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'THE
BUDDHIST HOUR'
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Hillside
Radio 87.6 FM & 88.0 FM |
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The
Buddhist Hour radio program for 19 November 2000 Administering something implies stewardship rather than ownership. Stewardship requires special skills. Stewardship for a non-profit organisation creates its own euphoria. Success has ruined more non-profit organisations than has failure. Because of successes and good management in the past, things do not go wrong; so we do not have a siege mentality present in our organisation. So what incentive is there for our Members to innovate? Unless Members go to work now, we could well outrun our resources in the near future. We have been building up a series of web sites and these are quality systems. Whilst having a quality system is a marketing advantage today, not having a quality system will be a disadvantage in a few years time. In 1996, we were scanning our early newsletters and early Buddha Dhyana Dana Reviews so that they would be machine readable. In those days, our computer processors were 286s and our calculated CPU speed was 12 megahertz. Low base memory was 640 kilobytes and expansion memory was 384 kilobytes. We ran on MS DOS Version 5.00. Today, we have Pentium 75s, 90s, 100s, 133s, 166s with Windows running at very fast speeds (up to 166 megahertz) with hard disc storage capacity of up to 2.7 gigabytes. We have gone up about three and a half generations in four years. Our supply chain management was efficient enough to bring us this change in technology. In addition, we have many computers linked together on a Local Area Network so it is easy to view or exchange files from one operator to another. Over that time, our operator Members have learnt several new packages of software and expect that the quality and accuracy of our data entry will always stay within the first tier. Our present Local Area Network (LAN) delivers information at 10 megabytes per second. The next LAN we are building will deliver information one hundred times faster, that is, a thousand megabytes per second. Before long, we will be using machines that read at 400-600 megahertz. This requires supply chain management. We fund raise and locate resources from our supply chain so operators of our many systems can proceed without interruption. The quality objective that we set for December 1996 was to reduce below 0.1 per cent documents that did not conform to the Australian Government Printer’s Style Manual. We have achieved this. Our new standard is 0.05 per cent conformity. We define responsibility, authority and interrelation of all personnel. Non-profit organisations have no “bottom line”. If we find we are not producing results in some area it means maybe we should direct our resources elsewhere. Non-profit organisations need the discipline of organised abandonment, perhaps even more than a business does. Over the last four years we have changed our information technology culture and made adjustments to our supply chain. We have developed web sites (with more to come) to provide persons with good information. However, with the number of web sites globally expected to increase to 100 million by the year 2005, it will be up to the persons themselves to decipher good information from bad information. In India, the need to change the way students learn has been recognised. Last month, opposition leader Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born president of the Congress Party in India, said India’s system of learning by memorization and repetition, which pervades from primary school through university, “may have stemmed from the British need to produce clerks” for their colonial system. She said that students are taught to conform from kindergarten and not to ask questions. This naturally kills creativity. We have to ask intelligent questions if we are to record and exchange our considerable know-how within the network. We select and are selected by many Monks in India to work for mutual benefit. The level of scholarship obtained by Buddha Dhamma practitioners living and studying in India today is quite extraordinary and outstrips, dare we say, the quality of output of some much more expensively funded institutions in the Western world dealing with the same subject matter. We do not intend to disparage the efforts made by Western scholars in their research efforts. We incline to the view that language studies become natural when persons have habitual access to India’s long history that is recorded at a considerable number of holy sites, such as, for example, the Mahabodhi or Buddha Gaya Temple which lies six miles to the south of Gaya in Bihar, one of the Indian States. Uruvilva or Uruvela, a hamlet which is identified with the modern village called Urel, six miles south of Gaya Railway Station is where Gautama or Gotama (The Buddha-to-be) sat in meditation under the asvattha or pipal tree and attained to the Sambodhi or Perfect Enlightenment. The Mahabodhi Temple is probably one of the most impressive religious buildings in India. These sites have many votive records in many languages inscribed on pillars or stone railings describing the history of the additions to the temples over many eras. Indian scholars who are inclined to virtue in the fields of social, political and spiritual endeavour are sometimes inspired to the highest level of one of the fourteen types of deep wisdom called