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According to Raymond Tschumi (1975), it is dangerous to assert, as certain sociologists do, that there is necessary parallelism between culture and society.

Against this undemonstrable hypothesis we may cite the fact that societies which do not burn books continue to incorporate the values of extinct societies in their cultures.

As for the conflict between the two cultures, it may be attributed to a morbid state or to a social crisis, but in order to detect this disease one must first recognise the healthy state from which it is a deviation.

The claim of present-day sociologists to recognise only objectivity or "realism" is evidence of a morbid disequilibrium, against which young persons quite rightly revolt.

This official and profitable reductionism feeds on intellectual laziness, political stagnation, and reassuring dogmatism, and it has but one object, if any at all: to escape genuine human responsibility and to try to escape from all identity, from all humanity.

So, there are at least two types of experience with overlap we recognise.

Once we resolve our minor cultural conflicts, we are likely to find ourselves on some sort of bodhisattva path.

There are no medals for achievement along the bodhisattva path.

When we consider that the tens of thousands of bodhisattvas we know who are alive today, and the hundreds of thousands of Bodhisattvas in human birth who we know lived in the last two and a half thousand years, practiced and continue to practice without too much publicity in this world, the Nobel Peace prize awarded to the bodhisattva, His Holiness The Dalai Lama, appears as an aberration in more silent traditions.

Common-sense sanity is the mark of a developed person who is not shaken by the arising and falling of events in the world.

Such a person is unlikely to complain in the conventional sense, but would point out discrepancies in an organisation, or in poor behaviour of Members of the organisation, he or she runs to help other persons.

One great bodhisattva from Sri Lanka who passed away recently was the Venerable Piyadassi Mahathero.

In his lifetime, he visited our Centre, and by his dhamma talks and writings, he inspired many persons.

The Venerable taught that knowing where you are and which of the five hindrances are being restrained by you is part of the Path of Buddha's Teachings.

The five hindrances are: sensuality (kamacchanda); ill will (vyapada); obduracy of mind and mental factors (thina-middha) restlessness and flurry (uddhacca-kukkucca) and doubt (vicikiccha).

If these things appearing and disappearing on the senses are not restrained, then the Venerable explained that you get a three fold nutrient which is the admittance of lust and hate to our six senses.

The nutrient of non-restraint is shown by lack of mindfulness and of clear comprehension (asati asampajanna).

In the Pali language the "a" in front of a noun is a negation such as "non" in English which comes from Latin "non" meaning "not".

Non is the first word in a large number of Latin phrases, chiefly legal, some of which have been in more or less frequent use in English contexts.

In the majority of compounds of "non-" the hyphen is usually retained: but it is commonly omitted in the case of a few words, such as nonconformist, nonentity and nonsense, in which the etymology has to some extent been lost.

It is self evident that to care for your physical health, you must have measurements of the state of your body.

Last week, one of our Members became unwell and when his blood was tested in the local hospital, it was found his blood sugar level was too high.

Under excellent medical advice, he has been put on a more healthy diet and is given medication to lower the sugar levels.

Daily tests show how his body is responding to the treatment he is receiving and this testing gives a measure of how the sugar level in his body is reacting to the treatment.

This is an area where Western medicine performs well.

More importantly, as a practitioner of Buddha Dhamma, he can learn to live with the fact that it is the nature of the human body to become unwell again and again, or become well again and again in this very life.

What happens is dependent on his merit made in the past times.

It is clear to him that his birth in a choice place like Australia with superior hospital treatment available to all citizens, did not arise from mere chance.

He has sufficient insight and understanding of cause and effect to understand and accept his physical condition.

Because of his merit, he can have a rest from his work at our Centre by caring for our computer Local Area Network (our LAN) which recently he upgraded and re-engineered for use by our Members.

The LAN system runs 24 hours a day, is robust and has given no trouble in his absence.

Accordingly, he has few duties and can rest to recover without too much flurry and worry about our LAN.

