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At present, ten of our Members are attending the 20th World Fellowship of Buddhists Conference at the Nan Tien Temple in Wollongong, New South Wales.

What will be the order of business?

Date: 29 October, 1998 to 2 November 1998

Venue: Nan Tien Temple, Berkeley, NSW, Australia

This Chinese Temple is the largest in Australia.

On 28 November 1992, the Foundation Stone Ceremony of the Australian 30 million dollar Temple was held.

Venerable Master Hsing Yun from Taiwan performed this Ceremony.

Most of the 1 million dollar funding came from Buddhist practitioners in Taiwan.

Since inception, several Nuns under the guidance of the Abbess Venerable Man Chien have been caring for the Temple.

The Temple operates as the International Buddhist Association Of Australia Incorporated.

Reverend Shin is the Secretary of the Organising Committee.

Australia is the host country for this year's World Fellowship of Buddhists Conference for the first time.

This honour arises from the recognition that Buddha Dhamma practice in this country has reached a certain level of maturity and that the karmic accumulation of the many, many Buddhist practitioners in this country is sufficient to drive this agenda.

We all desire improvement and to associate with the wise of many countries.

The Monks, Nuns, Bodhisattvas and lay person organisers of the various World Centres meet together to plan the future of Buddha Dhamma in this World.

They do not meet to practice politics and they abstain from interfering in national issues.

They work through consensus and good will and whenever they are considering something, they have the capacity to stop and pause, and to "look and wait" by suspending reactions or slowing them down.

By this method of mind control, they are not taken by surprise or provoked or tempted to hasty action. This means that they refrain from busying themselves unnecessarily and by this method, external frictions can be reduced and internal tensions can be loosened up between Members from the various World Centres.

Followers know that their task is to keep their minds concentrated so that they can understand others' viewpoints.

All Members strive to avoid seeing situations in a fragmentary manner because if this view is held, misconceptions are bound to arise.

The shadow-like World of views and opinions and self-reference can hardly be shaken by intellectual convictions.

What is needed to dissolve the false conceptions of unity created under the influence of the egocentric attitude is considerable patience and the avoidance of acting on poor information about sham unities which ultimately lead to disorientation of the original agenda under discussion at a conference.

The good will of all the delegates is needed because we cannot see that discussing something that happened four or five decades ago has any bearing on premeditated good thought (sasankharika-kusala) which must be transformed into a spontaneous good thought (asankharika-kusala-citta).

According to the Venerable Nyanaponika Thera, in the psychology of the Abhidhamma, such a thought, if combined with knowledge, takes the first place in the scale of ethical values.

This saying, paraphrased in Pali terms, would be sasankharena asankharikam pattabbam, which means "by premeditated intentional effort spontaneity can be won".

We have to set up a deliberate slowing down by pausing and stopping if we are to avoid the impetuosity, rashness and heedlessness of the untrained mind.

The demands of modern life make it impractical to introduce such a slow down of functions into the routine of the average working day.

In a commentary to the Satipatthana Sutta, it is said that the slowing down of movements may help regaining lost concentration on a chosen object.

By this method, the average rhythm of our everyday actions, speech and thoughts will also become more quiet and peaceful.

The habit of prematurely cutting off processes of thought, or slurring over them, has assumed serious proportions for persons in the modern urban civilisation.

Restlessly, they clamour for new stimuli in increasingly quicker succession just as they demand increasing speed in their means of locomotion.

This rapid bombardment of impressions has generally blunted sensitivity, and thus refined persons needing new stimuli, louder stimuli, coarser stimuli and so on.

This means that a shallow mental breath appears which is a symptom of growing superficiality and the frightening spread of nervous disorders in Western countries.

It may well be the start of a general deterioration of human consciousness in its qualitative level, range and strength.

Sustained attention leads to a fuller picture of the object in all its aspects. We have to sustain our attention beyond the first impact that an object or words have if we are to discover the next level of meaning of the object or the words.

We can never understand things if we view them in artificial isolation so we must be careful not to over analyse our data until it becomes lost in minute detail.

Sustained attention is the nourishing soil for the growth of intuition.

We must try to avoid floating or slipping away (anapilapanata), like pumpkin-pots on the surface of water as put by the earlier commentators.

At all costs, we must practice non-superficiality.

With these principles in mind, the design of databases and search engines becomes less elite.

Browsing and user self-help has to be designed into the topology of our systems. Browsing should be designed to be as open as possible. Browsing should be provided free of charge.

If the user wishes to leave our systems at our Centre with a hard copy print out, this must have a fee for service. For example, coin in the slot for photocopying services or printing from the screens of our computers.

Borrowing from our Library involves a fee.

Inquiries to our Library can be automated to a certain extent by use of search engines operating within our own records and outside our Organisation's resources from Internet searches.

As the system evolves and particular services go to Government, business, industry or academia, we consider inquiries from such institutions would involve a fee.

This means we regard information as a saleable commodity or as a special community service within Australia for which governments are prepared to pay for.

This idea is in line with the Victorian Government's Victoria 21 Skills.net Project. The aim of the program is to establish a network of Skills.net Projects across Victoria providing free or low cost access and training in on-line services and the Internet for those in the community whom otherwise would not have such access.

Groups and organisations across Victoria have been invited to apply for funding to help set up and run a Skills.net project.

The Victorian Government's Policy, "Victoria 21 - Into the Information Age" is the policy basis for the Victoria 21 - Skills.net Project.

The Victorian Government's multimedia strategy is intended to place Victoria as a leader rather than a follower or minor participant in the electronic revolution.

May you be well and happy.

This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes and Leanne Eames.

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