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The conferring of the Visuddhananda Peace Award - 1999 to our Founder, John D. Hughes recognises the value of his "radical Buddhist Missionary activities belonging to upliftment and propagation of Dhamma, Peace, Harmony through Buddhist Philosophy and idea in Australia and different parts of the world".

Dr. Bhikkhu Sunithananda, President of the Visuddhananda Peace Foundation, has advised that a delegation of eight members will visit our Centre on 5 January 2000 to present the award. The Most Venerable U Pandito Mahathero, who is President of Bangladesh Rakhaing-Marma Sangha Council, will lead the delegation.

Our Teacher is very happy to receive this excellent award because it is a great blessing to the people of Australia, our brothers and sisters and all the people in Bangladesh.

Our Teacher met the late Most Venerable Visuddhananda Mahathero many times and he was privileged that the great sage visited and stayed at his Upwey Centre. It is an inspiration and a blessing to recollect the tranquil sight of the Most Venerable sitting in our Centre's heavenly garden on a pleasant afternoon surrounded by his disciples and good friends.

During the visit, our Teacher helped translate into English the essence of what the Mahathero taught. The classic practice the Venerable taught at that time involved looking inside the forehead to identify the earth element nature of the front of the skull.

By recognising that something solid like "bone" in the human body is unsatisfactory, is lacking a permanent owner and must one day pass away, the truth rupam anicca dukkha anatta comes to "mind". With this in mind, objects provoke fewer conscious and unconscious fantasies. The danger with conscious fantasies is they give rise to speculative conjectures and pure fabrications. Pure fabrications supply the mythological background of many secular systems having underlying naivete about cause and effect.

It is not the function of the Dhamma to merely suggest an increase in raw, undisciplined, undirected, lawless "pretend" compassion (karuna) or loving-kindness (metta) is "all you need", as one of the earlier mass marketed pop-groups sang.

It is hardly worthwhile to discount some of the popular culture without hate for its performers unless efforts are made to replace it with learning more skill in the Buddha Dhamma arts.

The main use of Buddhist art is to expose and then break the primary human fantasy in the virtual (nascent) minds which "pretend" that weak akusala (unwholesome) minds that give lip service about compassion are good enough.

Negative influences (akusala) masquerading as "useful" (kusala) forces guard these virtual minds, thus preventing a person from awakening and giving recognition of their real nature.

Buddha Dhamma discounts the notion that the troubles in the present world are about to be fixed by some redeeming, supernatural event.

Our Teacher insists our Members join in and work with the agenda set with our friends at the World Fellowship of Buddhists' Headquarters.

By right action and example, we help persons walk down a sane human path of action that leads to the good things and blessings (mangala).

Our Teacher shows the way to reduce our attachment to the akusala notions and then we stop joining with those ignorant human agents who live and drive their world with slander, hate, greed and lack of right work practices.

By a change of heart and clarity of mission, we move away from those who enjoy sowing the seeds of economic, social, cultural or religious crises in the human world.

By a change of heart and clarity of mission, we prepare concrete approaches that impact the mundane processes of the human world and help disadvantaged groups.

By a change of heart and clarity of mission, we cultivate the minds that can practice.

We generate the will to do heroic right action and hold confidence and faith that when our kusala mind series come to fruition, then we cease to be enslaved by our akusala minds.

Living in such totality does not depend on being "chosen" or "called" by some divinity.

For anyone who is not yet aware of this simple fact, such an interpretation would be novel and impressive. Our Teacher, the recipient of the Visuddananda Peace Award 1999, has given this sound advice to one million persons in many countries.

His advice is simple: follow Buddha Dhamma and help other persons not because you are one of the "elect" but because you can see the senselessness of a merely functional existence driven by dependence on your ignorance.

Some divinities are very useful. Some divine heavenly beings operate at our Centre as Dharmapala (protectors). They share our merit and are taught Buddha Dhamma. They are not worshipped.

Our Teacher guides us to the best nudity - exposure to the true light of Dhamma.

Our Teacher stresses it is difficult to form a correct estimate of the significance of contemporary events and there is the danger that our snap judgements are biased. This insight gives us a sound motive to continue to help ourselves and others in practice.

When you decide to improve yourself firstly resolve this fact:

"If I lose my concentration of mind, I will lose all meritorious virtues".

You need a strong, virtuous mind maintained so you will not deviate from the Path.

The second fact to resolve is that it is necessary to cultivate the stages of proficiency of mental states (Pali: kaya-pagunnata) and proficiency of mind (Pali: citta-pagunnata).

Buddhism is a method of mind-training based on the Noble Eightfold Path, which consists of these factors:

an understanding of the true nature of existence; thought free
from sensuality, ill-will, and cruelty; speech without falsity,
harshness, and idle babble; action free from killing, stealing,
and adultery; a livelihood that hurts no conscious living being;
the effort of will to destroy the mental defilements; the
development of the faculty of mindfulness; and the cultivation of
supernormal faculties of the mind with the aim of direct perception
of the Unconditioned, the ultimate reality beyond the relative
universe.

