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'THE
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on: Sunday 26 November 2000 Our Centre operates as a peak organisation carrying the ideals of the WFB, and conducts activities as a Regional Centre of the World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB). We are an associated spiritual training Centre of the World Buddhist University. The WFB objectives include:
Why Only an Outline? It is not practical or ethical to disclose in writing the full program of teachings given at our Centre for three reasons. There is a tradition that some teachings are orally transmitted when the time is right for the student to grasp the insight. The first reason is to respect the confidentiality/privacy of the subject matter raised by clients. The second reason is it is not our policy to do case studies or dossiers on our clients. The third reason is that we respect the Buddha Rule of not making public, details of the use of siddhi (Pali: iddhi) or mantra or practices that help to connect persons to healing or protective Dieties. REPORT OF THE BUDDHIST DISCUSSION CENTRE (UPWEY) LTD. ON THE DEVELOPMENT AT THE CENTRE OF AN ASSOCIATE INSTITUTION OF THE WORLD BUDDHIST UNIVERSITY IN THE FIELD OF SPIRITUAL TRAINING. Prepared by John D. Hughes Dip. App. Chem. T.T.T.C. GDAIE Vice President World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB) The Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Limited (BDC(U)Ltd.) is a regional centre of the World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB) and an associate Institution of the World Buddhist University (WBU) in the field of spiritual training. Throughout this report on our recent developments, we will refer to our organisation as the WBU Spiritual Centre. The WBU Spiritual Centre is a privately owned organisation and does not have to satisfy everybody’s needs. It is self funded by Members of the BDC(U) Ltd. It maintains a low key and has not moved from a position where it has the view that the scholar has individual responsibility for his or her privately funded studies. Australia is a secular nation, and under its Constitution religious institutions or spiritual centres cannot receive funding, and as such we have no reliance on the Government for funding our research activities. We make it clear to our Members that some Members are chosen for our elite training and given access to our extensive databases and extensive library resources to support their writing and thinking. We refer to these persons as our A Team. We think on average the actual cost of supporting a scholar Member is at least 150 times that of supporting an ordinary Member. Members agree that the support structure for our A Team is an imperative and understand it is needed to continue our lineage into the next after next generation of WBU Spiritual Centre scholars. Over the last 2 decades, several persons who are now top international scholars studied with us for about 4 to 8 years as associate editors or project leaders in the act of critically investigating the truth of opinions, logical disputation and argument. During that time, they coached thousands of our Members and visitors in tertiary studies at no charge. These scholars are appreciated for the well-researched contributions and the editing that they did for Buddha Dhyana Dana Review and other publications.
Their scholarly works are preserved in our knowledge archives. Excerpts and abstracts are used from time to time in our weekly radio broadcast texts. The reason we maintain such a concentrated rate of training in scholarship at our Centre is that no other Australian organisation has committed to this role. Within the last 50 years, the author knows of no more than three persons who have presented mainstream Buddha Dhamma doctorate theses at local Australian universities. Has Australia the ability to produce Buddhist scholars? With the recent passing away of Professor De Jong, many persons incline to the view that it is difficult to point to a scholar of equal international status in Buddhist studies within Australia. Professor De Silva of Monash University, who is about to retire, has gone some way to putting forward the Buddhist case for scholarship in Victoria. In a secular society where Government funding on the nature and purpose of spiritual training as such, is not legal, spiritual training is privately funded. The Australian Government is more inclined to provide funding for projects with perceived economic benefit. Naturally, politicians around the world declare themselves in favour of education that promises to make their respective countries wealthy and their citizens healthy. There is no doubt that Buddha Dhamma spiritual training can achieve these two minor blessings. However politicians do drift into prevailing approaches that rest on narrow, instrumentalist notions of learning and they highlight the silences – on questions of gender, class, ethnicity and spirituality – that underpin the behaviourist outlook still dominant in much of the world of training. It is hoped as we share ideas that we have field tested at our Centre and overseas, and that are of fundamental concern to the curriculum at our Spiritual Centre you would not expect to hear us express a compromise policy which may