MINDSPACE

COME CELEBRATE BUDDHA'S BIRTHDAY, ENLIGHTENMENT AND PARANIRVANA

Northwest Arkansas Buddhists will celebrate Vesak 2008 with a potluck picnic beginning at 3:30 pm (dinner starts around 5:30 pm) on Sunday, May 18 at Agri Park in Fayetteville. All area Buddhists and all those interested in Buddhist theory and practice are cordially invited to attend.
Sometimes informally called “Buddha’s birthday,” Vesak celebrates the birth, enlightenment (Nirvana), and passing (Paranirvana) of the historical Buddha Sakyamuni. An official state holiday in many Buddhist countries, Vesak is also known as Vaisakha, Buddha Jayanti, and Saga Dawa. The exact date of Vesak varies according to the various lunar calendars used in different traditions. For many of those traditions, Vesak falls on May 20 in 2008.
Please bring food and drink, plates, cups, and utensils to share with those attending, as well as lawn chairs, games, etc. Local practice groups are invited to bring information about their group’s practice and activities to share with others. Those who wish may bring offerings of fruit, flowers, incense, or candles to be placed on the altar.
The event will feature a period of silent meditation, and perhaps a Dharma talk or two. At the close of the event, Ven. Geshe Thupten Dorjee will offer to those interested the Eight Precepts Vow, to be honored for the 24-hour period beginning at sunrise on Tuesday May 20. Participants who take the vow undertake to abstain from: taking life (both human and nonhuman); taking what is not given (stealing); all sexual activity; telling lies; using intoxicating drinks and drugs which lead to carelessness; eating at the wrong time (the right time is eating once, after sunrise, before noon); singing, dancing, playing music, attending entertainment performances, wearing perfume, and using cosmetics and garlands; and using luxurious places for sitting or sleeping.
Located on Garland Avenue north of the University of Arkansas and Deane Street, Agri Park features a covered pavilion; in the event of rain, the event will proceed as planned.

ANAM THUBTEN RINPOCHE TEACHES AT ST. PAUL'S

Anam Thubten Rinpoche gave an extraordinary teaching on Monday, April 21 at St. Paul's.  Thanks to all of you who turned out for Rinpoche's teaching.  He had a wonderful time and would like to return to do a weekend retreat. Thanks also to St. Paul's for hosting the event, and to Veronica Pucci for the wonderful photographs, which you can view at Dharma Eyes.  There is a possibility that we will have a visit from another Lama in late May or early June; I'll keep you posted. 

ANAM THUBTEN RINPOCHE TO SPEAK IN FAYETTEVILLE

WHAT:  Dharma Talk

WHEN:  Monday, April 21, 7:00 P.M.

WHERE:  St. Paul's Episcoal Church, 224 N. East St., Fayetteville  AR  72701 (442-7373).  For directions, click here.

Fayetteville residents have an extraordinary opportunity to hear one of the most talented and perceptive teachers currently active in the United States today. 

Anam Thubten Rinpoche was born in Tibet and entered into Buddhist training in the Nyingma tradition at young age.  Among his teachers, he had a special affinity toward a very inspiring Dharma teacher named Lama Tsurlo, who became his main mentor.  Lama Tsurlo's kindness and wisdom gave him the firm base to advance in his dharma practice, and still serves as a source of inspiration in his ever-unfolding love of true Dharma, as well as his work as a teacher.  Anam Thubten was recognized as the reincarnation of Anam Lama, when he was quite young.

Rinpoche will give a general dharma talk on the nature and availability of spiritual truth.  More specific descriptions of his teachings often narrow the scope of his message--you simply have to hear him to appreciate the full dimensions of his capacious mind, his generosity, and his compassion. 

Simply put--this is a talk that is not to be missed.  All are welcome, and a $10 donation for adults and $5 for students are suggested to help defray the costs of travel.  No one, of course, will be turned away.

It is traditional inTibetan culture for students, after the teaching, to line up for a blessing from the teacher.  This is entirely optional, of course.  But if you would like a personal blessing from Rinpoche, it is easy to do.  You simple bow, and present him with a kata, or white scarf, draped over your hands, which he will take, bless, and place around your neck.  If you have a kata you may bring it.  If not, we will have several for you to share with others.  It is also traditional that you present the teacher with your donation in a white envelope at this time.  We will have white envelopes available for you to use as well.

