Orange County Buddhist Church Fundraiser for the Japanese Disaster
Rev. Danny Fisher
Just a Buddhist Minister Trying to Benefit Beings
Month: March, 2011
March 31, 2011
Burma VJ Receives a Peabody Award!
"A scene from the documentary 'Burma VJ.'" Image via Oscilloscope Laboratories.
CONGRATULATIONS to the makers of Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, who received a Peabody Award this morning for their powerful, important film. The citation reads:
The documentary chronicles the heroic ingenuity of underground video journalists (VJs) who captured the 2007 Burmese human-rights protests – and the brutal government retaliation – on handy cams and smuggled the video out to the web and the world.
You can read my Shambhala Sun Space interview with the film’s Oscar-nominated director Anders Østergaard and the Democratic Voice of Burma’s Aye Chan Naing here; in addition, you can read my interview U Pyinya Zawta, the executive director of the All Burma Monks’ Alliance (who attended the Academy Awards with the filmmakers) here (also for SunSpace).
March 31, 2011
Stephen Prothero Returns to The Colbert Report!
Our friend Stephen Prothero— professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University, author of the New York Times bestseller Religious Literacy: What Americans Need to Know and the brand new God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter, and probably the religious studies world’s most widely-recognized public intellectual at this moment — returned to The Colbert Report last night to help the host figure out what religion to adopt next. Check it out here.
You can also find my interview with Steve from last year over at The Buddhist Channel.
March 31, 2011
A Gift of Dharma for 3.31.11
Today’s quote is from Robert A.F. Thurman, who is Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, co-founder and president of Tibet House U.S., prolific author and teacher, and translator. (For me, Thurman’s translation of theVimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra, The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti: A Mahāyāna Scripture, remains one of the richest and most rewarding English translations of, well, anything.) This is it – from my interview this week with “Buddha Bob” for Shambhala Sun Space:
Buddhist Studies is practice. There are three “baskets” of Buddhist scriptures (Agamadharma), and three higher educations constitute Buddhist realization/practice (Adhigamadharma). The middle basket is the sutra basket, which corresponds to the middle practice which corresponds to mind or meditation, higher education (chitta- or samadhi-adhishiksha), the other two practices / spiritual educations being ethical actions and wisdom — scientific, experiential insight, discovery and understanding. So it’s all of a single piece, the vehicle of study, meditating, understanding, and putting into practice and life.