sabbannuta nana, such as nirutti patisambhide nana: that of language. Our Teacher, John D. Hughes, regularly receives letters, journals and books from Monks in India. Recently, a letter arrived from Ven. Dr. Prajna Nandasri (M.A., Ph.D.) of Buddhist Temple, West Bengal State, requesting that an article he wrote, entitled The Greatness of the Buddha, be included in the next edition of our journal, The Buddha Dhyana Dana Review. Ven. Bhante Prajnasheel, Chief Monk and Secretary of the Buddhagaya Temple Management Committee, also sent a letter as well as a book, entitled Buddha Gaya Temple - Its History by Dipak K Barua, requesting that an appeal for the restoration and conservation of the Mahabodhi Temple in Buddha Gaya be published in the next Buddha Dhyana Dana Review. Involvement in the supply chain and preparation of nutrients rather than just taking from our supply chain is the mark of a true professional. On 25 March 1989, the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. acquired the John D. Hughes Collection. Our Heritage Collection has been sourced by our Teacher John D. Hughes for over four decades and continues to grow as a multilingual reference library. The Collection includes rare and valuable Buddhist texts including the complete Buddhist Canon, Commentaries by renowned Buddhist Teachers and Buddhist “Books of Guidance” in English and various foreign languages. We receive donations of books on a regular basis from students in Australia and overseas. After we receive five copies of a text, we will then lend one copy. Presently, we have over a thousand texts available for lending. Last week Members participated in the cataloging of over six hundred books. This was possible because one of our Members altered our supply chain by using the critical path planning. In the past, we could only catalogue up to fourteen books per week. Now we can catalogue more books in less time and at less cost. We are planning to upload 4000 book titles onto our soon to be updated original web site. The good deeds we do now depend on the supply chain of materials. Preparing food and other offerings to the Monks, taking precepts, and listening to Dhamma talks are all ways of making merit. You have merit. It is the accumulated reservoir of millions of past wholesome activities done with mind, body and speech. It is a kind of supply chain which supports our mental and emotional existence and our physical collection of body aggregates, on another level like money in several banks. We can never get all the banks to pay out at the same time. Right now you are in the Dhamma supply chain, but will you be in the Dhamma supply chain tomorrow and in the future? If we spend all our money we have in one bank and cannot access the money in the other banks quickly, we will get to a stage where we will have no cash flow and become insolvent. What happens then? Similarly, on a psychological level we need to replenish our psychological bank accounts, so that stored up mental energy is available for us to use in whatever way we see fit from one or the other of our bank accounts, that’s if we can access a suitable level of mind content. Some say there is a consciousness store house called the alaya whereas other schools do not acknowledge the existence of the alaya. This stored up mental energy can be used for many things. We cannot take our material possessions with us because the body is subject to decomposition, but the positive minds tendencies we have accumulated and operated in this one existence will serve well in the future times. Merit has a useby date. You use it or your loose it. What did we do to be in the supply chain of hearing, reading and seeing Dhamma? We make the effort to supply you today, because if we want to stay in the Dhamma supply chain, first we read Dhamma, use it ourselves, and then transform it and pass it on in many forms, such as the radio broadcast script, the actual ‘Buddhist Hour’ broadcast, and the weekly uploading of the radio script onto our ‘Blessings’ website at www.bdcublessings.one.net.au with the strong intention for it to be used by many. It would be foolish of course to turn all the merit into more material comforts in the present because we would be poor in the future, unless we share the material comforts with Noble beings. From the Buddha's insight about the nature of reality we can see that it is far wiser to spend part of our good kamma to accumulate wisdom, because with wisdom and understanding we can carry it with us, and wisdom is what we will use to liberate human beings from their own ignorance if they are teachable and wish to learn and act. And yet what do most people do? They overemphasise the material aspects of existence and essentially disregard the cultivation of their minds. It is important to practice restraint in this area. In the Buddha supply chain, there is the Stream-enterer access with the fruition, the Once-Returner access with the fruition, the Non-Returner access with the fruition and the Arhant access with the fruition. The fruition becomes complete at the 8th order. There is no similar supply chain in other religions so they can acquire these attainments. One night, while the Buddha was sitting in meditation under a Bodhi tree, the end of His religious quest was finally achieved. He started to see, like in a mirror, His previous lives, what He had been, the families He had had; He started to go backward in time to see many previous lifetimes to arrive perhaps to the point when it all started. Then