jeopardise our Canonical approach to teaching. We cannot have a simple message on curriculum because we are involved in the complex and demanding field of learning. We stress again and again to our Members that education ought to come first with suitable pedagogy before it is possible to have anything approaching what we could call Buddha Dhamma education. James R. Beniger, author of Control Revolution, a book about the emergence of the ‘information society’, lists 75 names or expressions used by analysts to refer to this ‘new age’. Familiar phrases such as “global village” or “the third wave” are twisted sometimes to incorporate the word “society” – producing such fog words as “the information society”, “post-industrial society” and even “post-capitalist society”. The author does not wish to disparage the intentions or motives of persons working in technology or persons who believe progress can only come from understanding their much wider self interests in terms of career path or increased remuneration for work done. When we talk about “the industrial revolution” that occurred in England two centuries ago, did the persons at the time see it as a revolution or merely an evolution of existing technology? The persons who bought the machines made small improvements to them and these successive improvements meant that England rapidly became a leader in industrial technology. Most persons seem to have held the view that technological determinism was unbiased and inevitable. Many managers and technologists are concerned about quality rather than cost awareness. Education or schooling does not necessarily equip operators with the emotional flexibility and intellectual skills needed in the workplace. Clerical work of the simpler sort is unlikely to grow because human beings are limited in memory capacity of client details. In Australia, six primary years and six secondary years of schooling no longer grant entry to middle class jobs. This range of jobs has been vanishing and it is estimated that what would have been one million clerical jobs in Australia have been automated. Given the widely advertised view that high technology will dominate the demand for new workers and raise skill requirements of jobs, the required transformation of needed tertiary education has not occurred to date in Australia. It is clear that the introduction of systems means some skills tend to be downgraded because some old-fashioned managers are afraid of workers editing programs. The new scenario calls into question both the forms of knowledge that persons need and the way that knowledge ought be distributed. In Australia, educated persons are moving towards a belief that there can be no set of job skills that are useful at the beginning of a person’s work career, that will be useful over their entire work life. In our organisation, the half-life of many job skills we use could be as little as six months due to the rapid churning of technology. We do not wish our Members or helpers to develop a terminal operator mentality at our spiritual centre. We know that a database environment, with a knowledgeable work force concentrating on data, not procedures, pushes up a person’s intelligence. All Members are committed to thinking before pushing buttons or just filling in the blanks on the screen. To attract a few hours of time from a best mix of the best helpers, the WBU Spiritual Centre blends knowledge, experience, innovation and enthusiasm to achieve the result we desire. We recognise that seemingly perceptual barriers exist for some Members who cannot or will not cognate the reasons we state as to why Buddha Dhamma mapping, research, preservation and availability is most important. Under the old system we had to work hard to get information from folders, letters, scraps of paper, conversations and telephone enquiries. Under the newer systems, we use our ISYS search engines to find a hundred or more highlighted references in two seconds from our Local Area Network data warehouse. We can move so fast, so high, and so quick with our new technology we can navigate across decades of our written history. The past knowledge base is now accessible, however without knowledgeable helpers who can relate the know-how to current concerns nothing happens. It is most important in a six month time frame that we educate Members to go beyond clerical thinking, which is a first order process. To create discontinuity and break from humdrum practice we ceased thinking about more development of local clerical resources. Our Members started to see that ideas, like Bodhisattva vows, meant something that could be put into action. When they do this, persons cease exercising trivial managerial power, and clerical first order thought vanishes. We teach our Members and friends persons to generate more than they consume. We must educate them to generate our own resources. There are three things we teach helpers to say “yes” to and affirm as education principles. Firstly, since worthwhile education does not come cheap in terms of resources used; it is hard to practice quality education if you are poor in resources. The second step we agree on, is that it is vital for Members of our organisation to generate most of their sustainable wealth in Australia and in particular Victoria. Finally, as we can find