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NAMO
TASSA
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'THE
BUDDHIST HOUR'
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Hillside
Radio 1620 AM, 87.6 FM & 88.0 FM |
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The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast for Sunday 3 June 2001
Today’s
program is entitled:
Learning depends on the development of competence. Competence is the power, ability or capacity to perform a given task.
Scholarship is the result of having access to good research tools to access higher order knowledges and the help of many research assistants who can understand the scholars’ needs.
Noble Prize Winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born in Aracatacata, Colombia in 1928, studied at the university of Bogota and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas and New York.
He is the author of several novels and collections of stories, including No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Innocent Erendira and Other Stories, In Evil Hour, Leaf Storm and Other Stories, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera and the internationally best-selling One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Marquez was awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1982.
In The General and his Labyrinth Marquez attributes his scholarship to the many assistants involved in this work.
He gives thanks to his many ‘assistants’ including Alvaro Mutis, whom he had listened to for many years discussing his plans to write about Simon Bolivar’s final voyage along the Magdalena River.
It was only after Mutis had relegated to oblivion his projected book (as so many writers do), which had seemed to me so ripe, and in its style and tone so polished, that Marquez dared asked permission to write the book himself.
The book would not have been possible without the help of those who threshed the same ground for a century and a half before him to make his literary audacity easier.
He also had many friends who took as their own affair, and one of the utmost importance, not only his most serious questions, but also the most trivial, such as the shoe size of one of the characters appearing in his book.
Numerous historians also availed him of their own detailed and expert knowledge, while one Jorge Eduardo Ritter, Ambassador of Panama to Colombia and then Foreign Minister of his country, made several special plane trips just to bring him books of his that could not be found elsewhere.
His other assistants included, biographers, poets, geographers, astronomers, linguists and the last old-fashioned typesetter in Mexico.
His attitude of scholarship is evident in the millimeter-by-millimeter hunt for contradictions, repetitions, irrelevancies, mistakes and typographical errors, and in his pitiless examination of language and spelling, which took him through in seven different versions of the manuscript.
The following is a quotation from The General in his Labyrinth.
“The General remained on board until nightfall, when he went ashore to sleep in an impoverished encampment. While he was on the barge, he received the ranks of the widows, the impoverished, the helpless of all the wars who wanted to see him.
He remembered almost all of them with astounding accuracy. Those who had remained were dying of poverty, others had gone in search of new wars to survive or had become highwaymen, like countless veterans of the liberating army everywhere in the nation.
One of them summed up their feelings in a phrase: "We have independence, General, so now tell us what to do with it.” In the euphoria of victory, he had taught them to speak to him this way, with the truth in their mouths, but now truth had changed masters.
‘Independence was a simple question of winning the war,’ he said to them. ‘The great sacrifices must come afterwards, to make a single nation out of all these countries.'
‘We made nothing but sacrifices General,’ they said.
He would not give an inch: ‘More are needed,’ he said. ‘Unity has no price.’”
How did scholarly persons learn in past times and who would help them?
The students of Leonardo da Vinci would attach themselves to the great Master for decades, during which time they would attend to their Teachers worldly needs, only coming to paint after years of being in the company of their Teacher.
There was no ready mixed paint in those days, so they would grind the paint for the pictures. Some of the pigments were poisonous so they had to take great care not to pollute the studio.
We run the Ch’an Academy from our Centre and teach in the traditional manner.
Students of great calligraphy masters in ancient China and Japan would grind the ink for the master. Sometimes, it was said that the ink stick was ground 100,000 times in the ink slab by the students. The ink so ground was superior and blooms on the rice paper to become more rich and dense as time goes by.
The judgment of a true connoisseur is based ultimately on his or her personal experience. Hearsay is ignored and he or she confronts the work of art itself, alone with their reflections, and carries on a genuine dialogue with it.
He or she can detect a forgery by inspection of the ink and paper.
