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FPMT News Around the World
Members of Dharmaraskshita Study Group on an outing to Alexander Falls, Mauritius, October 2012
As part of their program, Dharmarakshita Study Group, in Vacoas, Mauritius, makes a group outing three times a year. In October 2012, study group members went to Alexandra Falls in the south of Mauritius Island.
Members of Dharmarakshita Study Group, October 2012
“We had a one-and-a-half-hour walk in the forest to the falls and back. Then we shared a light lunch,” writes Vimla Koonja, study group coordinator. “This time only few members made it out of 22. They were Milly, Tooshma, Eeshita, Nishal, Yashveer, Ashwan, Nitish, Kirran, Vanessa and myself.”
With 160 centers, projects and services around the globe, there is always news on FPMT activities, teachers and events. Mandala hopes to share as many of these timely stories as possible. If you have news you would like to share, please let us know.
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Paul Pelliot, who arrived after Stein at the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas, in the Library Cave, 1908. Photo by Charles Nouette (1869-1910), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Journeys on the Silk Road: A Desert Explorer, Buddha’s Secret Library, and the Unearthing of the World’s Oldest Printed Book, by journalists Joyce Morgan and Conrad Walters, tells the story of the explorer Aurel Stein’s 1906-8 expedition to Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Dunhuang, China. Stein and his men traveled along the old silk trade routes, skirting the Taklamakan and Gobi Deserts. They raced to beat other explorers to the old Buddhist grottos where Stein had heard a vast trove of ancient texts had been uncovered in what came to be known as the “Library Cave.”
Read an excerpt from chapter 8.
From Mandala October-December 2012
Ven. Tunden
FPMT has shared the following statement in response to the death of Ven. Tunden at Nalanda Monastery:
We are profoundly saddened to learn of the tragic passing of Ven. Tunden and offer our sincere condolences to his family, and the Nalanda community where he resided during the past five years. A puja was conducted for Ven. Tunden at Maitripa College led by Yangsi Rinpoche on November 15, 2012. We encourage the recitation of prayers for Ven. Tunden and his family.
The monastery has also posted the following announcement on their Facebook page:
To all our family and friends,
As you may have heard we have some very sad news to pass to you.
Our brother Tunden took his own life here at Nalanda Monastery at 17:00 yesterday (15 November).
Venerable Tunden was 38 years old from the UK, and had been living in the monastery for the last five years. He did not leave any message, and nothing indicated that he was about to carry out such action.
It seems that he poured a can of gasoline over his body before setting it alight. Unfortunately, the first people and the emergency services on the scene were unable to help. In the current state of the enquiry, it is not possible to determine with certainty what led him to such an extreme act.
Our thoughts and prayers go out to Tunden’s family and we are working closely with them to take care of their wishes.
We will try to keep you updated with any other information including appropriate arrangements
Please add Tunden and his family to your prayers and dedications.
UPDATE: Nalanda Monastery has sent out a message to the community, which you can read here.
Sarah Shifferd, long-time columnist for Mandala, shares her own experiences from online dating and offers ten ground rules for transforming it into a spiritual practice. If online dating is a part of your life (or even something you’re just curious about), Shifferd’s piece will give you something fresh, honest, and humorous to think about.
“I said I would never do it. In fact, I occasionally made my disdain for online dating known, complaining about the shallowness of the internet age and the resultant loss of basic human connection.
“But whenever the words, ‘I will never …’ leave my mouth, that’s a sure sign the activity mentioned is imminent. So it was with only mild surprise that I found myself typing o-k-c-u-p-i-d-.-c-o-m into my browser one day in January and signing up. I wanted to widen my social circles beyond the Buddhist community in which I had worked, studied, practiced and taught for the previous eight years. I wanted to overcome some deep inner fear. And I wanted to see if all I knew about practice could be taken into the real world, where people had no idea I was supposed to be practicing at all.”
From Mandala July-September 2012.
Khadro-la at Land of Calm Abiding, California, United States, June 2012. Photo by Ven. Holly Ansett.
Editor Laura Miller talks to Khadro-la about earthquakes on the United States’ West Coast and what she and Lama Zopa Rinpoche are doing to help mitigate any potential damage.
From Mandala October-December 2012
Åge (pronounced Oh-wa) Delbanco, a Danish hippie and spiritual seeker who was given the nickname Babaji, and who became an early student of the Lamas. Photo from 1970.
In the late 1960s, Åge Delbanco (also known as Babaji) followed the “hippie trail” from Denmark to India and then found his way up Kopan Hill in Nepal. He arrived about a year after Lama Yeshe, Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Zina Rachevsky had begun creating what would become Kopan Monastery. Later, he went to Vajrapani Institute in Boulder Creek, California, and ended up staying for 13 years. Wolf Price talked to Åge about the early years at Kopan and the time he spent at Vajrapani.
