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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 22 April 2001
This script is titled: The purpose of learning
On Tuesday 17 April 2001 we held an "Installation of the Reclining Buddha" Ceremony. Venerable Bhante Kassapa, a Sri Lankan Monk, based in Victoria lead the ancient ceremony that empowers the image to be useful for practice at our Centre. Many Members and friends of the Centre attended this auspicious occasion that occurred after they had completed a strong five day Bhavana course run by our Teacher, John D. Hughes. Venerable Bhante Kassapa reminded Members on the course of the reasons for why they learn and practice prajna paramita over many years this life. The purpose is to teach persons how to relate to others. Monks and Nuns relate to each other in a different manner to the way Laypersons behave. They follow the Buddhist Vinaya precepts for Monks and Nuns (227 precepts). This is called the Vinaya rule. Buddhist Laypersons are less noble and learn to hold at least 5 precepts or more. The focus of learning to hold precepts is the way in which actions and words can be altered to affect individuals and the world at large. These recommended precepts remain as pertinent today as when they were first discovered 2500 years ago by Lord Buddha. The reason for this is that persons still harm other beings through their actions and speech, just as persons did thousands of years ago. Simply, this is because they are unaware of precepts effects on others. Without precepts, we are callous. What we say and do profoundly affect other people, and the Buddha’s Teachings constantly remind us of our learning responsibilities. These learning responsibilities involve the practice of the five, eight or more precepts combined with the learned practice of mindfulness. How do we practice to learn the precepts? The simple answer is “with great difficulty”. The practice of precepts is not just keeping rules blindly. It requires volition to want to do it. When you catch your learning mind that is about to break a precept you want to learn, to consciously redirect that mind to act in accordance with the precept you are taking, if you do that, then that is practice of learning the precepts. Anything else is a sham. For example, a person may habitually lie about their income on their tax return. Then one year later, he or she realises that this is incongruent with the precept of no lying. The person then changes his or her actions accordingly and attends to this illegal matter. If fines are payable, so be it, but, in general, the tax office views voluntary disclosure favourably. We suggest you review your tax payments this week. If you do, a new peace of mind soon becomes evident in your mental systems. It is generally agreed that the five precepts to be learned and practiced for a Buddhist Layperson are: I undertake to abide by the precept to abstain from killing I undertake to abide by the precept to abstain from stealing I undertake to abide by the precept to abstain from sexual misconduct I undertake to abide by the precept to abstain from lying I undertake to abide by the precept to abstain from liquor that causes intoxication and heedlessness. In his book, “A still Forest Pool”, the Most Venerable Achaan Chah states; There are two kinds of suffering; the suffering that leads to more suffering and the suffering that leads to the end of suffering. So, there is a vast difference in the mind training on learning precepts between the practice of Sangha Members and laypersons. It is simply a matter of scale and conditions. Our organisation is interested in encouraging persons to take extra precepts even for an hour or so. For example, we instruct our female Members to avoid the cases of direct and indirect contact with Monks mentioned in the texts, in the case of Nuns our male Members to apply the same rules to Nuns, even where the Nuns are holding only 10 precepts. This can be practiced when offering food to the Sangha. In general, Buddhist Monks and Nuns who visit our Centre hold many rules (precepts) and are less stressed persons as a result. They are calm and pleasant to be with since they are less prone to complain about how persons treat them. Many persons wish to learn about the secrets of how to lower stress in their life about various things. We teach the methods set out in the texts. Stress reduction in the long term is simple in theory. From now on, we observe more precepts. But in practice, because poor unwise habits are strong, it is not easy for most of us to learn extra precepts. Ancient reasons come to mind to stall us: “this is too soon, too late, too hot, too cold, “ or whatever. For example, consider using no alcoholic drinks. It is about the only means you have if you decide to alter your life style if you drink and dull your minds. “Why bother?” some may ask. “Everybody drinks”. That is true but everybody suffers ill health. The full reasoning is as follows: "Discipline is for the sake of restraint, restraint for the sake of freedom from remorse, freedom from remorse for the sake of joy, joy for the sake of rapture, rapture for the sake of tranquillity, tranquillity for the sake of pleasure, pleasure for the sake of concentration, concentration for the sake of knowledge and vision of things as they are, knowledge and vision of things as they are for the sake of disenchantment, disenchantment for the sake of release, release for the sake of knowledge and vision of release, knowledge and vision of release for the sake of total unbinding without clinging". (from the Venerable Bhikkhu Thanissaro's The