The modern Chinese term for “connoisseur” is a binome, Chien-shang-chia, combining the word chien (mirror, or something that reflects and discriminates) with shang (to enjoy, to appreciate) and chia (a verb suffix for “one who”).
The Chinese term chien-shang, however, should properly be defined in English only as discrimination on the highest and subtlest levels.
Personal cultivation, taste and artistic sensibility must be not only more acute but also deeper than those of the talented amateur.
A connoisseur must be able to tell a work of original artistic intention from a close copy and to sort out original works of inferior rank from superior examples of deception. This ability is in the goals of Students on our Ch’an Academy.
For the modern student of Chinese art, as for the traditional connoisseur, some actual experience in the techniques of painting and calligraphy is almost mandatory.
To know the actual experience, the planning that is necessary to compose and execute a picture without mechanical corrections, the sense of timing that must be present when different materials respond under different circumstances, the ways in which different brushes are handled to produce certain effects, the effects of overdrawing - all this knowledge largely determines how much we see and how clearly we understand what we see.
The connoisseur of old China was esteemed in his immediate circle and in his class for his powers of discernment, that he had cultivated in greater depth and breadth than had his educated peers. This is the ideal model of our Ch’an Academy.
In the sixteenth century, Albrecht Durer wrote notes for a projected manual entitled ‘Speis der Malerknaben’ that translates as ‘Food for Young Painters’.
“Durer’s great work for the instruction of ‘posterity’.... Never went further than an outline of which a few fragments were completed. The only portions printed during his lifetime were the ‘Underweyssung der messung’ (Instruction concerning measurements), which appeared in 1525, and the ‘Underricht zu befestigung der Stett, Schloss, und Flecken,' a treatise on fortification, published in 1527.
His treatise on Proportion appeared after his death, in 1528. All of these went through numerous editions and Latin translations of them were printed in Paris.
The treatise on Proportion was to have been dedicated to Pirckheimer and one of Durer’s friends wrote a dedication for him. There is the draft of a letter by him, however, in which he criticizes the style of the proposed dedication, and his comments shed an unusually clear light on his attitude.”
In his notes for ‘food for young painters’, Durer wrote “ Would to God it were possible for me now to see the works and art of the future great Masters, they who are not yet born. For I believe I should improve myself.
Likewise, how often have I seen great art and worthy things in my sleep, the which do not befall me waking. But when I wake the memory leaves me.”
“... If I kindle a flame and all the increase and betterment of Art be added thereto, there may be in time a fire stirred up therefrom that shall lighten the whole world. And since it is pleasing to behold a fine man, I will begin to work upon the proportions of men and thereafter, if God gives me time, write of further matters and work therein. But I know well that the Envious will not keep their venom to themselves. Yet nothing shall prevent me. For great men have been compelled to suffer the like.”
Durer also wrote, “... Some men are also able to learn from all manner of arts, but not all have that capacity. But no man of sense is so rude that he is not able to learn some Thing to which his spirit most inclines him. Therefore, no man may be pardoned for learning nothing. For it is needful for the general profit, that we learn and report faithfully to posterity, and conceal naught. And so I purpose to set down something which certain men may be not incurious to behold. For Man’s most noble sense is Sight.”
We enjoy this approach to art at our Ch’an Academy.
We decide to set up a technical library at our Centre over two decades ago. Part of the Library Collection includes rare art books.
Some of our early helpers were English migrants.
There are three things that surfaced from the use of several English migrants as helpers in the library that they found hard to accept.
The first thing they found hard to accept was that days of Anglo-Australian dominance of our library was over in our collecting policy.
We made it clear it was our policy to collect Dhamma books and journals in non-English languages, including European languages and Asian languages such as Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese.
They keep placing these foreign language texts on the lowest shelves so they were out of sight.
We insisted they be placed up on higher shelves as a sign of respect and efforts to be made to translate them to get them into our catalogue.
Whenever we had a Chinese translator come to get the titles into the English language, they raised barriers to giving the translator priority over all other library tasks.
