|
NAMO
TASSA
|
'THE
BUDDHIST HOUR'
|
|
Hillside
Radio 1620 AM, 87.6 FM & 88.0 FM |
|
|
The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast for Sunday 6 May 2001
This script is titled: Report on the Progress of Our Spiritual Training Centre Activities for the World Buddhist University.
Tomorrow, Monday 7 May 2001 we celebrate Versak 2544 B.E. Each year Buddhists from around the world join in Versak festivities to commemorate and pay respect to the life and teachings of the Lord Buddha, who was born 2544 years ago. Versak occurs on the first full moon day in May each year.
Versak this year, is on Monday 7 May and John D. Hughes, Founder of the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. and Vice-president of the World Fellowship of Buddhists will join with Members of the Venerable Sangha (Buddhist Monks and Nuns), Members and Friends of our Centre and representatives of the Federal, State and Local Government at our Upwey Centre to celebrate this special day.
We are grateful that the Prime Minister of Australia, the Honorable Mr. John Howard has sent the following message to our Centre in Celebration of Versak:
“It gives me great pleasure to provide this message in support of the celebration of Versak, the Lord Buddha’s Day.
Buddhists are renowned for the value they place on peaceful co-existance and the importance they attached to their search for harmony between the physical and spiritual aspects of life. This festival commemorating the birth, enlightenment and death of Sakyamuni Buddha is a wonderful opportunity to further promote these beliefs and to honour the memory of Lord Buddha’s compassion.
Over the past century, Australia has fostered a truly multicultural society that respects and encourages communities to pursue their individual cultures and beliefs within an Australian context. It is my hope that Australia continues in this direction and maintains a society in which equality, mutual understanding and respect remain as fundamental tenets of our way of life.
I send my best wishes to all members of the Buddhist Community participating in this festival and congratulate the organisers on what I am sure will be a highly successful event”.
Coinciding with this year’s celebration of Versak, Buddhist Regional Centres of the World Fellowship of Buddhists will have a target to observe the year, 7 May 2001-26 May 2002 as the “International Year of Metta (Loving-Kindness). After the end of all our meetings/seminars and/or religious performances, the diffusion of Metta (Loving-Kindness) will be observed by reciting the following Pali and English versions of the:
Diffusion of Metta or Loving Kindness:
Sabbe Satta; (May all sentient beings),
Avera Hontu; (Be free from enmity),
Abyapajjha hontu; (Be free from ill will),
Anigha hontu; (Be free from suffering),
Sukhi attanam pariharantu; (Live a happy life).
At our Centre, this will occur every Monday, Tuesday and Friday nights after meditation, Morning Chanting and other special occasions and functions.
On Monday our Centre’s Versak celebrations will begin at 3.30am with chanting by our Members to coincide with the full moon. Dana (lunch) will be offered to the Venerable Monks, followed by John D. Hughes welcoming guests with a Versak Address.
In his Versak Address, John D. Hughes will speak about our progress as a Spiritual Training Centre for the World Buddhist University. The Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. is a peak training organisation that operates as a focused self-help organisation. As part of our Versak celebration an exhibition of rare Ch’an paintings by Ch’an Master John D. Hughes will be held at our Centre. The exhibition will open at 1.30pm and all paintings on display will be available for purchase. You are welcome to visit us to celebrate this auspicious day.
For today’s radio show, we would like to read the Versak Address by John D. Hughes for you:
I wish to welcome you Venerable Sirs, Honorable Sirs and Madams, Members and Friends.
This Versak, I wish to report to you on one of our least known performances.
It is our Master Plan to hone our linguistic skills to preserve scholarship in this place.
If you think my talk is too full of compliments for our staff, you are correct. It is designed to give what psychologists call “positive re-enforcement behaviour”. We hold that praise for good work adds to our Member’s self-confidence. Some persons are automatically suspicious of those who praise them. How many times have you heard the phrase, “Oh you’re just saying that”?
Real compliments are a fine art. Most compliments have one of three weaknesses.
These common weaknesses are: the compliment, “damning with faint praise”; the “gotcha” compliment; and the “patronizing parent” compliment.
One Buddhist precept is not to flatter. The reason for this precept is obvious. Kurt Vonnegut says he hates the words, “I love you” because the only possible answer is, “I love you too”.
For Vonnegut, dealing with his incomprehensibility of suffering and death, what else could he say?
One writer has commented that:
“The purpose of Vonnegut’s comedy is not to provide access to reality.
The characters of Cats Cradle (Delacorte, 1971) are free, but their experience does not make sense to them.
Though there is no logical answer to man’s question, “I? Why?,” to Vonnegut existence is compelling.
Unlike conventional Western inclusive comedy in which all ends well, Vonnegut’s is exclusive, annihilating by treating it as a joke.
Because logic cannot make logical an illogical world, he has tried boundless illogic.” Another writer commented that:
“Numerous traditional aspects of American humour are present in this work: the tall tale; the unreliable narrator, the Negro minstrel (Bokonon), comedy in a grim situation (ice-9, the ultimate weapon), grotesque naturalism, incongruous language, narrative objectivity in a chaotic situation, satire, anecdote, the Westerner character, alazon-eiron relationship; point counter point, avoidance or deprecation of extramarital sex, the humourless narrator, and sentimentality.”
