Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Phra Satit on December 13, 2009 at 4:28am

I would like to only answer the first question at this moment.
As i'm in Australia so I like to hear people who may do the same work in USA, They may have some things or experience to share.

Permalink Reply by Thich Hue Gioi on January 5, 2010 at 4:12pm

Well, I began my Buddhist career in Pagoda Phat Hue Germany. I was encouraged by my teacher to study what he called all three traditions. The Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana. It was this spirit which informed my next few years in Germany, my training and working job at the Temple.

I was in charge of finding teachers from different traditions and then to organize events around these teacher/practitioners. The aim was to both educate the ordained students on the three traditions as well as get the lay community's awareness to a point where they can see Buddhism's great depth. In both cases to find the real heart of Buddhism what is carried in all traditions and what is only the cultural off springs/ritual of the heart of the teachings. Of course deep meditation is the best way but many are not willing at first and need different support.

What ended up happend is many of the students found other teachers and styles of practice that suited them. Those who stuck around started to develope a very deep and meaningful practice that incorporated the teachings from many great teachers. It was a constant influx of Buddhist knowledge and ways to practice. After so much knowledge being a young and small Sangha of about twenty had enough of organizing these events for other teachers they decided to turn that knowedge inward and really develope their own practice and skills. With the leadership and support of a open minded Abbot the Sangha has developed quite nicely and has kept relations with teacher from many traditions.

So from my experience I would suggest following a similar model. To organize regular events where different teachers from different traditions could come together and share teachings. In an atmosphere such as this it is possible to honor the culture and tradtions as well as see the common thread in all the Buddhist traditions to nuture and build a common ground on this basis. It could also follow a similar model to the world Parliament. This of course could be an end product we would have to start a bit smaller I imagine.

Step by Step

1. Internet groups (facebook, peacenext)
2. Website
-share texts
-share videos
-share event/retreat dates
3. (Small) Buddhist interfaith teachings
4. (Larger) Buddhist interfaith teachings & seminars

Just some ideas. What do you think?

Permalink Reply by Reverend Cheen on January 5, 2010 at 7:59pm

Fabulous! Well-thought out and practical.

Permalink Reply by Lisa Valerie Blake on April 2, 2010 at 7:23pm

My dear friends,

I don't have any expectations, but would love to hear a discussion about the Buddhist precept of equanimty and the reality of how historically women have not been acknowledged or recognized (generally) as spiritual leaders and role models. Although His Holiness the Dalai Lama is trying to correct this oversight, he is met with resistance by the male monks and lamas of his tradition.

Citing rules and reasons of why the female body is inferior to the male only allows discriminatory regulations written or codified thousands of years ago to be perpetuated. This serves no one. My understanding is that Buddha transcended the identity of male/female and that all beings hold a seed of Buddha nature with a potential to awaken. Ulitmately it is heart/mind, not gender body that matters most. Still...how anybody is viewed, gains or loses opportunities, or even is given expectations based upon the physical body (ie. reincarnate identification) seems to be very biased against the female form.

Therefore, we are woefully lacking an equal and balanced example of what the enlightened looks like embodied and recognized in a female form. I believe that this historic oversight should be named and owned by the patriarchal leadership and replaced by true appreciation and recognition that every precious human being is a product of the sacred masculine and feminine in union, with equal capacity for spiritual enlightenment, altruistic love, compassion, and leadership.

I think it would be helpful if Buddhist practitioners of all gender identities continue to raise this point and equalize the playing field to allow and encourage spiritual leaders from future generations of girls to emerge AND be recognized as strong, wise, compassionate, capable, and EQUAL precious beings. We women have long recognized this and it is time to not only begin a conversation that creates this new perspective. We must ask all practitioners to apply deep wisdom to discern this bias and correct it.

Even though eventually we must leave these categories all together, they have very real implications and consequences in the state of this world today. Morevover, we must encourage each other to shine our own light brightly enough out into this suffering world that we begin to recognize its presence within each other.

Yours in the depths of Love's liberation,
Lisa

Permalink Reply by Reverend Cheen on April 9, 2010 at 3:00pm

LIsa,

Thank you for such thoughtful and heartfelt comments. It is an important topic indeed. I would like to see more discussions like this over live chat and/or teleconference. I probably will not be able to get around to nurturing this and the Buddhism in America group on Facebook until May. If you and anyone here would like to help, such as by convenining a discussion etc., I will support you 100%!

in community~

Permalink Reply by Grigori Rho Gharveyn on March 21, 2011 at 6:24am

Dear Reverend Cheen,

Perhaps we must consider whether there can be any accuracy with regard to observing any religious traditions.