He saw the life of other beings similarly, like in a mirror and one thing became clear to him: the plane of existence (out of the five planes of existence) where these beings were reborn from one life to the next was determined by the accumulated effects of the actions in previous lives, in other words their own karma, a word which in Sanskrit means action. As He progressed through the night, He acquired a more detailed understanding of the Law of Karma: He realised the Four Noble Truths and the twelve links of the Law of Dependent Origination which is a more detailed formulation of the working of the Law of Karma and the truth of anatta, the truth that nowhere in the universe there is a permanent self to be found. Finally when the sun rose, He had become an Enlightened one, He was no longer an individual in the ordinary sense of the word. The point when all learning had stopped, the final destination of His religious quest had finally been achieved. We can look at this experience as the manifestation of the law of causality in the ethical domain but not as a type of mechanistic causality as it could be inferred from a study of scientific disciplines. This causality is expressed in its standard formulation like this: "When
this is present, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that
arises. This equates to a supply chain mechanism. Immediately after the Buddha attained awakening at Bodhi Gaya, he spent a lot of time paying respect to the Bodhi Tree under which he sat. Without the shade of the tree, the harsh sunlight would have broken his mind and awakening would not have been possible. For this reason, the tree was an indispensable link in the supply chain. The Members we treat as ‘professionals’ know cause and effect as supply chain management, and, over time, develop a realistic sense of becoming knowledgeable about the supply chain costs of the goods and services we dispense to Monks, Nuns and laypersons. Professional Members at our Centre are taught to make ‘many fields of merits’ more valuable and greater than that field that would arise ‘if all the sands in the River Ganges turned into jewels’. A noble professional person at our Temple "pays his or her way" by raising funds within the law by using established supply chains. This output of supply chains or getting goods allows our organisation to continue to develop and supply others by passing on goods and services freely to benefit them, that is, the practice of dana. It takes much reading and learning time and effort for a ‘nonprofessional’ Member to arrive at the correct view (samma ditthi) of the professional Member. Usually, this takes five to ten years of steady effort. One example of supply chain management is the Kathina Robes Presentation in which the lay community offer Robes to Monks. It is the most significant merit making opportunity of the Buddhist calendar for lay devotees. The word Kathina or Kathin literally means a formal act performed by the community of Monks. The name Kathina is derived from the name of an embroidery frame which is used for making the Saffron Robes of the Monks. During the lifetime of Gautama (the most recent Buddha), there was a group of thirty Monks from a town called Patha travelling to Jeta Grove Monastery to see the Buddha. Realising they would not arrive at Jeta Grove Monastery in time for the Rains Retreat, they decided to stay at Saketu town. Having stayed at Saketu for three months they continued their journey through all kinds of weather, then made haste in order to see the Lord Buddha. All their Saffron Robes were worn out and spoiled by the end of the journey. These difficulties were known to the Buddha. He therefore set down for the first time a rule for the Monks that enables them to receive a set of Robes which is offered for personal use. The Kathina Robes Ceremony originated at that time and has continued to the present time. Two weeks ago, several of our Centre’s Members attended a Kathina Ceremony arranged for more than twenty senior Thai Monks. The Monks names that attended the Kathina Ceremony from Thailand are: 1. Phra
Prommolee from Yannawa Monastery Bangkok, Next month, John D. Hughes and five Members of our Centre will attend the 21st General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Bangkok, Thailand. During this time, the inauguration of the World Buddhist University will be held. The Centre was selected as an associated Spiritual Training Centre of the World Buddhist University at the last General Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhist held in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia in 1998. We will continue to manage our stewardship of our supply chains globally. The authors and editors of this script are John D. Hughes, Pennie White, Evelin Halls, Vanessa Macleod, Leanne Eames and Lisa Nelson. 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.
References 1. Brown, Lesley, The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 1, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993, p. 28. 2. 1996 Annual Report and Position Paper, Information System Development Work Group, Report No. 109, BDC(U)Ltd. 3. Barua, Dipak K., Buddha Gaya Temple - Its History, Buddha Gaya Temple Management Committee, Buddha Gaya, 1981. Web Sites 1. www.newconomy.com 2. interactive.wsj.com (India Needs Better Education For Info Age - Sonia Gandhi) General
Statistics For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us. |
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