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NAMO
TASSA
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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 Broadcast for Sunday 15 April 2001
Today's program is called: The demise of the prosaic person
To follow the path of sanity is to follow the path to health. The word sanity comes from the Latin sanitas or sanus meaning healthy. The Great Dhamma Masters are of serene mind, even their imaginations are sane. The Buddha Dhamma Eightfold Path is the way out of insanity. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines prosaic as lacking poetic beauty, or imagination, plain, unromantic, commonplace, dull, mundane. When persons are prosaic they are also being pernicious. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines pernicious as tending to destroy, kill, injure, destructive, ruinous; of a person wicked, villainous, damaging, harmful and undesirable. Prosaic persons destroy Buddha Dhamma. In Australia, to be able to cease prosaic minds persons must learn to speak a rigorous form of English and also learn to write English proficiently. The average person in Australia has a speaking vocabulary of 800 words. If a trade is learnt, then this increases vocabulary by 200 to 300 words. A hobby may add a further 100 words. However, to be able to learn Buddha Dhamma, persons must increase their vocabulary to a minimum of 70,000 words. A superb student will learn 1000 new words per week. The Buddha expounded the teachings of causes and effects (in Pali, kamma-vipaka) 2500 years ago. Kamma-vipaka means that everything that happens to us is a result of something we did in the past. For example, if persons steal money from someone the kammic effect is they will not be able to get money, or they lose money, in this or future lives. Greed is a motivator for most salespersons. For a person to be greedy they in turn are being pernicious. Being pernicious is a defilement as outlined by Lord Buddha. The other side to the coin is when a person is florid in their speech or writing. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines florid as having or using many rhetorical ornaments or flowery words and phrases. To be a good salesperson you must not be prosaic or florid. You ought to cultivate good English skills to be able to sell. You must be able to identify what the customers’ needs are and apply a suitable non-prosaic and non-florid system to the sale. The more words persons have in their vocabulary the more effectively they are able to express what they wish to voice. Our Centre is a focused learning organisation, designed to help students strengthen their verbal skills. Our Teacher, John D. Hughes, teaches his students the five styles of friendliness, practicality, professionalism, cultural adaptability and scholarship. Students who have cultivated these five styles are able to develop the speech mandalas needed to sustain the life and work skills required to communicate in this century. The 21st Century is a time of commercial and social velocity. Change occurs rapidly in every facet of peoples lives, whether they like it or not. The wise develop the Cetasika pliability of mind (in Pali, citta-muduta) to a superior level that enables them to be successful practitioners of Dhamma. It is of little value preparing persons for today's ways of talking about commerce, as an estimated 60% of present job skills using first order knowledge will not be needed within the next decade. There is no present day vocabulary training for an estimated 40% of the jobs skills needed. We can compare our economy with the state of mind of America when their President set a national task to place a person on the moon. The 8000 key skills needed for a space program did not exist at that time anywhere in the world. All that was available was billions of dollars for research and persons of vision who believed it could happen. One great leader who had vision and the ability to translate vision into Right Speech (in Pali, samma vaca) was the Buddha. The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary definition of Vision is “a person or thing which is apparently perceived otherwise than by ordinary sight.” The Buddha expounded a path of Wisdom, known as the Noble Eightfold Path that is timeless. His teachings were given with such clarity of vision and wisdom that more than 2500 years later upon hearing his words persons are awakened to the Truth. When wise people speak Dhamma the words are clear and sweet and they inspire students as much as when they were first spoken in India by the Buddha himself. When students learn the Dhamma they are able to destroy their prosaic minds. Great nations have great orators who inspire the people to richness. Nations with poor orators suffer from a lack of direction. Some of Australia’s leaders with prosaic minds have lacked suitable words to put in place causes to conserve the environment. One result of this is that the massive land clearing undertaken over the last 200 years has resulted in a salinity problem. Contemporary leaders have recognised that we now need to plant 5 billion trees to restabilise our land. May the planting of the 5 billion trees come to fruition quickly and with ease. The Federal and State Governments of Australia have pledged $15 billion over ten years towards this project. This may not be enough funds to plant 5 billion trees. If tree planting on such a large scale were mechanised, then labor costs would be reduced and perhaps the scheme would be affordable. There are more than two schools of thought about the ever widening gap between the rich and poor. One school states the cause is population explosion and degradation of the environment. The other school sees changes in education and employment as the cause. We subscribe to both views as being correct and believe that the gap between the rich and the poor in Australia will widen. It is our Centre's capacity to increase the third order knowledge of trainees. The associated skills that result from this training will make our students employable in this new century. The ability to speak in a group on a multi-million dollar project every day for ten hours a day until the project is complete will become more common, until spoken skills and aptitudes like these become a necessary requirement for persons maintaining a common work ethos. We train our Members in the following skill sets to increase their verbal skills and vocabulary: · Acquiring Information Psychological accessibility is needed. The individual must be able to recognise his or her need for information, be willing to seek this information and be able to convey the need to a second person (the information specialist), when necessary. Using computer search engines, paper based technical libraries and Internet products and services our Members will identify information requirements, and develop sifting and gathering skills. · Ability to Perform Practical Tasks Emotional maturity is required to accept the demand and necessary vocabulary for rapid learning of new skills. Members will need to train themselves to develop advanced skill sets, and be willing to express in words learned knowledge to own and proficiently perform tasks on an unsupervised basis. · Ability To Work In Groups & Teams Cultural adaptability, pliability of mental states and the rapid exchange and processing of spoken information are required by individuals in the information age, where modern organisational culture typically structures projects around team work. Members wishing to work on our projects must develop these skills. We are in the middle of a Five Day Bhavana Course that commenced on 13 April 2001 and will conclude on the 17 April 2001. Over the course Members will chant the 227 rules of morality for monks and nuns. Yesterday afternoon we held a Bell Puja with help from Hillside Radio Managers’, Brendan and Jeanette Granger, who recorded this non-verbal thought transference. We will now play the two sessions recorded at the Bell Puja to provide you with examples of non-verbal transmission. May you come to understand what we wish to teach today, right speech through hearing this nonverbal transmission. May you be well and happy.
This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes, Jan Bennett, Arrisha Burling, Isabella Hobbs, Jocelyn Hughes, Vanessa Macleod, Lisa Nelson, Tim Browning, Lyne Lehmann, Nick Prescott and Pennie White.
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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 Brown, L. (ed.) (1993), The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 2, 4th Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Nyanatiloka (1980), Buddhist Dictionary: Manual of Buddhist Terms and Doctrines, Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy, Sri Lanka. Kennedy, P. (1993), Preparing for Twenty-First Century. Document Statistics Totals:
For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us. |
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