Buddhist Monastic Code). We introduce into our direct teaching and our grapevine a view that suggests that the only way Members can develop a unity between themselves is to help each other achieve some small part of an overall project or work together on some small part of gardening or building around the Centre instead of drinking alcohol or using drugs. Buddhadasa Bhikkhu from the book, The first Ten Years of Suan Mokkh, states: The more there are meditation Centers, the more there are specially characterising, ego-raising features, leading to contesting and hostile attitudes among the Centers, and thus making it difficult to compromise. The contest is very good if the contesting schools have their own good points and perform beneficial deeds in accordance with their skill and experience. But if they act out of desire to make their trivial features look good, then the religion as a whole will suffer. I suppose that this is the reason that the standard of spiritual practice in most of the Centers gets stuck and cannot be raised, invariably dimming the status or prestige of this kind of work. Our Dhamma practice Centre should be the place for eliminating such undesirable features while at the same time disseminating the higher teachings of the Buddha by rightly behaving as good models. Eventually, our Centre would repay the whole investment in its construction by saving on the cost of alcohol and drugs over a persons lifetime. Direct costs can amount to a quarter of a million dollars in a lifetime. This is economic waste on a big scale. This economic suggestion, when followed, improves their physical health and quickly they see something tangible for their effort, It is a form of materiality no doubt, but it is impressed upon Members that money is saved for the use of others and well as themselves. The skill of the Teacher may know the potential within each student to learn and practice and the merit they need to make to do so, which in most cases the student is unaware of, for if they were, they would have already done it by themselves. But unless the Teacher is very persuasive and can provide the economic resources to use to help them make merit this knowledge is of little help to the students. Looking at the economic behaviour of most human beings one could conclude that they seem to be not very keen to escape rebirth in the human world, since they avoid keeping five precepts. They have the culture of poverty. It seems they would prefer the poverty suffering of animal births than to stand up for human values. You might think this sounds harsh, but it is true, like it or not like it. By teaching the preciousness of human rebirth the Lord Buddha uncovered a coherent view of reality which became cause for his Teachings on generosity, morality and wisdom. Putting the teachings into practice in ones’ own life in this very human life and becoming a living example of the transformational power of the Buddha Dhamma is what it means to be in human birth and to enable good. Our Centre’s output in written Dhamma is attractive to the Sangha, scholars and devotees born in countries other than Australia because, in a tactical way, we preserve and practice many ancient oral traditions and make use of the written Tipitika Dhamma in a series of faithful translations as our anchor point. We take care to write well. The language skills of our Members does much to assist our cultural adaptability. We have graduate editors. To sum up our cultural position, we design our version of best practice by avoiding racist, ageist, sexist, nihilist or eternalist literature from entering our written resources. Our words must take on the richer language of the information Age ready for this next century. The organisation needs to develop awareness among present Members that Lifetimes of Learning creates the correct base for the Centre to become a true Learning Organisation. We turn the purpose of learning into practice to find peace. To meet our strategic mandate, our Dhamma Centre is by definition a Learning Organisation. By borrowing the concepts of management disciplines and by using current managerial terminology, we can articulate a conceptualised understanding of what we are, what we stand for and where we are going in stating the ways of practice that arises from the understanding of why we learn in the current order. As Phra Ajaan Suwat Suvaco pointed out: “The ultimate defilement is unawareness. Every defilement, whether blatant, moderate, or subtle, has unawareness mixed with it. This is why the Buddha taught us to train our minds to give rise to awareness, the opponent of unawareness. Whichever side is stronger will win out and hold power over the mind. If awareness wins out, the defilements have no place to stay. If unawareness wins out, there’s no peace and ease. No purity. The mind isn’t empty. Stress and suffering arise. To know the unawareness already in the mind is awfully difficult. It’s like using darkness to illuminate darkness: you can’t see anything. Or like two blind people leading each other along: they’ll have a hard time escaping from dangers and reaching their goal. This is why we have to depend on people with good eyes: in other words, mindfulness and discernment. These are the crucial factors that will lead us to the end of the path.” Our Global Aspirations give our purpose of learning focus by improving our research tools and changing to e-information delivery of teaching methods. Our Management Team has access to the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd’s key Dhamma Reference works, the John D. Hughes Collection. Developed over four