We look forward to seeing you on Monday, 21 February, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, 7:00 p.m.

SPECIAL NOTE:  RINPOCHE WILL ALSO BE LEADING A RETREAT IN LITTLE ROCK, APRIL 18-20.  CONTACT KAREN WISDOM FOR MORE INFORMATION (501-681-2895).

TCIA'S FIRST ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING

The Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas held its first organizational meeting on March 12, 2008, at the Pat and Willard Walker Meeting Room at the Fayetteville Public Library.  Over thirty people attended.  By the end of March, Geshe la and the officers will appoint a Board and convene its first meeting soon thereafter.  Everyone who attended shared with us helpful ideas for our future growth, and we are looking forward to working with everyone as we begin to formalize our plans.  James Owenby, our secretary, has provided minutes of the meeting, and they can be viewed on this site under "TCIA Minutes" and under the same heading at TIBETSPACE.

THE DALAI LAMA ON BUDDHISM IN AMERICA

Have a look at the 8:00 minute video below.  His Holiness last summer gave a talk in Carmel, New York, and during the talk he addressed some very important issues regarding the practice and development of our spirituality as Americans.  He also had some very simple and wise comments regarding our goals and aims.

GESHE LA'S TEACHING AWARD

As many of you know, Geshe la received his Outstanding Faculty Award on Thursday, 21 February 2008 (he's pictured to the left with our Chancellor, John White, and his wife, Mary Lib) at an honorary banquet held at the Hembree House.  It was a wonderful and moving evening.  Since then we have been showered with congratulations from Tibetans around the world.  I've added a photo album with a few pictures from the event.

This award represents a victory of sorts for all Tibetans, and Geshe la has gone out of his way in interviews with the Voice of Tibet, the Voice of America, and other venues to stress this fact.  Now, Tibetans have a model, an example of how education results in recognition and the kind of attention that might someday lead to a full redress of the wrongs that have been dealt the Tibetans.  At the very least, Geshe la's education has allowed him to make a credible case, not only for Tibetan culture in general, but for a reasoned approach to the necessity of non-violence in all of our lives, and it is this approach that garnered the award for him.  As he says continually:  "This is about education."

Most importantly, we recently received a letter of congratulations from Tashi Wangdi, the North  American representative of the Dalai Lama.  This is wonderful news for Geshe la, and we hope that it bodes well for our future involvement with Mr. Wangdi's office.  If you'd like to download the letter and read, click on the following link:

Download LetterWangdi.jpg (811.5K)

Geshe la and Rinzin la's presence here in Fayetteville has served as a catalyst for a range of positive developments, extending from the classroom to the meditation room, and we will be calling a meeting soon for all of those interested in helping us plot the future of the Tibetan Cultural Institute of Arkansas. 

Until then, many congratulations to Geshe la and to Rinzin la.  They are doing important work here, and we are fortunate to have them in Fayetteville.

MONTHLY-OR-SO RECOMMENDATION: ROBERT THURMAN'S "INFINITE LIFE"

A while ago, I added the Monthly-Or-So Recommendation to this blog site, and it's time to post another selection, since it's been or month or so since I recommended What Makes You Not a Buddhist.  This time, I'm recommending Infinite Life, by Robert Thurman which, if you didn't know better, and saw only the rather garish orange-fading-to-lilac cover, you might think had been written by a televangelist. 

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.  Robert Thurman is one of the pioneers of Tibetan Buddhism in America.  A co-founder and President of Tibet House in New York City, he was also the first Westerner to become a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and has enjoyed a close relationship with the Dalai Lama for the last four decades.  He ultimately decided to return his robes, and one of the bits of evidence of that return appears in the picture to the left with her arm around her father.  Recently retired, he taught for years at Columbia where he held an endowed chair in Indo-Tibetan Studies.

