The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives

In De Legibus (III) written about 50 B.C., Cicero said, " the safety of the people is the supreme law".

Shakespeare, in his play, Julius Caesar, said:

"In her day every man shall eat in safety
Under his own vine what he plants; and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours".

The motto of the National Council of Industrial Safety, in the USA, since 1915, has been " Safety first".

Our organisation puts the safety of our Members at a very high level. This is because firstly, as a company we must do it by law and secondly, because we wish Members to live in safety.

The method of practicing safety originates in the mind training that we give to Members.

Having said that, our Occupational Health & Safety Records show that for the last month (July 1999), there were five minor accidents recorded. For example, one Member cut his hand when using a tool and another received a minor burn when placing wood into the metal fire stove. In all cases, the accident could have been avoided if the Members were wearing gloves provided.

Methods of reducing accidents are being further explored this year.

The mind framing needed is to raise the awareness that the way to be safe is never to feel secure. H.G. Bohn proposed this maxim in his handbook of proverbs published in 1865.

Persons, at times, become careless of the fact that their future depends on outcomes generated from their present actions.

There are five ways of practising things that deserve to become more widely known and practised by many persons with safety.

These five things are:

(1) Study (Pali: uggaham)

(2) Questioning (Pali: paripuccha)

(3) Appearance of meditation vision (Pali: upatthanam)

(4) Steadiness of meditation (Pali: appana)

(5) Characteristics of meditation (Pali: lakkhanam)

One view is that if a person were to seek safety (liberation) for oneself alone; it is not the correct motivation.

If our mother was drowning in a fierce river and we were safe on the bank, we would attempt to save her even at the risk of our own life.

In the same way, we, as laypersons, should maybe forego our own safety and happiness in order to save all mother sentient beings.

This view is because we are enmeshed in the world and want to have future rebirth.

This viewpoint is often held not to apply to a Monk or a Nun when practicing to leave the world.

Furthermore, just as the Buddha guides us along the Path, all sentient beings help us to achieve our goal in this way.

If a being causes us trouble we have the opportunity to practise patience.

If a being is in pain, we have the opportunity to develop compassion.

If a being is unhappy, we should practise loving-kindness.

We do not always come to safety by running away.

Mai Vo, a fellow traveller on the boat, told a Monk that 50% of all the refugees who fled Vietnam by water at the time of the communist takeover died before reaching a safe destination, many being killed in circumstances of great trauma and misery.

For those who lose their human life, we can help them to more safety by the transfer of our merit.

The Dai Le Vu Lan Ceremony was undertaken to free all souls lost at sea.

The great Protector Devas were invited to participate in the freeing of countless beings trapped in inauspicious and troubled states of existence.

A few years ago, concurrent to the Ceremony on the water, a convoy of 30 cars with a Victoria Police escort performed the same Ceremony on the roads of Melbourne, to benefit all beings who died fleeing for safety by roads.

When certain donations are made, the donor may tag the merit to help someone else.

To arrange to tag the merit from gifts to us, for others, we need to have expeditious acknowledgement of the name of the person who you wish to benefit.

If you require more information on the range of our activities which need your money to help service or buy increases in our capability to help others, please ring us on 9754 3334.

We are not able to receive Government funding because we are a religious organisation.

Religious bodies, per se, are excluded from direct Government funding under the guidelines set up by a secular Government.

Although we have many incidental skill-building teaching programs and because we rely more and more on our e-mail and data warehouse of good information; we have a policy not to issue any documents which can count as qualifications in a commercial sense.

Accordingly, we cannot be funded by Government agencies.

We encourage all Members to study further with outside institutions.

We do not waste our resources in duplicating what others are teaching but concentrate our efforts on teaching persons how to have a safe life because they are not afraid to learn how to study new things.

There are few safe places in the world where persons attempt to conquer the fear of learning how things really are.

There are many places where persons learn to send their minds to sleep by living in a fantasy world.

Just as there are few persons who can review a book without giving voice to their own ideas, so it is rare to provide the Teachings which help wake persons up when they become tired of playing with the toys of human life.

To offer safe self-help services, we depend on our own fund-raising.

We need public donations from persons like you to continue to operate our systems safely.

To operate safely requires the skill to stop persons suffering from mental fatigue when under instruction.

It is the middle way that enables persons to discover how to apply the right effort sufficiently and long enough to discover, without doubt, the outcome differences that arise from the application of good or bad information to the problems of life.