decades the collection continues to grow as a heritage multilingual reference library for Buddha Dhamma Scholars and Practitioners. Access is also granted for Key Members to a Business Library, an I.T. Library and an Education Research Library owned by John D. Hughes. We have a superior collection of Dhamma reference works. Our Key Members have set our benchmarks for delivering e-information on-site in terms of retrieval time. For management purpose we operate e-information as an adjunct to our Buddha Dhamma Collection. We use a logarithmic scale (base 10) to define delivery speed. Second class delivery is defined as 20 seconds retrieval time. First class delivery is defined as 2 seconds retrieval time. Our new President, Julian Bamford B.A. App. Rec. has stated he is adamant and determined to drive this initiative of improvements to give first class involvement of cataloguing what we have. This month, we will upgrade to the new ISYS 6.0. This runs eight times faster than ISYS 5.0. Our new software, can search our library databases for key words in the titles or abstract of books and journals, with bubbling joy in our heart, our President is adamant we can form catalogue raisonaire of books of interest on a given topic for research purposes. Our Local Area Network entries, email, radio talks and company reports are searchable on this new system. Also, Corporate Governance and Reporting and Local Area Planning and Asset Management records can be searched at the same time. The plan is to scan into e-information extra historical material from our records. We are in the process of forming a group of active scholars in accordance with our World Buddhist University (W.B.U.) charter. Our senior Managers develop themselves as better administrators. They need development as authorities on sound doctrine for Buddha Dhamma projects based on good canonical references that must be attained. Our Key Members need to know the Buddha Dhamma from our references. A practical training program on Boolean Algebra use is our prime target this year. We estimate within four months scanning of new material we can flush out 200% more references in half the time on a given topic. The indexing pace of current book holdings is increasing under the supervision of Vanessa Macleod. We are overcoming the backlog accumulated over the last two years. Key words in book titles will show up in the next generation of detailed searches. As our search capacity for detail increases by the addition of ISYS 6.0, we can make known more transparent information bridging our strategic and operation plans to help senior managers towards best practice in project management. To bring about the necessary focus we intend to produce case studies of organisations at home and abroad. When we write and produce the amount of good work that has to been done from here, it constitutes a bridging stage along the road towards wider cooperation with other Buddhist organisations we networked in the past. We may be able to supply some Buddhist organisations with a case study of their history that their present Members may not know. History can help create interest. The torments of our past research fathers will not be wasted by being unreadable by others. The ambiguity of the state of historical knowledge of Buddha Dhamma Centre’s operations needs much bridging research to consolidate the processes of whether to renew or not renew networks. It may be that some organisations today do not wish to recall their Theravadin foundations. If an organisation becomes little more than a social club, we feel they could do more. We do not intend to disparage the intellect or motives of organisations when we say this fact. For example, if we could produce histories of our past contacts, their founder’s intentions could be discovered. But the history we would like to write does not merely wish to editorialise our social contacts and dismiss uncertainties of direction when they arise. These case histories should be made with risk management in mind if we think a network organisation is at risk of becoming merely a social club. We need a history website. Twenty-three years ago, our Teacher was funded by the Australian Schools Commission to research the state of Buddha Dhamma organisations in Australia. To date, such important historical research and photographs are not on our websites. We must take steps to include this early Australian Buddhist history for scholars. Our history website policy will be: Our focus is on what our International Dhamma Activities (IDA) policy should be to help others avoid mistakes by remembering their Vows when they started their organisations. Our scholarship must not be too trite, and be just comment. It should be practical to awaken in others of European culture a sense of their cultural dependence on the most advanced minds that have been employed in writing about Buddha Dhamma over the last few millennium. Historically since the olden days of schisms in the Sangha there has been some separationism. For example, Theravada, Mahayana and their doctrinal sub-division like Vajrayana, Sahajayana, Kalacakrayana, Sarvastivada, Madhyanika, Vijnanavadin and so on among the Indian and Nepali Buddhists. In China, Japan, Korea and Tibet several factions appeared. In Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam also similar divisions prevail. Even in Europe, America, Australia and South Africa, the Buddhists preserve their Nikaya identity strongly. So, the globalisation of Buddhism in pluralistic manifestation becomes a weak force to face the challenges of one worldism time to the new world order in our