Infinite Life, which originally appeared in 2004, is a quirky book in some ways, but it is quirky in attractive Thurmanesque ways.  Thurman has been called everything from the Wild Man to the Robin Williams of Tibetan Buddhism, but these characterizations should never distract us from his extraordinarily assimilative intelligence.  His prose is always free of jargon and technical language, and he has done wonderful work in presenting the Dharma in clear American terms.  In Infinite Life, he asks us to imagine our lives, literally, as beginningless and endless . . . . an idea that is, of course, central to Buddhist philosophy, but one that remains for most of us . . . an idea.

This is what Thurman sets out to correct in this book, and by taking us through the preliminary arguments for the existence of our once and future lives, he then takes us through the meditational exercises that will transform the idea into a living practice.  The book is, as Thurman says, "a regular book with a message . . . but in another sense . . . a workbook."

And so it is--both a book and a workbook, and I found both applications extremely useful.  Perhaps you will too.  (You can order the book through the link to the right, and the our site will eventually be given a gift certificate that we will use to stock Geshe la's library, a library that we hope will someday find an accessible and permanent home.)

ART OF DEBATE, TIBETAN STYLE, AND A SURPRISE APPEARANCE BY A FRIEND OF OURS

For those of you who might never have witnessed a full-scale Tibetan debate, I include the following video.  While there are many such videos available, this one captures the atmosphere of the debates I saw this summer:  noisy, pointed, rambunctious, a kind of intellectual free-for-all.  I include it here because it's well for us to remember that this is the very system in which Geshe la was educated.

And by the way, I found the following video as well.  Those of you in the Fayetteville area and certainly in the San Antonio area might recognize this gentleman:

DEATH & DYING: THE BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE

My holidays were productive, but not always in the ways that I would have imagined.  I spent a good deal of time in rooms like the one pictured to the left.  You know the drill--impersonal, clean, too cold or too hot, odd beeps, ucomfortable chairs, and the interminable waiting for the doctor . . . my mother was addressing a few health problems of a potentially severe nature, another person in my life was diagnosed with cancer, and I was reading again the book I'd recommended earlier, What Makes You Not a Buddhist.  The passage that struck me as I sat by the hospital bed waiting for my mother's doctor to arrive concerned the Buddha's revelation about his family, about all families, and in fact about the family that he'd left in order to gain this realization.  Here's the passage, from p. 42 of the book:

As his meditation deepened, Siddhartha began to see the essentially illusory quality of all phenomena, and with this understanding he looked back upon his former life at the palace, the parties and peacock gardens, his friends and family.  He saw that the so-called family is like a guesthouse or hotel where different travelers have checked in and temporarily bonded.  Eventually this conglomeration of beings disperses--at the time of death, if not sooner.  While together, the group may develop a connection that involves trust, responsibility, love, and shared measures of success and failure, from which all sorts of dramas arise.

The family as guest house or hotel, a "conglomeration of beings . . . "  How much sense this makes!  And how logical it is!  But it's equally difficult to internalize its essential lessons, to convert the intellectual force of the argument into an intuitive reaction against our continual struggle for permanence at the social or family level.  As I watched my mother recover from the anesthesia, I realized that had things not gone well for her--as one day they won't, as they won't for all of us--then she would pass out of this guest house alone, just as she'd entered it.

Of course we all "know" this.  But analyzing just how we know it reveals many things.  First, knowing that we are born and will die alone is a way of conceptualizing this fact, and by so conceptualizing it, hiding it away from our intuitive, heart-knowledge, the reservoir of information on which we model our behavior.  We might know that we are going to die, but we certainly spend a great deal of our time acting as if we won't, busily attaching ourselves to people, places, things, and events, all in a concerted effort to avoid what's imminent.  Second, knowing that we will die is the first step on the path to fully responding to our deaths productively, through meditation and study, but it's a very difficult path to follow, and American culture does nothing to make following it any easier.  Third, and finally, transforming ourselves in the face of our mortality is a task that is ultimately done alone, by our own methods, our own disciplines, and our own strategies.  Teachers can't do it for us, families can't carry us there, countries can't facilitate our passage to this place.

A Buddhist monk, Tenzin Sherab, comments on his own work with the dying:

All we can do, I suppose, is to learn what we can from qualified teachers wherever they may reside, share what we've learned when we feel qualified to share it, and minute by minute, hour by hour, remind ourselves of our life in the guest-house.