Cultural radiation assures us that over time every culture, every religion, will change; often the new forms will resemble each other less and less over time.

This is a natural process that can be resisted only at great cost to the liberties of the individual and collective members of any cultures or religions resisting change.

When our communities' cultures and religons resist their members' natural proclivites to change, when our communities' cultures and religons resist their members' natural proclivites to adapt their own cultural or spiritual customs and beliefs, or to adopt new traditions or beliefs, then our communities' cultures and religons become more rigid, more inflexible; they evolve to rely more upon rules and less upon their individual members' wisdom or common sense.

Specifically with regard to religions, this may often defeat their true purposes; purposes we would regard as being to facilitate each persons' individual direct experiences of their Divines.

Over time, many religions take on roles as intercessors, mediators between their faithful members and their Divines.

It may be argued that such intercession or mediation may drive a wedge between such a relgion's members and their members' Divines if their doctrines become too politicized as tools for manipulating their members in a manner that may attempt to presume they have the power or authority to restrict their members direct access to their Divines in their members' own hearts in order to support agendas that may have little or nothing to do with the true spiritual welfare of their members.

We hesitate to charaterize any religion as in any way mistaken, even when their authorities are corrupt, because true religion always begins in the hearts of the people, and their individual experiences of their Divines.

The social institutions we call religions arise around our efforts to share our personal experiences regarding our Divines.

Like any social institution, many people will be attracted to participate for personal power and self-agrandizement, to manipulate their people's cultural or religious beliefs to their own best advantages.

This means that over time, each social institution, including perhaps all religions, may become increasingly more corrupt as the interpretation of their rules or spiritual messsages become more distorted in order to increase benefits to their corrupt members at the expense of the well-being of those members who may feel they must accept being dominated in this manner.

Over time, the corruptions of individual members may become insitutionalized; many people who are conditioned to reactively defend their cultural or social instituions may also, often unwittingly. wind up defending the corruption of their insitutions as a consequence.

When anyone speaks out against the corruption at the heart of their own institutions they may often risk coming under attack by those institutions' auto-immune cultural defense mechanisms.

All large social institutions, such as governments and religions, but including schools, hospitals, and workplaces, etc. are capable of enormous resistance to change, due in part to their rule systems, and due in part to their social inertia.

Resistance to cultural change requires traiining members of each culture to preserve their culture, to defend it whenever it seems threatened, internally, or externally.  This places a burden on the members who defend their religions and communities that may disadvantage them in several ways.

Perhaps foremost, a person must be conditioned to fear change in order to make them more resistant to change within their own cultures; any application of fear may be harmful, however, those applications of fear that may make us each more reactive, while making us less thoughtful and considerate, may be particularly harmful.

Traiing in cultural defensiveness is a process of short-circuiting higher cognitive functions to emotionally direct reactively conditioned responses.

Learning to be more reactive impairs nearly anyone who accepts such conditioning to defend their religions or cultures.

This short-circuiting of higher cognitive functions helps cultures and societies maintain their conditioning of their members.

Many rules of our cultures and social systems are more for the convenience of those who hold their populations in thrall by political power, economic power, or brute force.

Consequently, whenever anyone rises to defend their cultures or traditions they may incidentally harm themselves in the process by reinforcing their fear conditioning by reinforcing their reactively conditioned responses to their fears, thereby conditioning them to further disable their higher cognitive abilities, abilities that might otherwise help them find accomodation, agreement, and peace.

The emotional state of fear is typically heightened when our reactive defense postures are triggered; this further conditons us to be fearful and more reactive.

Cultural defense mechanisms typically try to keep the members of their cultures isolated from other cultures, but in the Information Age it becomes increasingly more difficult to maintain cultural or relgious segregation.

The reactively conditioned defensive postures of all cultures were once very valuable to their survival, however, in the information age these defense mechanisms become liabilities that impede communications.

The age of revelations is upon us, information is the key.

We must learn to adopt better communication skills.

The free exchange of information is vital to this process.

We must all learn to be less defensive, less reactive; we must all learn to redirect those energies that we might once have used reactively, defensively, to become more intelligent, more creative, and more enabling.

When two or more defensive postures meet they often engage in a manner that locks them together so that no matter how much energy each side puts into their defenses, all sides remain feeling threatened.

Over time, our institutions internalize or institutionalize prolonged conflicts or engagments; these internalized impasses become parts of the accepted state of affairs.