suitable local scholars with interest in the spiritual study fields associated with Buddha Dhamma, we can make our resources available to them. They do not need to leave Australia to mature themselves with like minded persons. We do not mind becoming overtly dependent on overseas materials for study. The WBU offers a vast range of new opportunities. The strength of the new University will provide an implicit curriculum for scholarship that includes a sila (morality) stockpile of good work habits about culture, language, society and technology. We will define scholarship with good work habits (samma jiva) as the ability to apply that stockpile of information and acquire new knowledge that is useful for at least 50 years. Maybe the rector of WBU and colleagues might find one case in 100 where knowledge found passes out of practical use within six months and yet still can be called scholarship. Spiritual knowledge does not pass out of use within six months. But in general, we think we know when we talk about viewpoints held by persons, that we can remind ourselves that affective reactions not only signal their evaluation along a dimension of good or bad but they also communicate and suggest certain rudimentary ways to react. Yet, we think we know that neither affects nor current concerns of a person are dispensable constructs. Although affects (somewhat like the Pali meaning of sankhara) are clearly over-simplification devices to describe some situations in our WBU Spiritual Centre policy, we treat and recognise affect as being for many humans, his or her ultimate arbiter of value. Because of the operation of affects, all persons do not agree upon universal values. Each week, for over two years, the author has been training our best graduate and post graduate Members to write in-depth non-trivial radio scripts on various Buddhist topics utilising second and third order knowledge or better. These are the basis of our one-hour Buddhist Hour broadcasts on Sundays from 11 am. In the past, the text of a few of these broadcasts was published in our journal, the Buddha Dhyana Dana Review, and circulated to 40 countries. This year (2000) the broadcast scripts have been uploaded onto one of our websites. As you might expect, the broadcasts are non-racist, non-ageist, and non-sexist. Our Centre’s website policy is to establish the superior value we place on browsing amongst well-written Teachings as real specimens of local Australia writing displayed with classical Buddhist references. There are some things we want to become better known for. We find it sad that Australian opinion polls show that the majority of Australians oppose any significant increase in immigration now or in the future. But half a century ago, independent observers from other nations believed our record on immigration highlighted a great and positive Australian achievement. According to the Business Council of Australia, migrants and their children have contributed close to 60 per cent of Australia’s economic growth in the last 50 years. Australia cannot save the world but it is clear that when it comes to immigration, many parts of the world will be paying us more attention. In 1955, the author could find only one Buddhist Monk in Australia. Today, hundreds of Monks and Nuns can be found in the hundreds of Temples which have been established. It has not been an open door immigration policy but the growth of Buddha Dhamma within the country has been the biggest single contributing factor to the transformation of Australia. Within the genuine space dedicated to scholarship, we have built the causes of spiritual study within our WBU Spiritual Centre for more than two decades. At the moment our personal funds are insufficient to build a separate WBU Spiritual Centre. We do not intend to borrow money for this purpose. We have already built a Centre that provides the momentum towards scholarship ideals. Since 1980, our work in the translation of minor Dhamma texts has inspired many of our Members. Our present concern is to select persons who are motivated enough to handle the preservation of our Centre’s original collection of rare texts within our present site storage constraints. In the future, we plan that selected Members be funded and supported to give them increased exposure to some of our rare original texts from overseas. As more merit is made, we look forward to the hyper-energization of a few key helpers by the Deva and Devata of Learning. Our WBU Spiritual Centre can gain a further advantage in two ways. Firstly by extending our library space and secondly, by regularly displaying bitmaps of our rare texts, thankas and calligraphy on our websites. We are recognised as a Spiritual Learning Centre. This website display with religious texts is designed to inspire many potential scholars to seek closer co-operation with either the new parent University in a Thai Buddhist nation or ourselves or both. It is time to put on display some of our buried artistic treasures. This will be done over the next six months. This action gives incentive value that can be controlled by skill in means. Our Centre’s management has “repressors” or “inhibitors” that are needed to avoid the risk of imprudent gearing of debt. To recap, we do not apologise for presenting our rare books with cues to inspire