2010 March 01 « Rev. Danny Fisher

A Gift of Dharma for 3.1.10

Today’s quote is another from our friend the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi. It’s from his teaching “The Case for Study”:

This cognitive character of the Buddhist path elevates doctrinal study and intellectual inquiry to a position of great importance. Though the knowledge that frees the mind from bondage emerges only from intuitive insight and not from a mass of doctrinal facts, genuine insight always develops on the basis of a preliminary conceptual grasp of the basic principles essential to right understanding, in the absence of which its growth will inevitably be obstructed. The study and systematic reflection through which we arrive at this preparatory right view necessarily involve concepts and ideas. But before we hasten to dismiss Dhamma study as being therefore only a worthless tangle of verbiage, let us consider that concepts and ideas are our indispensable tools of understanding and communication. Concepts, however, can be valid and invalid tools of understanding; ideas can be fruitful or useless, capable of bringing immense benefit or of entailing enormous harm. The object of studying the Dhamma as part of our spiritual quest is to learn to comprehend our experience correctly: to be able to distinguish the valid from the invalid, the true from the false, the wholesome from the unwholesome.

It is only by making a thorough and careful investigation that we will be in a position to reject what is detrimental to our growth and to apply ourselves with confidence to cultivating what is truly beneficial. Without having reached this preliminary conceptual clarification, without having succeeded in “straightening out our views,” there can indeed be the earnest practice of Buddhist meditation techniques, but there will not be the practice of the meditation pertaining to the integral Noble Eightfold Path. And while such free-based meditation may bring its practitioners the mundane benefits of greater calm, awareness and equanimity, lacking the guidance of right view and the driving power of right motivation, it is questionable whether it can lead to the penetrative realization of the Dhamma, or to its final goal, the complete cessation of suffering.

A New Twist in the Wat Promkunaram Homicides Case

News courtesy of Barbara O’Brien at Barbara’s Buddhism Blog:

Nearly 19 years ago, six Thai Buddhist monks, a nun and two novices were shot to death in Wat Promkunaram, a temple in Phoenix, Arizona. The August 1991 homicides have been called the worst in Arizona history. In 1994 two young men were convicted of the murders and sentenced to prison.

Now a full panel of the 9th Circuit Court has overturned the conviction of one of the young men, Jonathan Doody, because his confession was coerced.

Read the rest here.

Five-Year Battle Over Oakland Buddhist Temple Comes to an End

Read the Oakland Tribune‘s write-up of the story here.

Aseem Shukla at On Faith: “Why No Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, or Jain Representation on the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Task Force on Religion?”

Over at On Faith, Aseem Shukla, Associate Professor in urologic surgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School and co-founder and board member of Hindu American Foundation, rightly asks: “Why no Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh or Jain representation on the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Task Force that recently made recommendations to the U.S. government about developing a strategy to make religion “integral to American foreign policy?”

Of 32 religious leaders, academics and consultants that made the cut, not a single one belongs to a Dharma tradition–Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism or Jainism, let alone many thriving indigenous traditions. Not one. Hindus and Buddhists comprise a growing portion of our foreign service establishment, and the current administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Rajiv Shah, is Hindu. But not one made the cut to sit on this task force recommending how our country should deal in a world where more than one in five persons is Hindu or Buddhist. (Tom Wright, the task force’s project director, said “We did reach out to leaders in those religious communities but they weren’t able to participate.”)

Read Shukla’s whole post here.

Not long ago, I wrote about a related topic for Religion Dispatches: the lack of a Buddhist representative on the Obama administration’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Read that article here.

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March 1, 2010

Australian Elephant Blessed by Buddhist Monks

The Associated Press has the story about the ceremony for this little guy…

"In this Feb. 25, 2010 photo provided by the Melbourne Zoo, Mali, a baby Asian elephant, born at the zoo six weeks ago, walks from beneath her mother Dokkoon after a naming ceremony performed by Buddhist monks in Melbourne, Australia. Mali is Thai for jasmine and was chosen out of five possibilities derived from her Thai lineage in a public vote held by the zoo." (AP Photo/Melbourne Zoo, Martin Terlecki)