In the standard meditation of the Buddhist practice of mindfulness of the thirty-two parts of the "living" body, the first five (head-hair, body hair, nails, teeth and skin) are found to be dead. So, live bodies and dead ones differ only in degree.

Buddhaghosa, in his "Path of Purification", recommended staring at corpses. By Buddhist meditation on our own bodies, much can be discovered. It is wiser to discover what is to be discovered while your body is living.

Loving-kindness meditation, which is called metta meditation in the Pali language, is concerned with the well-being of people's minds and bodies.

Metta is for people whose temperament is hatred. You cannot have the same minds. If your mind is different, my mind is different. A thousand people, a thousand minds are different.

But in a way this is reduced to just six temperaments in the path of purification. There are others who are lustful or there is stupidity, and there are the discourteous. And the other one is devotional. Another one intellectual.

These are the characters. So for the person with hatred, metta is the meditation to use. For lustful temperament, to see the loathsomeness of things. When you go to look at it, beauty is skin deep. So we send love, loving kindness, and there are no compromising limitations in metta.

Metta is a very difficult term to translate, but it has been translated as friendliness, universal love, benevolence, loving kindness; love; all these things feel good. In all religions you find this concept.

Non violence is the highest Dhamma. In Hindu they speak about it. In Islam they speak of brotherhood. In Christianity, love thy neighbour. Also in the Torah.

When you speak about metta, there are no compromising limitations. Love is love.

The Buddha began his dispensation with his first sermon to the five ascetics, his former friends, who were still steeped in the fruitless rigours of extreme asceticism. The Buddha embarked on a long and tireless mission of a period of forty-five years disseminating the message of the Dhamma (his teaching) far and wide.

He made no distinction of caste, colour, class or clan when he disseminated the Dhamma.

Men and women, the rich and the poor - from different walks of life; the lowliest and the highest; the literate and the illiterate; brahmins and outcasts; princes and paupers; saints and criminals; listened to him as he showed the path to peace and enlightenment.

What the Buddha taught was not only for India - not only for his time. It is for all persons, for all time. The path he had pointed out is open to all.

One of the methods available to us today to practice the Path taught by the Buddha is through Chan painting. The Chan system is designed to bring you to a series of particularly desirable noble qualities, such as, for example, self-control, generosity or compassion to act on your minds.

For example, if you paint a mountain, perhaps you may choose to intimate a hint that there is a possible path for a person to be able to ascend to the mountain's summit. If you show a scholar, provide the scholar food and some way of learning, such as the four friends, a Teacher or a written text.

Even were you to display an animal or an insect, please furnish some suitable food for the being within the composition of the piece. If you show a protector, provide that being with company in the form of a companion or student.

The second major point is that you must be prepared to work through a series of classifications until you can distinguish between pieces that are isomorphic as opposed to what is homomorphic.

You ought target yourself to find the way to arrive at the Chan insight series which can understand there is phraseology which can be written by the brush to express the truths which arise from the natural delineation of different methods of viewing human and other World systems.

When relationships are very close, we might see that every part of one set of things has a corresponding part in another set of things. When two sets are not identical but each of them has the same form and should behave in the same way; then they are said to be isomorphic.

Sometimes, the correspondence is not so close and several parts of one set may be represented by only one part of the other; it is, therefore, a smaller set but still preserves some of the relationships existing within the larger one. These two sets are termed homomorphic to one another.

For the present, just recognise that organisational structures, which allow excessive compartmentalisation of image and style, make it difficult for persons to focus sufficient tolerance to initiate change in your life.

The Chan Academy, which is situated at 33 Brooking Street, Upwey, is recognised as one of the most potent change agents helping citizens of this Shire to recognise that religious tolerance is a part of Australian law. Even if you have not arrived at the mastery point of your minds where you can see the proposition of 10,000 Worlds in a single glance, you can glimpse something of the notion of tolerance shown in the Chan paintings displayed there.

The fact is that Chan Buddhist tolerant art is timeless. This is one truth. Another truth is that tolerance has been taught and will continue to be taught in this Shire by the 'Way of the Brush'. Tolerance is a potent slice of the Chan essence.

Tolerance is an immaterial product. In general, Adam Smith and other economists have denied to immaterial products the name of products and to the labour of which they are the fruit in the name of productive labour, upon the grounds that these products are consumed at once, and have no durability, that they are not susceptible of accumulation, and therefore, can never increase the capital of a nation.

Our view is that tolerance is more valuable than gold and it will help increase the human resources of this Shire for decades.

May you continue to practice tolerance in this Shire or elsewhere, and so you will avoid excessive fragmentation of your mental organisational structure.

Thank you very much for your attention. May you be well and happy and tolerant.

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

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