In the USA some years ago, a drug information program intended for school children was found, after some study, to turn persons receiving the program towards drug use compared with persons not receiving the program.

When we teach we have safety in mind as number one, so when we warn persons of the danger of drugs, we make sure we do not make the same errors.

We are in agreement with Premier Kennett that things should not be done which appear to be in favour, in any way, of any step that appears to sanction the use of drugs.

When we hand out information to Members or other interested persons such as Government Members, we are not playing politics. When we purchase expensive Dhamma reference books from overseas, we use them to help us to publish our Review that goes to 40 countries in the world.

For a free copy, contact our Centre.

Valuable capital items given, such as Buddha Images, are listed for safety on our fixed assets register.
We arrange books received to be stamped with the Centre's stamp for safety reasons.

In Australia, the well being of the public in terms of safety and health, including sanitation, fire prevention and vermin control, has been safeguarded to a high degree.

For instance, recent fires in old dwellings which resulted in fatalities are now perceived by the Australian public as being too high a risk to accept and the Government is now demanding existing fire prevention provisions be altered.

The law requires unsafe buildings to be demolished.

We have a definite plan to spend money, as it becomes available, to upgrade the safety of our existing buildings at our Centre.

Safe construction of suitable Vihar or Kutis is specified by Government building regulations.

Beams and joists, which support the roof of the structure, are specified under the Australian Standard Building Code.

The building must be able to withstand strong winds without blowing over.

Undersized construction material is illegal.

If second-hand material is used in building, they must be stress graded by a professional officer because it may be split or faulty.

We structure the image and style of our place so that it functions as a safe quality international working Buddhist Temple.

In the coming year, our Task Units have the responsibility to extend their efforts to manage maintenance of a series of new works to enhance the safety of our Buddha Garden.

Many good things are needed for a safe life - free from war, flood, famine and so on.

Triumph, success, wealth and gains in personal happiness, strength, fortune, long-life, beauty, prosperity and fame are wanted by all persons, but without helping others in the causes of these things they soon vanish and it is rare to have a hundred years of the safe life.

Yet our Teacher knows certain persons who have succeeded by cause and effect.

They are successful in their livelihood and their work ethic is so strong they never tire from helping many persons from getting safe blessings.

What is a safe blessing?

A safe blessing is one that does not cause other beings harm.

Earlier this century, Tan Achaan Mun invited Monks to practice with him in the forests of Thailand.

In those days, what were referred to as man-eating tigers were common.

These large animals were not sexist because they would kill and eat men, women and children.

There is a mantra to scare them away, but Tan Achaan Mun told his Monks not to use this because it caused headaches in the tiger and made them hate humans even more.

This is an example of an unsafe mantra.

Unfortunately today, some non-Buddhist persons are giving out unsafe mantras to the general public.

A small amount of analysis of what happens when rebirth occurs, or an analysis of the links leading to birth and death enables us to find many representations of what is safe and conceivable.

Concepts of birth and death links have been compared to being like a heavy black rope.

However, by skilful means a heavy rope can be used as a safety rope.

The very same rope that binds us up can be turned around to make a safe connecting escape rope.

Wrong linking together of a series of ropes can make you a bound prisoner.

Right linking of the same ropes can make a ladder so you can climb away and be a prisoner no more.

Our version of safety has many faces.

A benefactor temple has offered to burn our data onto a CD.

From time to time, he said he could arrange for a burnt CD to hold our latest catalogues.

When exploring the safety and capacity of the offer, we declined given that we fear a virus on their system. We follow safety, so would prefer to get the money to buy our own burner to control viruses.

Until we get more control of our output quality we will not take short cuts.

Many of our Members are graduates and some have second degrees, for example, MBA (Master of Business Administration), and MAJIT (Master of Arts in Japanese Interpreting and Translation).

Their skills, apart from being essential for library operating, reporting and planning tasks, are also useful to cover safety ideas in our occupational health and safety (OH&S), finance, and environment support policies.

Their capability to produce safe instructions for new Members and new end-users for their next-after-next teaching material will depend on the quality control we exercise on our data warehouse contents.

End-users must come to appreciate that if they rely on the completeness of the content of our library and data warehouse, it must be virus free.

We are very careful to stress that Members themselves must provide additional content for our data warehouse on a continuing basis.

Project technicalities need to be able to supply safe information suitable for current public relations activities and to list coming events this year, and for this reason we suggest additional OH&S performance indicators.

It is timely and interesting to review OH&S Legislation in Australia.

In Australia, the wellbeing of citizens is legislated in terms of safety and health issues in the work place.

