FULL MOON – Saturday 13th August 2011

The active mind is difficult to tame,
flighty and wandering wherever it wills:
taming it is essential,
leading to the joy of well-being.

Dhammapada 35

If you are practising properly it will be difficult. There is no need to feel bad just because you are struggling. This is how it is for everyone who is aware. Remember, it is our habits that make it hard, not reality, not Dhamma. So we regularly resolve to align all aspects of our life with Dhamma. Remember too, the more firm our resolve, the more difficult the practice, so modesty in our ambitions can be a good thing.

With Metta,

Ajahn Munindo

Calls for Female Religious Equality Spread

Following on from our story of the 1st Annual International Bhikkhuni Day it's interesting to note the increasing number of calls for the ordination of women priests within the Roman Catholic church. Just as within the Thai Forest tradition of Buddhism, women have been ordained in the Catholic tradition of Christianity against the dictat of each institution's leadership.

More than 150 Roman Catholic priests in the United States have signed a statement in support of a fellow cleric who faces dismissal for participating in a ceremony that purported to ordain a woman as a priest, in defiance of church teaching.

There has been a “Call to Disobedience” issued in Austria in June by more than 300 priests and deacons. They stunned their bishops with a seven-point pledge that includes actively promoting priesthood for women and married men, and reciting a public prayer for “church reform” in every Mass.

In Switzerland, Markus Buechel, bishop of the diocese of St Gallen, has said there was huge pressure on the bishops to discuss women's ordination. "We can no longer evade it," he says.

And in Australia the Catholic Bishop of Toowoomba, William Morris, has been effectively sacked by Pope Benedict XVI over doctrinal disobedience for his support for ordaining women priests and other liberal reforms.

Back in the States, just as within the Forest Tradition, people have gone ahead and by-stepped the restrictions by just doing it! The RCWP is an organisation of Catholic women priests, in their own words they are "an international movement within the Roman Catholic Church. The mission of Roman Catholic Womenpriests is to primarily spiritually prepare, ordain, and support women from all states of life, who are theologically qualified, who are committed to an inclusive model of Church, and who are called by the Holy Spirit and their communities to minister within the Roman Catholic Church."

The 1st Annual International Bhikkhuni Day

The 1st Annual International Bhikkhuni Day is on Saturday 17th September 2011,

from 9am - 5pm, and in the UK a meeting will be held at

The Buddhist Society, 58 Eccleston Square, London SW1V 1PH.

The Bhikkhuni Day is a global, grassroots effort, sponsored by the Alliance for Bhikkhunis, and devoted to honouring Mahapajapati Gotami, the founder of the Bhikkhuni Sangha. On this day, supporters will gather at various venues around the world, to celebrate their spiritual legacy, learn about the history of prominent Buddhist women, meditate and raise funds to support bhikkhunis, via a meditation pledge-a-thon.

The home page of Alliance for Bhikkhunis ( http://www.bhikkhuni.net) contains details about the day on the bottom right-hand corner of the page - together with a link to the brochure for the day: http://www.bhikkhuni.net/documents/IBD%20Brochure%20rev.%205.23.11.pdf

All those who would like to attend the London meeting are very welcome. Those who would like to attend but who live too far away, are encouraged to set up a local meeting of their own, and can contact me, Josephine Snell, at josephinebarton@hotmail.co.uk for details on how to do this. Setting up a meeting has been designed to be incredibly easy to do, and there are resources on the AfB website to help, plus my support via email. Ideally, we would like to end up with groups all over the country...

Those who are planning to attend a meeting, or who are unable to attend but would like to support the day through taking part at home, are invited to set up a FirstGiving page via the Alliance for Bhikkhunis' website - see http://www.firstgiving.com/allianceforbhikkhunis/1st-annual-international-bhikkhuni-day
- so that they can help raise funds through the meditation pledge-a-thon. Alternatively, supporters can sponsor people who already have FirstGiving pages of their own.

It would be really helpful if you could you let me know, via my email address josephinebarton@hotmail.co.uk, if you plan to attend the London meeting or would like to attend one elsewhere, so that I can start to get an idea of numbers and can put people from outside the London area in touch with each other.

With many thanks for your interest, and much metta,

Josephine Snell
(Member of the AfB committee for International Bhikkhuni Day)

Taliban Fingers and Angulimala

Claims that a British soldier cut off the fingers of Taliban insurgents as trophies during combat operations in Helmand in Afghanistan are being investigated by the military police.

The soldier, from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, is alleged to have severed fingers from dead insurgents during his unit's tour, which ended in April.