The second point they found hard to accept was we were building a specialised technical library for scholars and they had in mind that they were building some sort of general library for fairly uneducated persons like themselves. They were not graduates, so they thought that the type of books and journals we collected should be of a general nature rather than a specialised nature.
They could read a popular book by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, but could not read the technical articles in the Tibet journal to which we subscribe.
They had a preference for first order knowledge rather than higher order knowledge.
As computer technology was outside their culture at the time, the committee had difficulty in understanding that the library must be able to head in the direction of machine searchable references.
At present, we have most of the entire contents of our library catalogue titles on our Local Area Network (LAN), emails and our mailing list databases are also machine searchable. This gives us rapid access to good source material we need when it comes to writing radio broadcasts.
We determined that the level of writing of our radio broadcasts although they are generally popular, must touch on topics suitable for use by persons up to graduate or postgraduate study. They must contain 2nd and 3rd order knowledges.
The early English migrants who were helpers in our former library would have found the study and research needed to meet our notion of a regular weekly Buddhist Hour radio broadcast written at such a level as we demand a difficult one. They would not believe there was a global audience waiting for such writing.
Another thing the early workers of the library found hard to accept was the question of the value we place on Occupational Health and Safety issues. To improve fire rating we removed the plywood wall linings and replaced them with plaster boards to get a better fire rating. Beneath the plaster boards, we put sisalation and fibre glass insulation batts.
Wooden book cases were replaced with metal wall units. Cardboard magazine holders were replaced with metal holders.
For some years we were spending more money and effort on improving OH&S issues than we were spending on library books and supplies.
We are seeking funds for our next library upgrade this month.
We seek persons who understood why such issues were very important.
As we found more suitable persons having a wider vision of how we intended to use the library, we talked these English persons out of helping in the library.
The reason for this was that they impeded progress toward the modern systems.
Our present research assistants are happy to use our most advanced computer programs for researching on the TEXTLAN and look forward to the next advances in service we have in mind.
TEXTLAN is our text based local area network.
Our present librarian is an Australian with an M.A. in Japanese. She has flown internationally with Qantas and is happy in international settings.
She has worked as a rapporteur at W.F.B. Conferences. She trains her research assistants to respect all foreign language texts.
Always we are looking for more storage space.
The advances in our library science provide well organised storage caches with quick retrieval times.
One of these is onsite storage in metal shelving called Suite 11 and another is an offsite room (called Suite 11A) at a Members home. The second site has metal shelving provided by our Centre’s management.
As time goes by, it makes good sense to us to involve other persons with the opportunity to make merit by permitting us to store more of our spare journals, spare copies of books and other spare items we will offer for sale in the future.
The very nature of traditional means of cataloging books requires a focus on a uniform processes with minimum deviation in the type of entry of data. This type of operation cannot operate as a catalyst for creativity or new ideas.
We have extended our traditional approach to the ability to look up our library indices by placing them on our original Internet site that is connected to the Australian Library Gateway at www.nla.gov.au/libraries provided by the National Library of Australia Canberra ACT 2600.
You can scroll down the thousands of entries to get some idea of our collection.
At our Centre, the latest search engine we have installed on our LAN can search key words in book titles and/or authors within seconds.
We are about to set up a second web site for our library that will have a search engine on the site to make it more convenient for scholars to find what we have. At present we do not loan books on line. Our conservation policy is we only loan a book to paid library Members if we have five copies of the book on site.
We were forced to adopt this policy five years ago after we found some scholars borrowed our only copy of an out of print text and left the country without returning the rare text. We believe it is in the national interest that we place conservation of our library resources at a high level and wish to operate at low risk.
Copyright issues are an important precept to us.
We will not photocopy a book or pamphlet unless we have written permission from the author or owner.
Since we do not want to take a second rate growth path in our potential for scholarship we favour paths of development that are nimble and imaginative.
At the same time, with rapid change, we develop a strategy of spreading the risk, since a culture that avoids risk and places high value on security has a high risk of being overtaken.