Clean food is one of these issues.

Our Members use disposable plastic gloves when handling food at our Centre.

Such safety precautions are significant. We do not sell food.

Heavy fines are imposed to prevent the marketing or serving of contaminated food which is liable to cause illness.

Other legislation covers sanitation guidelines to prevent e coli counts from exceeding the acceptable limits in water supplies, food and in the environment in general.

In spite of these regulations, occasionally there are media reports of salmonella food poisoning in shops or on aircraft.

The hardest part of safety management will always be the selection and quality of leadership and the motivation of our Members that are our work force.

If this can be achieved, the deployment of resources and management of the environment is likely to take place to the satisfaction of the individual and the efficiency of the organisation.

The true welfare of persons is bound up with the ability to identify those staff whose cooperation is critical to the scheme and concentrate efforts to winning them to the side of prudent design of capital outlays needed for site refurbishment and growth.

Apart from OH&S issues within the obviously tangible physical structure designed for client guidance; we operate another not so obvious structure formulated for the same purpose.

The words we use for our chanting are safe and were written down about 2500 years ago.

Some words tell about the qualities of Buddha, which we praise.

Today's program is about safety.

Generally speaking, everyone cherishes a faith that will bring them to a good and safe way of living.

Your faith decides the way you live and the things you do.

You hope somehow you and your friends will be okay ­ that is to say that in the long run things will turn out to be okay for you and that your friends and you get benefits.

If you have friends, you hope they will help you when you need them.

Apart from Members and friends, we extend our safety ideas to animals.

For example, it must be safe for the many birds that visit over the four seasons, such as the wild ducks.

Stray cats or dogs must not be able to harm them.

But, at the same time, we do not wish to harm the stray cats or dogs.

This coming year, it is the responsibility of all Members to report to the Manager of OH&S more frequently than last year.

Members must:

Maintain a sustainable safe task program list,
Maintain and add to operational safety measures and
Ensure the safety of all users by removing health hazards.

For example, we have a program to replace the carbon ozone filters on our laser printers and photocopiers.
It is noteworthy that we replace them more frequently than specified by the manufacturers.
We found we could detect ozone at an earlier stage.

We have a Task Unit called Corporate Governance & Reporting (CGR).
.
The former workgroups of Company Administration and Treasury and Occupational Health & Safety have now been grouped together under this broader category task unit.

For safety reasons, we project the five styles of Practicality, Friendliness, Professionalism, Cultural Adaptability and Scholarship.

This year we intend to create settings to give us more Goodwill, Safety and Profit.

Our Tactics are to have more visible but not overt signs describing the safety items.

Visitors will be encouraged to pass through the garden and circumambulate the Australia pond and the new surrounds have been determined to minimize obstruction to practitioners and offer them the maximum of safety and comfort from the elements. More use will be made of shade cloth this summer.

Food Protection Health and Safety Issues

A Kitchen God and his assistants reside at 33 Brooking Street. His picture is above the entrance to the rear kitchen area. Food is to be prepared with mindfulness, generosity and wisdom. The food is to be of the finest quality and made with the best ingredients.

If you prepare a meal, ensure that the meal you have chosen is well considered and conducive to the practice of Buddha Dhamma. Consider the ingredients you will need and make sure that they are within the menus specified below.

S1 and S2 meals that have been "thrown together" will not be accepted and you will miss out on your opportunity to make merit.

If you are preparing a meal at the Centre, make sure that you clean the kitchen after the meal has been prepared.

This act will help to keep the Deva of the kitchen pleased with the performance of our Members.

Light, cold meals will be accepted for breakfast and lunch in order that the people eating the food are not burdened by the heaviness and drowsiness resulting from coarse, heavy meals.

Hot food may be prepared for the evening meal, however, only certain hot foods are acceptable.

Planning for the health, safety and comfort of students and their teacher while at the Centre must consider factors such as ventilation, noise pollution and the effect of ultraviolet radiation.

During the morning session (10.00 am to 12 midday) windows in the Hall had to be kept closed to minimise noise from chain saws and tree mulching machinery being used on an adjacent property. On a day with the forecast temperature of 21 degrees being achieved this resulted in a mildly 'stuffy' environment with less fresh air circulation in the Hall than optimum.

Taking advantage of the warmth and sun, lunch was served in the Chan Garden, close to the East gate. Positioning of tables and seating was done to achieve shade from trees during the peak UV period of the day.

May you live safely.

May you be well and happy.

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

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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.

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