Worry or self-talk is one form of restlessness.

The measure of the self-talk in a person's mind, as it performs his or her mental life, in the case where the person's body functions become unbalanced by nature, is a measure of mental development.

In Buddhist taxonomy, the mental attainment of being able to lower the usual flurry and worry that occurs when the body does what it is good at, namely - becoming unwell, is a good sign of mental health.

According to Chogyam Trungpa: "Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquillity, nor is it attempting to become a better person.

It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes.

We provide space through the simple discipline of doing nothing. Actually, doing nothing is very difficult. At first, we must begin by approximating doing nothing, and gradually our practice will develop.

So meditation is a way of churning out the neuroses of mind and using them as part of our practice. Like manure, we do not throw our neuroses away, but we spread them on our garden; they become part of our richness."

"Frivolousness" refers to the extra and unnecessary mental and physical acts which we keep ourselves busy in order not to see what actually is happening in a situation.

Whenever there is a frivolous emotional situation and concept growing out of it, then this ground should be completely extinguished with a direct blow, that is, by seeing directly what is not right and wholesome.

This is what is called the Sword of Manjushri, which cuts the root of dualistic conceptualisation with one blow. Here a person should really be "uncompassionate" and illogical.

The real objective is just to squash the frivolousness, the unwillingness to see things as they actually are, which appears rational.

Frivolousness does not really get a chance to feel the whole ground. It is preoccupied with reacting to your projections as they bounce back at you.

True spontaneity feels the texture of the situation because it is less involved with self-consciousness, the attempt to secure oneself in a given situation.

It is obvious that, when you are really squashing frivolousness, you should feel pain, because there is a certain attraction toward the occupation of being frivolous.

By squashing it you are completely taking away the occupation. You begin to feel that you have nothing to hold on to any more, which is rather frightening as well as painful.

What do you do then, after you have extinguished everything?

Then you must not live on your heroism, on having achieved something, but just dance with the continuing process of energy that has been liberated by this destruction."

In general, the activity of experience would not be called "culture".

An experience content differs from a natural datum content inasmuch as it takes on a value for experience, which is free to be substituted by another natural datum: culture is at once what nature contains and what raises nature to a higher order.

Unique as experience contents are, they acquire value only by being exchanged, and they cannot do this by themselves: it is experience that gives them value and transforms the nature of culture.

Since nature remains silent, one cannot enter into a dialogue with nature itself, but only with what it is made to say and the sense which is given to it.

When this type of knowledge is understood each for himself or herself in one life, most likely the next rebirth (life) can be superior.

Hence, we say it is likely you need lifetimes of learning to come to the Buddha Way at the completion level.

Obviously, this helps explain why persons are born from different causes.

Sometimes we read about or meet some Buddhist person who seems self contained in this life, is good enough from birth, does not waste time, and knows enough to be able to achieve great things this life.

Thousands of examples of such persons exist in Buddhist records.

A common cultural pattern can be seen in each case.

For example, consider Dae Poep Sa Nim who was born in Korea in 1946, the youngest child in a family of eleven daughters.

By the time she was thirteen years old, although she was from a Christian family, she went looking for a good Teacher in the mountains.

After a long search, she found her Teacher, an old master who lived away from others. She studied with him for five years and was given transmission.

She left Korea at the age of nineteen and settled in Hawaii. She decided that she wanted ten years of social life experience before she started teaching.

She went to university, had a family, worked and travelled, practised privately, and never told persons of her attainment. After ten years, she opened the Dharma Buddhist Temple of Hawaii, and began teaching.

In 1985, she received the "World Peace Award".

In 1985, with Zen Master Seung Sahn, she founded the Centre Zen in Paris, France.

She was the first woman in 1500 years of Korean Buddhism to receive the title "Dae" meaning "great".

How does rapid development of a person to "great" happen?

How was she tested in life?

Does it differ to the way we are tested?

