Buddhist council and chaplancy training

The Buddhist Council under the Presidency of Brian White is doing a fantastic job.
The new premises in Crows Nest are great, with a good library and room for meetings and training.

They have organized a Chaplaincy training program .
Regrettably it runs for five weeks, on Thursdays (all day). Much more that I can allocate nowadays.


Interestingly the program is organized with the New South Wales College of Clinical Pastoral Education. They seem to normally train Christian Chaplains but they are now the first to train Buddhist as well. A fantastic interfaith collaboration.

Dalai Lama in Sydney

Yesterday we were very lucky to get the chance to listen to the Dalai Lama.
It was a rainy day, and we had volunteered to help collect donations. Apparently the renting of the Domain (a park next to the Sydney Botanical Gardens), furnishing it and providing security, costs about $800,000/day. The total cost of the tour was about $4M, and although the tour was not for profit, the organizers were running at a big loss.
Anyway, while the Dalai Lama spoke it hardly rained, and we enjoyed and learned from it.

The talk was about compassion and lasted about 45min. He described compassion from the Buddhist, the Theistic (focusing on Christian) and the common sense perspective. I would not try to explain here what he said, but I found interesting that he brought together the ideas of Interrelatedness (the Buddhist perspective), with God's love and our need to get closer to him by loving others (the theistic perspective) and the idea that good feelings bring good health and therefore our own happiness (common sense/ scientific)

After the talk he answered 4-5 questions, read to him by the host.
When asked 'What is the meaning of live' he said 'the most direct answer would be, I don't know' and then he went on explaining how it was difficult question and that the purpose of live is happiness.

back from retreat

I finished my 5th (or 6th?) long retreat. Most of them have been under the guidance of Bhante Ven. Mahinda at the Aloka Meditation Centre.
In these retreats we get a lot of freedom. There is only 2 'mandatory' chanting and 1 dhamma talk.

For me every retreat is different. New challenges come in, and vanish...

Some things stay the same, and these are the things I tell people who ask. For example, the schedule:

5:00 am. Bells - Wake up call.
5:30 Chanting
7:15 Breakfast
11:00 Lunch
3:00 Tea (unless you are doing the 8 precepts, so like the monks you do not it after 12:00 noon)
5:00 Dinner (idem)
6:00 Chanting
8:00 Dhamma talk
10:30 lights off.

The whole week we maintained 'noble silence', that although is difficult for some people is the best way to keep everybody focused on their own mediation practice (The practice we follow is the development of Samadhi). The people of this group were great. Some with a lot of experience. The residents who coordinate the retreat were also great.

I decided to create a new label in the blog 'development'. For the sake of my Dhamma teaching the retreat could be considered 'professional development', although I'm not a 'pro' so I will just call this development.