affects that invite potential scholars to do more than passively view photographic representations on our WBU Spiritual Centre website. Scholars could translate them for us and give us their copyright permission for their translation to go onto our website. From the notion of affect as a guiding force refer to Mowrer (1960). We cannot let our treasures leave our site for insurance reasons. But for the time being we commit ourselves to the unattractive task of telling Scholars to accept our economic reasons of why we cannot invite many Scholars to handle the original specimens. Of course, in the economic sphere as elsewhere, practice does not always conform to the ideal. Often, in common practice, persons use the term “education” and “schooling” as synonymous. As Nobel Prize Winner, Milton Frieman (1980) pointed out the identification of the two terms is another case of persuasive terminology. In more careful use of the terms, not all “schooling” is “education”, and not all “education” is “schooling”. Few institutions in our society are in a more unsatisfactory state than schools. If we follow what everyone else is doing in curriculum content we could not hold ourselves to be a spiritual Centre if we cannot distinguish the assumptions underlying education on the one hand and schooling on the other. A tide of opinion, once it flows strongly, tends to sweep over all obstacles, all contrary views. Equally, when it has crested and a contrary tide sweeps in, that too tends to flow strongly. Changes in the direction of British economic policy occurred early in the 20th century and similar economic changes occurred in America after the Depression in 1930. Different intellectual climates bring strong ideas. In the mid-twentieth century, it was taken for granted that a modern economy should be organised through centralised control and five-year plans. But personally, I believe that thinking in terms of seventy year cycles for all our projects has much to commend it. For a 70-year time span, provided we are equally strong between ourselves that we can accept expediency and comprise, in order to hold together our widely disparate factions and interests, can we not agree today on the climate of opinion we need to define the training and curriculum development for a World Buddhist University in Thailand? This supply-and-demand proposition of a 70-year cycle includes a world tour of some of our rare manuscripts. We believe we are justified in cueing the website viewers to believe that sooner, rather than later, were they to make the effort and engage in more vigour, we would consider letting our rare specimens visit them in well protected and well mounted exhibitions. It is important that persons become genuinely committed to something in order for obstacles to increase in value. When this happens, a form of internal synergy forms. Initially, the WBU Spiritual Centre would concentrate such efforts in the State of Victoria so that colleagues interested in scholarship could meet with us. Our website policy could follow a process suggesting our originals are in short supply. There was an experiment held in 1995 that suggested that when a commodity (chocolate chip cookies) were made to appear in short supply, subjects (college women) liked them better, especially when they were led to believe that the scarcity resulted from a high demand from other participants, rather than by accident, and especially when the scarcity increased during the experiment (Worrchel, Lee and Adewole 1975). As we start our website we will do our best not to reduce the enormous flow of rarity indicators that we can use to increase incentives, each for himself or herself, to wish to find the incentive to view the originals of our rare texts. The scarcity must be supplied to generate a form of “cosummatory force” to overcome satiation. Incentives are not the only things that need to be clarified because values need attention. If we suggest attachment is what we want we have been misunderstood. As mentioned again and again, “value” is without meaning in this context and it is interesting that Buddha Dhamma stresses that attachment to matter can be a cause of suffering. We must be understood as saying the tactics we intend to use to operate the WBU Spiritual Centre are on a wider frame than mere attachment and use a much smaller number of critical considerations than are usual in the way we live. We will take care to avoid emotive words, such as the “digital divide” or “unfair”, to suggest we have values that determine the exclusion approach we take as to who can view the complete set of original rare texts and who cannot. We hold that the term “value” has no precise meaning in western psychology. Value is a way of describing things valued in some other set of terms. There are two aspects to this “value” notion. Firstly, when we make a “natural selection” of what rare texts we choose to distribute on our Internet catalogue as a beginning, we are not impelled to target specimens that may specifically have excitement value for those of lower socio-economic status. There is strong evidence that the use of drugs, such as alcohol, goes across many socio-economic groups and that persons use it to improve their bleak or painful life situations. It may serve as a focus to provide a sense of