This story has striking similarities to the story of Angulimala whose name in Pali literally
means "finger necklace". Angulimala had been told by his teacher that he had to collect one thousand little fingers in order to graduate. He became a feared bandit and wore his growing collection of fingers in a garland around his neck. The story goes that his thousandth victim was to be the Buddha who he spotted coming towards him one day. This powerful and athletic serial killer, who had already successfully resisted several attempts to apprehend him, grabbed his weapons and dashed out to murder the Buddha and complete his score.

He expected to easily overtake him and quickly finish the job but then a very strange thing happened even though the Buddha was only walking, serenely and unhurried, Angulimala, despite his formidable strength and speed, found he couldn't catch up with him. Eventually, exhausted, angry, frustrated and soaked with sweat, Angulimala screamed at the Buddha to stop.

Then the Buddha turned and with neither anger nor fear, speaking quietly and directly, he told Angulimala that he, the Buddha, had already stopped. He had stopped killing and harming and now it was time for him, Angulimala, to do likewise. Angulimala was so struck by these words that there and then he stopped; he threw away his weapons and followed the Buddha back to the monastery where he became a monk.

Angulimala is the name of the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy service which was founded by Venerable Ajahn Khemadhammo, who in in the late 70's set up a small monastery here on the Isle of Wight.

Sadako Sasaki and the Paper Peace Crane

As mentioned in our previous post about today being the 66th anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb, "Remembering Hiroshima",  volunteers at the Kamloops Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Temple were hard at work decorating the temple with paper cranes.

The origin of this practise is the story of Sadako Sasaki, who was a little girl of two when the atom bomb exploded near her home by Misasa Bridge in Hiroshima.

In November 1954, Sadako developed swellings on her neck and behind her ears. In January 1955, purple spots had formed on her legs. Subsequently, she was diagnosed with leukaemia. She was hospitalized on February 21, 1955, and given, at the most, a year to live.

On August 3, 1955, Sadako's best friend Chizuko Hamamoto came to the hospital to visit and cut a golden piece of paper into a square to fold it into a paper crane, in reference to the ancient Japanese story that promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane. A popular version of the story is that Sadako fell short of her goal of folding 1,000 cranes, having folded only 644 before her death, and that her friends completed the 1,000 and buried them all with her.

With her family around her, Sadako died on the morning of October 25, 1955 at the age of 12.

After Sadako died, her friends and her schoolmates published letters so that they could raise the funds in order to build Sadako a memorial to her and the other children in Japan who had died due to the effects of the atom bomb. In 1958, the monument was complete. It was a statue of Sadako, and in her hands is a golden crane. This monument is located at Hiroshima Peace Memorial, otherwise known as Genbaku Dome. The plaque that is on the memorial states, "This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world."

The origami crane has now become an international symbol of peace.

“I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world”

Sadako Sasaki

New Feature - Notes

I've decided to add a new "Feature" in the form of an occasional "note" informing the reader of any recent additions to our other pages (accessed from the cream coloured menu bar at the top of this page).

By way of introduction, here's the first......

NOTE - The latest Dharma talk, shared with the Newport Soto Zen group was "Unholy Emptiness by Stephen Batchelor". It is now available on our Audio Page.

Remembering Hiroshima

On Saturday it will be the 66th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. I came across this story of how people in the Canadian city of Kamloops and it's neighbouring cities of Kelowna and Vernon are taking part in a marathon chanting session to commemorate the August the 6th, 1945 atomic bombing.

Rev. Yasuhiro Miyakawa Sensei will hold a 12-hour chant at the Kamloops Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Temple on Poplar Street on Saturday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

“He’ll be chanting non-stop — no "bathroom breaks", no anything,” said Daniel Heslop, the temple’s secretary.

“Others can join in for as much or as little as they like or they can just sit back and enjoy the atmosphere.”

Volunteers were hard at work this week decorating the temple with paper cranes.

“The origami cranes are going to be set out everywhere in the temple, basically,” Heslop said, estimating the number of cranes at about 15,000.

He went on to say that Saturday will mark the fifth year Miyakawa has hosted a similar event — in Kelowna in 2007, in Kamloops in 2008, in Vernon in 2009 and back in Kelowna in 2010.

Tzu Chi

Having just received the latest newsletter from the Tzu Chi Foundation, the Taiwan-based Buddhist Relief organisation, I came across this article from the Guardian.

Yeh Ci-xing wasn't expecting a tectonic shift in her core values or the genesis of major lifestyle changes after picking up an in-flight magazine. They aren't intended for that. What they did contain, particularly in 1988, were pithy distractions from the boredom, bad food, and secondhand smoke-filled cabins that were the hallmarks of long-haul flights.

"I was so moved by an article about Tzu Chi that I signed up within a few days of touching down in Taipei. And I've been with them ever since," says the full-time volunteer for Taiwan-based NGO Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation. "I've learned to expect the unexpected."

And so have millions of others.