This is the old yarn spinner overwhelmed by his own tale that is antilinguistic devices.
You, too, do not wish to think you give praise only as a response to flattery.
One way to enhance your power of praise is to take opportunities to use it in public. So brace yourself, you may be the next person I praise.
Long range planning for our learned papers is risk-taking decision making. It is the responsibility of our style policy maker, whether entrepreneur or manager.
He or she must be rational and systematic and must not substitute facts for judgement, nor science for good management.
The systematic organisation of our long range style planning research task to supply our Members with knowledge should strengthen our manager’s judgement, leadership, and vision in how to generate credibility for the World Buddhist University in Thailand.
We are a Regional Centre of the World Fellowship of Buddhists.
We have a charter for the World Buddhist University as a Spiritual Training Centre.
Perhaps, to hone our skills we should state we are all amateurs in linguistics. This means to some extent that some of our words may be obscure. At present, we have no doctorates majoring in linguistics at our Centre.
Very simply put, we write in a style suitable for critical readers. We try to write in an international style for those persons who use English as a second language.
At times our research papers may be addressing our fellow Australians or local Politicians, so in such cases, we can use a little of the local argot. But, we strive to be clear in what we teach.
We often supply a glossary that selects to define what is obscure. Our glossary may supply translations or offer the meaning of foreign words we chose to use.
The short definition may not give us what we want to convey.
We accept that our style could let occasional prolixity occur in our glossary writings. We do not demand our writings should always be easy reading, but we do not wish them to be florid or trite.
We concur with Swift that proper words in proper places make the true definition of a style.
For example, we sometimes introduce an “unpopular” story. If we mention the social security system in our radio scripts we are not against telling our fellow Australians of the future reduction in average pensions that must occur. “Antilinguism” is avoidance.
Covertly our big picture is, we are trying to train “antilinguism” out of popular Australian culture.
Do not misquote us, that we have an “antilingham” policy or you will not get the comfy armchair treatment at our Centre.
Our work force, like our population, is getting older. We must tell Members that the current Australian social welfare culture is no longer feasible in economic terms unless there is more wealth generation in Australia.
To hone our work skills we need to reject “antilinguism” arising because it stops thought about reality.
Australians admire laconic fellows. One of them was a suicidal sheep poacher. He didn’t say much as his billy boiled.
Another of our heroes is Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee). His narrow vocabulary resonates with “antilinguism” of the childish persons in our society.
We hate to admit “Paul Hogan” is late middle-aged and is slowing down. We have to admit that most persons slow down at his age to become more laconic.
Be warned - if we live long enough, this could happen to you. But help is on the way.
Our Buddhist counter-culture combats “antilinguism” by writing radio broadcasts as a more subtle culture than is commercially available. We praise older persons (not merely on the grounds that they are old) but because they are worthy of praise, if and only if they refine their work skills.
We are very careful to avoid criticism of the elderly who are incompetent or incoherent in their arguments because we remember the bad press that a former Australian Prime Minister drew on himself by calling a heckler a “silly old bugger”.
We avoid such vicissitudes of language in the interests of international public relations. How tactful ought we be when we tell our older Members to change their culture or waste the rest of their life. Talk or perish miserably.
This is what we tell Members, this is our pitch.
How do we introduce our pitch?
We say in our Western culture, several factors contribute to the belief that there is an approaching “Death of Language.” In the 1930’s and 40’s, logical positivism and so called “general semantics” questioned the adequacy of language for communication.
We say some prominent aestheticians have argued for the superiority of “thinking in and through visual patterns” over verbalisation.
In ‘Reading the Mind - Advice for Meditators’, Ajarn K. Khao-suan-luang says ‘If you concentrate on knowing just a little, you’ll end up with more true insight than if you try knowing a lot of things.
It is through wanting to know a lot of things that we can end up deluded. We wander around in our deluded knowledge, thinking and labeling things, but knowledge which is focused and specific, when it really knows, is absolute. This is Prajna-Paramita.’ We teach this.
Our pitch continues with:
There is an “antilinguism” in voguish practice of transcendental meditation and among the exponents of body language. Computerised language gives us a “quasi-mathematical” type of “reductive sub-language.”
Our pitch concludes with:
The contemporary youth cult embraces an “infantile style of speech, in which a minimal vocabulary is generalised to all contingencies, words become the barest labels, and the act of speaking consists in making vague gestures”.
We will not entertain “antilinguism”. We are more interested to see our Members run towards refulgent scholarship.
Our pitch is actualised in two ways.
Firstly, we strive to be two levels above popular culture in Australia in our choice of words for our radio broadcast scripts.
Secondly, we aim to design about 3% to 5% of our typical radio script content to third order knowledge, and about 12% to 18% to second order knowledge.
We have no wish to develop the next level of “antilinguism” within our World Buddhist University scholastic boundaries.
We have shown you the high ground. Will you accept our mission? It is not impossible.
Thank you very much for your kind attention. Please accept our sincere praise for listening with sustained attention to our pitch.
May you be well and happy.
Thank you very much. Perhaps next time, we will offer you the comfy armchair.
This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes, Julian Bamford, Lisa Nelson, Anita Svensson and Evelin Halls.
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.
Document Statistics
For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
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. |