meaningfulness where meaning is otherwise lacking. The second case is that this lack of meaning can arise from a dull job or a lifeless marriage, when emotional investments are made elsewhere. In modern industrial society, lack of sense that one’s life is meaningful has taken on the proportions of a major social problem. Viktor Frankl (1967) calls it “noogenic neurosis”. Dealing with it presents a problem of affective engineering - of finding ways to rearrange person’s lives or the way they view their lives so as to to restore to them a sense of meaningfulness. Loss of value from persons having depressed moods is well known because such moods lower the value of virtually everything. As more and more persons access Internet, the number of depressed viewers can be predicted to rise. Their sensory pleasures that have lost value through habituation can be revived to some extent by consciously focusing attention on them after they have become automated. Nearly half (47%) of Americans with Internet access in the lower socio-economic status have obtained this experience only since the beginning of 1999. The same direction is being followed in the State of Victoria, my home state, as Government policy helps access for pensioners to be able to email one another. For some, access can give cultural shock because operant thinking is most likely to be disrupted under certain specifiable conditions. The thinker may fear the loss of something or be depressed about something other than the problem in hand. At other times, the prospect of a different goal than the one he or she is working at present may excite the thinker. We must remember we are dealing with real persons. Distance education is well developed in Australia due to the nation having a small population (19 million) in a vast continent. The advent of distance education online meant the education providers had the potential for interactivity and student-directed learning emerged. From 1994 the Commonwealth of Australia abandoned the policy of supporting a small number of distance education Centres, instead favouring the development of mixed mode delivery for all institutions. Members are infused with the social purpose of the WBU Spiritual Centre, that of the creation of mutuality, the passage from feeling into shared meaning. A deep and comprehensive treatment of a variety of methods is taught at the Centre over time. Among these are: Teachings to raise Insight and Mindfulness Traditionally called Vipassana to view anicca (the ever-changing nature of things). Mohnyin Sayadaw compares this insight about anicca with the movement of a hand. Ordinary persons will say it is the same hand in all positions; yet in the ultimate sense, trillions of “groups” - physical/energy configurations - arise and vanish in the process of the oscillation as the hand is moved. So, the real teaching is a dynamic affair where no two students are taught the same, even if it appears they are taught as a group. We say you need to understand this fineness of anicca. (change due to rising and falling of matter). Five Day Bhavana Courses Several Five Day Meditation courses are held throughout the year. Courses run from 9.00 am - 10.00 pm each day and there is no fee for attendance. All those who attend the courses are asked to maintain at least five precepts. Please contact the Centre for a schedule of courses and for all supplementary information. Prajnaparamita Teachings Master John D. Hughes will teach the Prajnaparamita Sutta on the Perfection of Wisdom every Tuesday evening starting at 7.30 pm. These rare Teachings commenced on the New Moon day February 16 1999 and will be taught for three years and three moons concluding on Versak 2002. Those wishing to join in these unique teachings are encouraged to become Members of our Centre. For information on the Teachings or on becoming a Member please contact the Centre. Buddha Dhamma Teachings Buddha Dhamma practices including bhavana are taught by resident Teacher John D. Hughes at the Centre every Monday and Friday evening starting at 7.30 pm. You are invited to join us for any session or alternatively please contact the Centre to arrange a convenient time to visit and meet with our Teacher. Visiting Teachers give specialised lineage transmission At times the Centre accommodates eminent Buddhist Monks and Teachers from other Centres and overseas to conduct Dhamma talks and teachings. At present eminent Buddhist Monk Venerable Ajarn Chanhphy Manivong visits regularly on Tuesday mornings for Dana which is followed by a Buddha Dhamma teaching. Please contact the Centre for dates, times and Dana rosters. Ch’an Classes Classes in Ch'an (Zen) methods are conducted at the Centre on the last Sunday of each month. As an ancient Buddha Dhamma practice Ch’an trains the mind by the Way of the Brush. Classes are taught by resident Ch’an Master John D. Hughes. John has empowered Julian Bamford and Jan Bennett to run these classes. Please contact Julian Bamford for class fee details or more information on 9756 7477. The Way of the Garden Selected Students are taught within the garden settings to observe the four seasons change. This method improves their health. The Way of the Scholar To overcome sloth and torpor, selected Students are taught over time the methods of writing about Buddha