People fail to realize that these issues remain mutable, subject to change, because these issues adopt inertia from culutrual reinforcement that helps these deadlocks to resist change more effectively.

However, we are all capable of change and new growth, both as individuals, and as collective societies and cultures.

We never need to abandon our own cultures or religions to grow, however we may sometimes need to sample the fragrant aromas and sweet smells of many other flowers to be satisfied that the perfumes of our own religions and cultures are truly the sweetest to ourselves.

If we do happen to find a sweeter-smelling flower we may like better, we will always take our roots with us into our explorations of those gardens where our new flowers grow, new gardens where we may meet new people with whom we may learn to share our native traditions and beliefs in our processes of adopting their own beliefs in traditions.

Regardless of our traditons or beliefs, or what may be regarded as the best or most proper way to respect our own traditons or beliefs, or the traditons or beliefs of anyone else, the best respect we can always give to all beliefs and traditons transcends our capacities for tolerance when we embrace all beliefs and traditions of all people, everywhere, with acceptance, regardless of the individual forms or nuances of their individual or collective traditions or beliefs.

 

Namaste

 

Permalink Reply by Grigori Rho Gharveyn on March 21, 2011 at 7:11am

Dear Reverend Cheen,

We expect a North American Buddhist Network group to help manifest world peace.

A Buddhist network in North America might help make many individual Buddhists feel more secure in their cultural identiites. 

Developing an effective structure will require acceptance of the mutual differentnesses regarding each person's expressions of their beliefs or traditions.

We have met many isolated or networked groups of Buddhists.

To our inexperienced knowledge, they each seem different in their practices, possibly they may be different in many of their beliefs, or their interpretions of their beliefs as well.

We are aware of at least two major differences in approaches to expressing Buddhism in cultural beliefs and practices, alas, we cannot name them or their details.

We know we have benefitted from meeting many different Buddhist people; we believe that the wisdom all Buddhist people share in common transcends all of their differences.

Nonetheless, we have observed fear in some Buddhist people in response to meeting Buddhists with different traditions or beliefs.  Arguments sometimes arise where tensions build; it often seems that everyone so engaged may become more distant from their unity as a result.

To network as many Buddhists as possible there should be a manner of introducing an emerging network that respects each potential member's uniqueness, their diversity.

We might organize this in two primary circles, one within the other.

The outer circle would consist of circles of people who are closely related to one another by their choices of beliefs and traditons regarding their expressions of Buddhism in their lives.

This allows room for circles of people of other non-Buddhist faiths to join, people who admire Buddhism but who may have very different relgious or cultural backgrounds or beliefs.

Each circle may adopt whatever internal structures or rules are most comfortable to them, electing leaders, or taking turns at leadership, either formally, or on an ad hoc basis.

The inner circle would be open to anyone who wants to explore the inter-relatedness of their experiences of Buddhism with other members of different circles.

Those people whose curiosity or fears attract them to debating the various perceived virtues or faults of different forms of expressing Buddhism may join together in the iner circle to explore their interests in a moderated community.

Moderators must hold unity above any favoritism.

Only the inner circle would be moderated by the network, the outer circles would remain the domains of their respective members who may choose whether to use moderators or rely on self-moderation.

Possibly they will evolve their own inner circles for moderated exchanges.

We would suggest that any heated arguments in any circle be taken to their respective inner circles for moderation, as a possible option.

HEated argumetns betwen members of different circles would be referred to the primary inner circle of the network.

There are several next steps that may be taken together, rather than in any sequence.

One critical step will be Discovery.

The purpose of discovery is to identify as many groups of Buddhists in North America as possible and to create and maintain contact lists for them.

Another critical step will be contact.

Contact must be tailored to each individual group for best effect.

Members of the Contact teams should immerse themselves in the beliefs and practices of the group they will approach sufficiently to be accepted among them as a fellow, but without deceitfully misrepresenting their own beliefs or practices.

Contact team members must be good cultural anthropologists and diplomats.

Another critical step will be Networking.

Because many Buddhist groups may already be networked with like-minded groups, their own networks may help accelerate the networking processes.

Once contact has been made, the contact team members should introduce their new friends to friends already established within the network by being aware of their common ideals and interests and bringing them together where they may effectively mentor each other to learn about their shared issues more easily.

Perhaps the only other critical step is Design.

We have proposed a network architecture design for you here, but you should get other anthropolgists' opinions about your network's social architecture, as each different person's ideas will include things we may have neglected by over-simplification.

 

We have reserved responding to the questions about networking in a second comment.

Enjoy!

 

Namaste