Persons who understand even a little of Buddha's Teaching can explain testing of such accomplishment because they have heard of cause and effect.
For persons who are "outsiders", persons who do not understand cause and effect, the whole concept of "testing" remains a mystery and they postulate about the causes of attainment.

For persons who do know cause and effect, they do not believe such remarkable talent is given from Mother or Father nor is it God given.

As cause and effect (karma) becomes more widely taught to more persons with their classical Western culture, there will be less "outsiders" guessing rather than looking for themselves at each stage of development of such persons.

Just as it is going to be hard for computer literate generations to imagine a pre-electronic world, it will be hard for persons who are passably literate by the standards of a print culture, with all its standardised lettering, to imagine life in the now vanished scribal cultures, the worlds of clay tablets, papyrus rolls, parchments and manuscript copying.

It is only recently that our societies have begun to acknowledge there are millions of persons in the industrialised world with literacy problems.

We talk about "future shock" or the "shock of the new" but it really strikes home when middle-aged executives are replaced by younger persons who can live in an information rich culture and fast track change.

For others, it is that their children who do not use their brains are better informed of issues than those who do because their children's first search for information is the Internet, not a recall of things learned from a library.

This amazing revolution is that a container other than a brain had been found for information and a particular type of reference; we are starting to see that certain types of data were better off outside our brains and our mouths than inside them.

Writing requires considerable skill and powers of concentration; traditionally it was a solitary craft that required a kind of monastic dedication.

Last Sunday, a woman who is probably the most literate Nun ever to visit Australia called on our Centre and offered us an English translation she had done of the most profound of the Pali suttas, the Satipathana, with her commentary notes.

At law, the venerable Sister owns copyright in her translation.

We are happy to report the Venerable has given our organisation permission to print this text for free distribution. In time, we will add it to our web-site www.bdcu.org.au.

The gift of Dhamma (in Pali: Dhamma Dana) is the highest gift one person can offer to another: it excels all other gifts.

This sutta details the completion stages for Buddha Dhamma practice.

For a start, we have placed five paper copies in our library.

This week, our Members are typing the new translation onto our electronic data warehouse.

Venerable is about to offer us a further 60 Pali texts she has translated to the English language.

Sadhu, Sadhu, Sadhu.

One of our major goals as a library is to make sure the output of such professional elites as translators can reach more persons.

Education is worth more than $3 billion a year to Australia's export industry - the second-largest earner in the service industry after tourism.

Victoria is winning about 35 per cent of this income.

At our Centre, we train persons to learn for the information age but we do not issue any form of certification for attending classes.

Most of our teaching is at no charge.

Seldom have we sought or received Government funding.

Because we encourage professional persons who understand what is happening in other countries, we stay relevant and global in our outlook and attend to masses of detailed good cultural information.

We invite persons who want to change their culture and can time manage their own affairs effectively and can afford to give us a few hours a week of their time.

Others may wish to make merit and add freely to our modern resources to help us.

This week, we are appealing and looking for a person or company who can install a wall mounted vacuum cleaner and ducting pipes which we have been given.

Apart from reducing the time taken to clean our Hall of Assembly, the ducted vacuum system will reduce the risk of wiping off the contents of PC hard disks by disturbances in the electromagnetic field around our computers.

We also wish to appeal for a sponsor who will install or pay for three phase power to our Hall of Assembly, either in part or in full.

If you can help, please ring us at 9754 3334, again, 9754 3334.

We run our Hall of Assembly as a learning centre supported by Members' and friends' donations and offerings from persons like you.

To maximise the merit, we advise gifts are not tax deductible.


May you be well and happy.

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

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As we, the Chan Academy Australia, Chan Academy being a registered business name of 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 another 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 Chan Academy Australia (Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.)

This Radio Script is for Free Distribution. It contains Buddha Dhamma material and is provided for the purpose of research and study.

Permission is given to make printouts of this publication for FREE DISTRIBUTION ONLY. Please keep it in a clean place.

"The gift of Dhamma excels all other gifts".

For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us.

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