latest Buddha Dhyana Dana Review, with photographs, onto this site before the end of the month. In addition, we will load last year’s Task Unit reports, our profit and loss statement, balance sheet, financial activities and our plans for fundraising. We will include financial analysis of improving the use of our Members’, Friends’ and other volunteers’ time together. This means our mature financial tactical plans can be read by others and adapted to meet their needs. This is a form of distance education. Previously, we would have persons from other organizations visiting here and train them in our efficient methods of the provision of goods, services and infrastructure. Computer Mediated Communications are a flexible, efficient and very cost effective means to educate persons. It is quite expensive to support persons on-site for this sort of training. Quite clearly, our open learning situation from the Internet has to be carefully developed so that it is not full of trivial generalities. We will not issue certificates of competency for persons who use our systems as a best practice model, because to do so would require an expensive administrative structure having government approval. We are happier to work with the lifetimes of learning model. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (1999) special report stated that community services non-profit organisations employ over 132,000 people. Many of these are employed part-time, and on low wages. For this reason, expenditure by community service non-profit organisations, a significant $3.7b, is nonetheless a lot smaller than would be suggested by comparing its employment with that of the education non-profit sector. Many of our projects are labour intensive, such as writing and editing to our standard radio broadcast scripts each week. It is not uncommon to go through 20 drafts of any given program. Very highly skilled persons in our organization use their time in the careful writing and meticulous editing of the radio programs. The real cost associated with developing, designing and implementing education materials, methodologies and technologies are difficult to assess, because as accountants are well aware, costs can be presented in many different ways. Our aim, therefore, was to obtain costs as they were locally perceived by us. The cost data we have obtained express local knowledge or institution-specific knowledge about the costs of implementing particular features of the bundles of procedures that collectively make up on-line distance education as we wish it to be. It is important that costs be seen within the context in which they are incurred. We therefore do not just put a raw cost figure in our reports, but elaborate about reasons which might be social rather than cognitive for this type of presentation. Some people argue that expenditure on high quality print, including for instance full colour, is unduly lavish, and serves cosmetic rather than educational purposes. There can be no hard and fast rule about this, because ‘design takes at least two different forms’. There is structural design, which may affect the structure of the material, and there is graphic design, which, although it can also help the learning process, mainly affects the visual appearance of the pages. In our web design, we have to overcome problems of how we use information internally, and how we might deliver the same information in external forms on a website. The difficulty arises from the notorious ‘problem of joint supply’. Great differences can arise from the different ways in which the relation between the internal and external products are seen by the organization. Should costs be shared between the external and internal modes of preparation, and if so, there is an exhaustive manner suggested by Rumble (1986) of five possibilities. Taylor & White (1991) think that the external mode can be considered to have existed anyway, so that only marginal costs need to be attributed to supply internal students with the same materials. When teaching one on one very rapid corrections can be made because very rapid feedback is enabled. When teaching one to many very rapid corrections can be made if the thirty or so common errors are quickly spoken by the person guiding without asking individuals what they are looking at. These errors are only generated from holding one of fourteen possible unwholesome minds. Since the teacher knows the nature of each of these unwholesome minds and has a fair idea of the audience, very rapid corrections may be made by explaining what they have in mind that is in error and not in their self interest to pursue. In written text the context can be well referenced with footnotes. Provided that the students are well trained to read the footnotes they will not come to much harm. However, very poor students who do not read footnotes should not be given more advanced texts to play with. By loading warnings onto our Internet sites, we can prevent poor students from reading, provided we make the first few paragraphs fairly dense. Poor students will then switch to another site. We are not designing web sites for beginners, just as we are not designing our five day meditation courses for beginners. Beginners are now well catered for by the appearance of hundreds of texts dealing with very elementary concepts. We do not intend to write such texts because that is not what we see as our target audience. With this in mind, we remove most first order references from our writings which requires a high level of knowledge bases, research, writing, editing and proof reading to remove trivia or oxymorons. The conceptual difficulties encountered, added to the cost of collecting detailed cost data, helps to account for the fact that detailed activity costing has not been