Dhamma. They become the next generation of wordsmiths. Our publishing program provides opportunities for global private correspondence, Internet input, key articles for our Review and in house journal (“The Bugle”) and practice in writing conceptual solutions to real projects. Our weekly radio broadcast scripts provide a skills incubator for meeting time lines. Regular attendance is needed and a strong wish to learn. Our superior library gives research experience. Sumi-e Classes Sumi-e methods are taught at the Centre by Master Andre Sollier. Classes are conducted monthly over the four seasons and each class runs from 10 am to 3.00 pm. Master Sollier selects a new theme every year for his students to learn. The theme for 2000 is the ten ox-herding paintings. Please contact Julian Bamford for class fee details or more information on 03 9756 7477. Puja Transmissions Various Pujas are conducted at the Centre throughout the year by visiting Teacher Francisco So with two Pujas being conducted in early September 2000, prior to Founder’s Day. Please contact the Centre for information on these and future Pujas. Fundraising & Financial Responsibility as Leadership Training Selected Students who wish to stabilise the continued existence of our Organisation need to understand our financial programs are based on “self-help”. Several are trained in leadership and encouraged to become University graduates and post graduates in skills needed for them to become the future Directors of our Centre. Teaching about Relevant Current Affairs More and more we plan that our teaching is delivered by Internet. We are developing more and more Internet sites so we must operate under many different regulations. In 1999, the European parliament initialled an amendment to the Copyright Directive that would outlaw random, illegal copying of material on the Internet. The move came after the Telecom companies proposed to weaken the entire copyright regime for content providers. We are studying the recent amendments to the Australian copyright law with due diligence. We do teach minutiae when it is appropriate. Facts and figures are important to understanding issues. The lead vehicle for this style of teaching is found in the texts of our radio broadcasts. These can be read on our Internet site at www.bdcublessings.one.net.au We are Members of the Ethnic Communities Council of Victoria. From time to time, we put our position to Government Standing Committees drafting new legislation. We strive to present a balanced view of how we see the legislation affecting religious organisations in general and in particular how it will affect the operations of our organisation. Our views are formed by extensive reading and discussion with our international peers. We cultivate direct contact with University theses to legitimatize our arguments with use of pertinent reference material. We will not infringe copyright by publishing material that has not been cleared by the holder of the copyright. We respect industrial and intellectual property rights. Our Founder worked in the area of patents, trademarks and copyright for many years and founded AMPICTA. Our Teacher is a life member of AMPICTA, an organisation that looks after intellectual property. Humanitarian Activities We train persons towards cultural adaptability that can distinguish between generosity and stinginess and encourage the practice of dana (material assistance). Our ‘self-help’ training extends to many realms. We train our Members and other persons to speak good things, to do good things, to be kind and to spread kindness to others. We fund Buddhist orphanages in Bangladesh and India. We help many local Australians with household goods and sound advice. We help many business persons direct their company policies towards sounder human resource development and prosperity based on a better global view of how their activities impact on their worker’s families and the need for enrichment training in a post-Fordism era. There is no bias in our organisation between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ in the economic sense. We train persons who can organise and promote exchange of missions, scholars and students. In conclusion The B.D.C.(U) Ltd. was designated as a spiritual training centre of the World Buddhist University at the last meeting of the World Federation of Buddhists in late 1998 in Wollongong, Australia. The B.D.C.(U) Ltd. meets the objectives of the WFB of:
MAY YOU BE WELL AND HAPPY The authors and editors of this script are John D. Hughes, Leanne Eames, Tim Browning, Julie O’Donnell and Lisa Nelson. Disclaimer:
As we, the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., do not control the actions of our service providers from time to time, make no warranty as to the continuous operation of our website(s). Also, we make no assertion as to the veracity of any of the information included in any of the links with our websites, or an other source accessed through our website(s).
Accordingly, we accept no liability to any user or subsequent third party, either expressed or implied, whether or not caused by error or omission on either our part, or a member, employee or other person associated with the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.
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