Age. The apparent pluralistic approaches can be homogenised through the exposition of the Four Noble Truths. A Vajrasattva with a strong view of self-determination believes retroversion to be unified with the Wisdom (Prajna). To achieve this Members have been taught Prajna Paramita. We are interested in arousing Buddhist Awareness of their history on a massive scale. Then as the true history of Buddhist influence in Australia is made clear, others can feel confident to learn about such good influences. For our Centre adding a history website means the golden age of Buddha Dhamma information in the English language has arrived in Australia. We must exploit our gold mine of Buddha Dhamma history for the benefit of the Many. Our website information on history will give a leading edge in research. Since 1977, John D. Hughes has documented events so there is much World history available for our history websites. Original documents will be scanned and displayed online to guide others. There are approximately two billion pages on the World Wide Web. Yet most of the true history of Buddha Dhamma is not available because it has not been written from the source document. As yet such information in our archives is not available to the general community. Some of our other websites contain useful data but our records have fuller data than we have disclosed to date online. As we write case studies, we will place them online and we will build our organisational consensus as a practical supplier of case studies to help show the Middle Way. We had several good historical projects in the past. Our need is for speed with history to e-information suitable for our training requirements. Without a sense of history, we would be closer to staying as we are. Once we have some of the history case studies of Australian Buddhists on the Web, persons can benefit because they can read about actual persons who reached the as-yet-unreached and realised the as-yet-unreached. When we write we must consider key search words. Today, various search engines are available. Web search engines have a component called a spider or crawler that is always searching for new additions or deletions. The task is massive when you consider how persons might miss our history in two billion pages. Once the search engine has indexed the new history page, it is not yet indexed. The search engine lists the pages found in the index with the first entry being what its algorithm calculates as being the most relevant. Use a different search engine and you get a different result. We must supply webmasters with search topics. Information on various search engines is available in Microsoft Communiqué April 2001 pp. 23-24. Our next International Dhamma Activities six month development is to provide a training resource of how to write case studies for our history requirements. The ISYS Version 6.0 is leading edge in the world and can put our case study references into historical date order. Our International Dhamma Activities requires we become known as a BUDDHIST CENTRE OF INFORMATION FOR RESEARCH AND LEARNING HISTORY. These new history case studies resources are required for the state of transition from print to electronic media. Many of the changes offer enormous potential for our Librarians to upgrade to become case studies Historians. Or they can be Information Officers and Information Officers can become Knowledge Managers. If we do not document the case studies of history today we will regret it tomorrow. The persons who can help us will soon pass away. We will create new insights for Buddhist history to be understood as a culture. The recent destruction of Buddha Rupa overseas flags up this need. We have expanded our client expectations at the World Fellowship of Buddhists and we ought to be able to provide more historical integration between organisations by use of the Internet. Our number one priority is to make sufficient causes for this case study of history to happen. An overall improvement in history processing was to get our Library catalogue on to the Internet with 3728 book titles available for viewing. You can view the John D. Hughes Collection on our website http://www.bdcu.org.au. The John D. Hughes Collection includes our Library. A new series of information sources and Internet access together with ISYS allows us access to new knowledge resources. They can add new products when they have designed new databases, new networks and new communication technology. May you turn the purpose of learning into practice to find peace. May you be well and happy.
This script was written and edited by: John D. Hughes, Leanne Eames, Lisa Nelson, Evelin Halls and Tim Browning.
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: Compiled by: Bhikkhu Ariyesako, A Lay Guide to the Bhikkhu’s Rules (1995) Buddha Dhamma Hermitage. Parivara XII.2 from Venerable Bhikkhu Thanissaro's The Buddhist Monastic Code (p1-2). Achaan Chah, edited by Jack Kornfield and Paul Breiter, A Still Forest Pool (1985) The Theosophical Publishing House. Phra Ajaan Suwat Suvaco, Fistful of Sand (2000). W.A.V.E. Wisdom Audio Visual Exchange. Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, The first ten years of Suan Mokkh (1990) The Dhamma study and practice group. From our
ISYS text retrieval system: I:\ida\radio66a.doc For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us. |
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This Radio Script is for Free Distribution. It
contains Buddha Dhamma material and is provided for the purpose of
research and study. © Copyright. The Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. |