2011 May « Rev. Danny Fisher

May 31, 2011

Abbot of the Gateless Gate Zen Center Sets Out on 11,000 Mile Motorcycle Ride to Help Prisoners Across the U.S.

"Kinloch C. Walpole, abbot of Gateless Gate Zen Center."

This from Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly Online:

69 year-old Kinloch C. Walpole is the abbot of the Gateless Gate Zen Center. On July 7th he will set out on an 11,000 mile motorcycle trip to all four corners of the U.S. to give presentations about Women and Children in Jails and Prisons of the Nation.

Walpole has spent 15 years teaching Zen meditation and secular meditation in over 20 prisons with students ranging from death row and federal penitentiary populations to youthful offenders. On his tour he will speak about incarceration, the re-entry process, and unknown costs that affect the public sector. The second goal of this trip is to raise money to build a re-entry center designed by incarcerated women that could prove to be a model for both religious and secular organizations to use. To learn more about Walpole and his trip, including topics of the presentations, schedule and more click here. To learn more about Gateless Gate Zen Center click here. To donate to the trip or to the re-entry center click here.

May 31, 2011

A Gift of Dharma for 5.31.11

Today’s quote is from Andrew Cooper — Tricycle: The Buddhist Review‘s editor-at-large, a wonderful writer, and one helluva nice guy. This is it:

Although E. M. Forster could hardly have intended that the epigraph to his novel Howards End—‘Only connect’—serve as a two-word distillation of the Buddha’s teachings, it certainly is a good, and timely, one. To connect across the differences that divide us; to connect by building bonds of affection, understanding, and support; to connect in the recognition that we and all things are inextricably, well, connected— in our age of accelerated travel and instant communication, doesn’t this simple phrase offer us a promising touchstone for Buddhist practice? Is not connection with others one of the surest ways to loosen the bonds of self-concern and to find one’s best way to act in the world? It is, as well, a wonderfully economical description of the basis, the means, and the fruit of the Buddha Way. Our differences do indeed matter, but they don’t matter as much as this: Only connect, and, in Forster’s words, ‘Live in fragments no longer.’

May 30, 2011

For Memorial Day…

(With a hat tip to Facebook friend Nicholas Pierotti…)

May 30, 2011

A Gift of Dharma for 5.30.11

Today’s Memorial Day quote is from our friend Lt. Jeanette Shin, CHC, USN, the first commissioned Buddhist chaplain in the U.S. Armed Forces (she serves in the Navy). This is it — from a Memorial Day post to the Buddhist Military Sangha from last year:

American Buddhists have fought in the wars of this nation, and Buddhist families have lost sons and daughters in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have also given the “last full measure,” no different from any other citizen of this Nation. Do not forget those who have given so much for us. Take time during your Memorial Day vacation, or during your memorial services this Sunday, to remember those who have served.