According to the Times of India, His Holiness the Dalai Lama has spoken out about the world economic crisis, saying:
More on that “Buddhist monks force Cambodian rock opera off the air” story, via our friend and past interviewee Erik Davis over at deathpower: The Phnom Penh Post reports that organizers of opera say that they will change some lines of narration to appease a very vocal faction of Buddhist clergy. I previously blogged about this issue here and here.
My mother Dana, who is a professional actress and librarian by training, is also a quilt artist. (Regular readers may recall a post from last summer about a quilt she made for me out of old t-shirts of mine.) Mom makes what are called “art quilts”, or quilts that are designed and shown like more traditional forms of gallery artwork. I was helping her recently to photograph some old quilts, including one she made in 2000 called Kundun (pictured above). Kundun is a Tibetan word that means “the presence,” and it is used as a title to address His Holiness the Dalai Lama. (And, of course, it’s the title of Mary Craig’s biography of the current Dalai Lama’s family, as well as Martin Scorsese’s 1997 biopic about him.) My mother has long been an admirer of the the Great 14th, His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso. We even went to see him together during his visit to Indiana some years ago. Anyway, she was inspired to make a quilt in his honor, and Kundun was the result.
Click on the image above for a larger view. The same goes for the two views from the back of the quilt posted below.
Via Barbara O’Brien at Barbara’s Buddhism Blog: Kallie Szczepanski at Kallie’s Asian History Blog asks readers for their “favorite Buddhas”–Buddha statues, that is. Mine is pictured above. (I took the photo in December 1999.) It’s the Buddha in the main shrine room at the Burmese Vihar in Bodh Gaya, India. It was sculpted years ago by the temple’s abbot Sayadaw U Nyaneinda. Just thinking about it encourages me in my practice.
Over at elephant journal, Heather Mueller writes about “specifics every first-time dathüner should know.” Dathün is Tibetan for “month session,” and refers to a one-month group meditation retreat led by a qualified teacher. I completed a dathün from December 2003-January 2004 with Reggie Ray when he was still teacher-in-residence at the Shambhala Mountain Center. (I took the photo of Reggie that appears above near the end of that retreat.) Heather writes about doing a dathün at Reggie’s new retreat center at the Dharma Ocean Foundation in Crestone, CO. For even more about dathün, check out this famous letter by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and this post by elephant editor Waylon Lewis.