“[In Kopan] Lama Yeshe would be so accepting of everything. There was this English girl who came and she wanted to meditate. She sat down in her room and didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, she just sat down and meditated. I thought that was not so good, but Lama Yeshe said, ‘Oh meditation, very good, very good.’
“I think she meditated for two weeks and then keeled over exhausted. Her father came at that time and brought her home. Later she wrote a letter to Lama, thanked him, and said it was great to go through that and not be stopped. It was always like that. I had all these ideas – Western ideas about what was good and what was bad, right and wrong. It always turned out that I didn’t know what I was believing.”
From Mandala April-June 2012.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaching at the Sixth Kopan Course, March 1974, when he gave his most extensive teachings on the eight worldly dharmas. Photo by Ursula Bernis.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche teaches extensively on “the dissatisfied mind of desire”:
“Whether we are a Dharma practitioner or not, every problem in life comes from our own mind, as does every happiness. The cause of suffering is not external; the cause of happiness is not external. It is within us, in our mind.
“The particular thing that has created all the problems of life is the dissatisfied mind of desire, the mind clinging to this life. We try to obtain the immediate happiness of this life through what we call the eight worldly dharmas: a desire for comfort, material things (such as gifts, friends and so forth), a good reputation and praise, and an aversion to a lack of comfort and material things, a bad reputation and criticism, or blame.”
This teaching is excerpted from How to Practice Dharma: Teachings on the Eight Worldly Dharmas, edited by Gordon McDougall.
From Mandala July-September 2011.
Craig Matsu-Pissot submitted “ever mind” to Mandala to our great pleasure. It reads like a meditation on the nature of the mind and is certainly worth lingering over.
“… shadows of behaviors which have appeared repetitively / like the passing cars of a ghost train / which of course leads back to a birth place no longer relevant …”
From Mandala January-March 2010.
Photo by fdecomite via Flickr. Creative Commons Attribution.
In a time when there is a heightened awareness of global terror and especially during the American presidential elections, the word “freedom” is often heard. But what does “freedom” mean from a Buddhist perspective? During teachings on Shantideva’s Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, Geshe Jamphel, abbot and resident teacher of Nalanda Monastery in France, explores this question.
“We can look at freedom in different contexts. For example, we don’t wish for the weather to be too hot or too cold, we don’t want to be thirsty, and we don’t want to be hungry; we want to be healthy and not ill. However, things do not always arise as we wish them too. Therefore, we can clearly see that we don’t have freedom,” writes Geshe Jamphel. “Also, in a free country like France, there are still people living in situations of unbearable suffering, which may lead them to commit suicide. You could even say that such a person is less free than someone in prison. If we do not make effort to be liberated from the afflictions, our mind will deteriorate into such states. In short, if we don’t make effort to construct a path that is liberating us from samsara, we can construct as many freedoms as we want in this world, but we will never be free.”
Read more on fpmt.org/mandala/.
From Mandala October-December 2008.
Dog warming in sun, January 2012. Photo by Phil Hunt.
Leah Richards, a veterinary nurse, has a deep love, compassion, and respect for all animals and hopes to be a veterinarian one day. While at the 2003 Kopan course, she asked Lama Zopa Rinpoche for guidance on what to do when asked to perform euthanasia on sick and suffering animals.
From Mandala October-November 2004.
Ven. Rita Riniker
“Somehow, we have this arrogant idea that we should be able to protect ourselves from all harm from others as if we are superheroes and perfect,” writes Swiss-born Ven. Rita Riniker. “If we get hurt, our ego is not happy and we start to hate ourselves for not being perfect. That in turn makes us feel very important. Although it is not a happy feeling, we prefer to be an unhappy, important somebody than a relaxed, happy nobody. Feeling hurt is perfect food for the ego. It makes it really big, but also very vulnerable and weak. In that way, the target to be hurt again becomes even bigger.”
Read Ven. Rita’s complete answer on fpmt.org/mandala/.
From Mandala January-March 2009.
An orphaned possum joey being examined, 2011. Photo by Tania Duratovic.
“The start of 2011 saw the Australian state of Queensland experience some of the worst flooding in history, resulting in three-quarters of the state, an area the size of France and Germany combined, being declared a disaster zone. Stretching from remote farming communities to the state’s capital, Brisbane, the floods killed 35 people and affected the lives of more than 200,000. The hidden toll, as in many disasters, however, was the thousands of injured, orphaned and deceased animals.”
From Mandala July-September 2011.