We have an enormous advantage over any likely competitor. This is because we started two decades ago to build our collection so that we now have the bulk of the library collection comprising of ‘out of print’ texts.
Our photographic treasures are unique.
The main drive is to continue on a growth path where our scholars refer to and use our references for either practical teachings at our Centre or radio broadcast giving a thumbnail sketch of the state of art of some special topic.
We wish to be able to give authoritative comment of any particular Buddha Dhamma practice that is based on the Buddhist Canon.
The next improvement we have in mind is to claim back a small amount of our prime space and convert it to a suitable working station for one or two more part-time scholars on site and from our Wide Area Network (WAN) provide virtual space for several off-site scholars to cooperate on our leading edge research.
We need to make some of these changes rapidly so we do not stay within our old culture of putting up with cluttered space.
The main library space holding the John D. Hughes Collection has been improved and the next area that needs urgent revamping is the CGR office area.
An administration task force is needed to bring order to this office space during the next five day course.
We are concentrating on a complex data base system to access our photographic collection that we are placing in digital form on a second Local Area Network called PHOTOLAN.
The delivery time for PHOTOLAN to stream data will be 100 times faster to screen than our text-based LAN, hence it can provide colour photographs of good quality that are well indexed for research projects. It will be able to deliver photographs of rock specimens in high fidelity and paintings in fine detail.
Our scientific research plan requires minute examination of objects.
When you have on line a system that can zoom into both these types of high definition files, our research of a higher order can commence with ease of access to the object studied becoming easier.
This is our present direction of research in Study Area #1 at our Centre. We think our server will run Pentium 4 technology. Within the next six months, we intend to explore how to get more contributions for members and friends who are willing to provide suitable funds or know-how for caching our library photographic records at high speed.
If you feel you can help on this project, please contact us so you can work on our leading edge teams.
A variety of strategies are being used, with some designed to improve our organisation’s own ability to be entrepreneurial.
We have depth of management with most of our high cost, inefficient and wasteful processes either scaled down or heading towards best practice.
We are particularly in need of further reviewing the costs of our various fundraising projects to get them to be more effective within the legal restraints of accountability.
The benchmark we follow is to keep our documentation in accordance with the Gaming Commission of New South Wales best practice.
This permits our Company auditors to issue yearly reports that we are within the legal requirements. Recently, we have had the extra burden of filing the quarterly GST statements and paying on time.
Our accounting systems are the very latest but we still require extra persons to learn to operate our computer systems that track every dollar we make.
We wish to achieve more efficient and higher quality administration by reviewing processes, removing from decision making those who do not have a major stake in the outcome, and providing incentives for responsible and accountable risk-taking.
We intend to improve our learning skills by attending to the development arm. The developmental arm does not have to be a profit centre.
Our true profit will be when senior management is rewarded by seeing they have put in place long-term corporate development success for our organisation.
For tracking purposes, we establish a monetary value for the goods and services we deliver. We wish to see this figure reach Aust. $1million this year globally.
We intend to make a difference in the area of scholarship and publication this year. For more precise information on how we intend to achieve this see our different web sites. Australia has many thousands of vibrant, entrepreneurial companies.
We intend to take concrete steps to become closer to 20 of them this year so they can share the benefits our members obtain by our intense training in the good life.
May you be well and happy.
This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes, Julian Bamford, Leanne Eames, Julie O’Donnell, Tim Browning, Amber Svensson, Lisa Nelson, Anita Svensson.
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 Marilyn and Shen Fu, Studies in Connoisseurship, 1972, Pub: Trustees of Princeton University
Richard Friendenthal, Letters of the great artists, 1963, Pub: Thames and Hudson
David Uren et al. The New Entrepreneurial Opportunities within Australia’s reach (2000) Australian services Network and Acuity Consulting, Principal Author David Uren Contributing authors John Rimmer, David Forman
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in His Labyrinth 1991, Published by Penguin Group, Penguin Books Ltd, London England. Printed in Australia by Griffin Press.
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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. |