persevered with. The view is sometimes advanced that teaching methods used on-and-off-site are converging. We are looking at models of convergence to try and understand what we are going to do. It has been said that ‘distance education materials are often written at the expense of research and sleep’. We are determined to resolve conflicts of parallel use of materials, and to find a culture for the next decade or so that allows the two to converge. Members must realise that every activity has to be funded to make our Centre sustainable and we are fortunate to have teams of people to do this grand work. We have developed in our Members persons who are flexible enough and patient enough to work through problems and are educated, credible, significant and professional enough to work together in teams. They have to deal with considerable pressures, but can stomach the risks and enjoy the art of conflict resolution that always appears wherever Buddha Dharma is being propagated. It must be remembered that there are certain types of persons who work to destroy the morality associated with religious teachings. But in the long run as the Dharma ending age gets darker and darker these persons succeed in destroying the Buddha Dharma in the human world 2500 years from now. After that time because the suitable locations have been destroyed and human beings are born with bad dispositions, they are not teachable so therefore Teachers do not take birth to show the way. The marks of the destruction of the Buddha Sasene (the teaching era) have been described by Buddha how stepwise the conditions needed for learning are destroyed. Money alone will not fix up the conditions for teaching about the four Noble truths. The second Noble truth deals with the fine structure of sorrow (Dhukka). Very roughly speaking this can be summarised as the conditions that come with old-age, death, grief, lamentation, pain, misery and despair. When a very careful examination is made of the relation that exists between each of these factors then the determinants of mind can be understood and then the behaviour patterns of persons turn away from the usual craving for this or that and then the determinations about body, speech and mind that formerly caused all the negativity of life turns around and the third Noble truth can be cognated. However, to do this the so called name and form pair must be examined internally and externally until the process of becoming or ‘taking up’ of things can be seen to be only conducive to more delight and passion and this drives the process again and again to birth and death. To get the merit to be able to access this sort of vision of the third Noble truth that when ignorance ceases determines will cease means persons must work for the sake of other persons not just themselves. Last Sunday, our teacher was at the Cambodian Temple and guided thousands of followers in the methodology of how they could help their ancestors by sharing merit. The cost of mounting the occasion was considerable and was borne by the lay persons of the Cambodian Temple who funded the building and the care of the seven Monks who attended. Cambodia is a Buddhist country so no one has to ask twice to get donations to keep the Temple running and stable. Persons who are not born into a Buddhist family have great difficulty in understanding the merit that can be made by supporting a temple and distributing written Dharma. But over time, from ten to thirty years or so, ordinary Australians who are not born into a Buddhist family have supported our Temple and permitted us to continue teaching persons. The continuation of our Temple as a place where you can learn in a small but secure setting for this period of time is very demanding. We do not intend to give up our normal practices that we have carried through in a peaceful manner for decades. Once this is understood, the future of our Centre and its management can achieve what it states it wants; namely, to be effective for the next five hundred years or more. May you be well and happy. This script was written and edited by: John D. Hughes, Leanne Eames, Julie O’Donnell, Anita Svvenson, Pennie White and Julian Bamford. Internet based References Australian Government’s overseas aid program - AusAid, (2000), AusAID Budget Summary 2000, article at URL http://www.ausaid.gov.au/budget/summary.cfm, accessed on 2 October 2000. Australian Bureau of Statistics, (1999) Special Article - Australia’s nonprofit sector, Year Book Australia, ABS Catalogue No. 1301.01, article at URL http://www.abs.gov.au accessed on 2 October 2000. Print based References Klas, S., ed., Buddhist Perspectives on the Ecocrisis, The Wheel Publication No. 346/348, Buddhist Publication Society, Sri Lanka, 1987 National Boad of Employment, Education and Training, Costs and Quality in Resource-Based Learning On- and Off-Campus, Commissioned Report No. 33, October 1994, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1994 Buddha Dhyana Dana Review, Vol. 10 No. 2. Disclaimer:
As we, the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., do not control the actions of our service providers from time to time, make no warranty as to the continuous operation of our website(s). Also, we make no assertion as to the veracity of any of the information included in any of the links with our websites, or an other source accessed through our website(s).
Accordingly, we accept no liability to any user or subsequent third party, either expressed or implied, whether or not caused by error or omission on either our part, or a member, employee or other person associated with the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.
For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
© Copyright. The Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. |