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NAMO
TASSA
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'THE
BUDDHIST HOUR'
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Hillside
Radio 1620 AM, 87.6 FM & 88.0 FM |
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The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast for Sunday 1 July 2001
The
topic of today’s broadcast is:
In the past, Australians rapidly adopted new technology. The recent collapse of One-Tel communication provider disturbed some Australians. We think the collapse and loss of value of IT companies, both local and overseas, will slow development of new companies for communication in this country. Because the Australian market is approaching maturity of Internet use Australia at grass roots level new startup companies for Internet access may find funding difficult. Overseas countries may outstrip Australia in Internet per capita use in the next 5 years. As these countries’ large populations come online, they can access our many websites.
Nearly all Members have a VHS player, so we can present edited training tapes for this format. We are burning 650MB capacity CD-ROMs on site and will make these available to Members as a nominal cost. More than 10 % of Australian computer users have a computer with a CD reader. If they equip their computer with a CD Reader, they can use our CD data discs.
We have the potential to produce DVD format. As new technologies merge into our databases we will respond when we apprehend demand sufficient and can achieve cost effectiveness. The small population of Australia means that certain types of IT with fast Internet will unlikely to be widely available before 2004.
At schools Internet Providers appear to be concentrating to fewer players.
We have no doubt that if we persist and continue to grow at our present rate, we will connect to a significant audience.
Over the last year, we have learnt many modern skills. It took us 20 years to print and circulate one million readable pages of A4 printed Buddha Dhamma but we can imagine ourselves delivering equivalent “read” from our various websites within the next year. We will approach our next after next global technology in a five year time frame. We will not use long flash intros or produce magazines so hip looking they cannot be read and we will consider our users are as at least as intelligent as we are.
We will skill ourselves to write English as a second language and not display our Australian jargon. We have built a collaborative culture.
Within five years we see ourselves as the number one global provider of good information on authentic Buddha Dhamma in Australia. We do not know of any other Australian organisation that is as adamant as we are at pursuing fifty specialised websites within the next five years.
A person who writes a radio script, broadcasts it and puts it on our website has many satisfiers. This is a great way to make merit and create causes for future study.
We need collaborative webmasters. By training persons with Buddha Dhamma refuge, we save work stress. Our training progress of collaborative webmasters is highly successful. Our Manager of Enterprise Technology Evelin Halls, who is studying IT at Monash University, has obtained distinctions for all IT subjects and has been awarded Life Membership to the Golden Key International Honour Society. At June 2001, we have 4 on-site webmasters, including Evelin, actively tending our websites.
Because we train Buddha Dhamma Practitioners as collaborative webmasters, we get an S5 collaborative culture to develop and maintain our IT systems on site and off site. “Through 2005, managing IT organisations will become increasingly complex, as command and control ceases to be a viable management technique, replaced by a high-performance, collaborative culture.” (Australian Personal Computer, February 2001).
We do not believe we could obtain the level of collaborative culture we wish with persons who do not keep 5 precepts. We will not train clouded persons for our key positions.
Our multiple websites increase our connectivity with other regional WFB Centres and desirable organisations overseas. Since January 2001, we have had over 3,600 visitors to our web sites. Our most regular visitors are from Thailand, Canada and England. The average numbers of visitors to our websites increases each week and these visits have good hang on times (more than 5 minutes on some sites) with the visitors frequently downloading an average of 3 pages of texts per visit.
This time last year we had one occluded original website. Now, we have revitalised our original website at www.bdcu.org.au.
We wish to hold some information for 500 years.
We are re-designing our databases to remove 90% keystrokes.
Our old word processing approach to a data base of dealing with International activities by fresh separate entry in each case is better forgotten. It was too hard to keep up to date data. In one case, our database failed to detect an address change that occurred three years earlier.
Conventional training about data bases stretches people outside their comfort zone but unless there is a change of heart as a core value the person discards the training as soon as possible. We want to bring about more selective change in our use of data bases for International Dhamma Activities. Our relation to the new groups need a critical mass of things in our data bases that are different to what we had before.
We wish to raise the database response time to move quickly with change in current address changes.
We intend to build a new CGR database that includes a mail out section that is easy to use from the viewpoint of adding new work in and getting old work out to print ready.
We are encouraging all thoughtful Members to plan our future work patterns on such databases in order to increase the productive time they can spend at our Centre.
But technology is just one of the things we think about. We think about changes in our society and our relation to it.
Some say the rate of change is too fast for most persons to grasp, and adapt to. We do not think like that.
But whenever we introduce technical or organisation changes we underpin it with the notion we can increase service. We may suffer downgrading of our services if we become too old fashioned.
In general, we avoid hot political issues. At times, we are asked to join in some controversy or other.
In most cases, we remain silent and neutral.
There are some issues in Australia that generate more heat than light.
For example, we are not joining the complex debate on the Aboriginal population and have written about why it is inappropriate for this generation to say “sorry” for the actions that our ancestors did in former times, and at former places.
In line with our present Prime Minister’s policy, we do not take the black armband view of our Australian history.
This year, some sensitive issues arose with Indonesia and India.
We have no direct contact with East Timor and some small contact with Indonesia. The recent good will visit of the President of Indonesia to Australia is welcome. We send our flagship publication Buddha Dhyana Dana Review to 11 organisations in Indonesia. We have contact with 93 people and organisations in India. The Australian Government has improved our relationships with both these countries over the past year.
In our view, the most cost-effective advertising globally we have is on the Internet.
Our main website is at www.bdcu.org.au, and links to our seven new websites are found at this site.
We notice that more and more local people ring us and tell us they discovered us on the Internet.
Our websites and our local radio broadcasts means we reach a more representative audience including some blue collar workers.
A US study found that blue collar workers spend their online time at home, while professional workers used online services at work. While this study highlighted differences in Internet use between people with different incomes and job types. The study found Internet use has become more pervasive.
We imagine a similar pattern exists in Australia.
Another US study showed those people on an income below $25,000 p.a. were the fastest growing segment of Internet users. The study showed that over half of the Internet users were women and that women tended to use the Internet more than men.
We do not know if this applies in Australia.
In the UK, 32% of all households had Internet access at home.
These could become our clients.
This last year, Australia has the world’s third highest access per capita for Internet use. This is because the Internet has been quickly adopted by all socio-economic classes because the price of personal computers has fallen. The Government funds Internet access for schools and funds access for aged people to prevent an information divide.
The Victorian Government policy has all Primary and Secondary schools wired to the Internet. School children can be more knowledge than their teachers when it comes to finding our websites.
Education is secular in Australia but social values of different religions can be taught. We intend to prepare lesson plans for Victorian Teachers next year.
At present, we do not wish to fund raise by selling so-called “foreign” advertising on our websites.
Over time, we plan to invest in more bandwith. We must raise funds to do this. This needs careful planning because we will not borrow money to do this.
Over the next year or so, we will increasingly develop more specialised websites.
We have about one year of radio talk texts on line and are considering opening a special site containing the audio content of each radio broadcast.
When writing Buddha Dhamma, key Members don’t give the mind much time off at all till the text is edited and placed online. It is something they bear in mind 24 hours a day.
Our Centre owns the copyright of our material. We are free to make more merit by giving it away. On the internet, unlike with hard copy material, you can give the text away and it is still there for the next person to download. This saves printing and distribution costs from our end. We are strong believers in this form of missionary activity to speak the message of the Lord Buddha around the world.
So, you can see how important it is for us at our Centre to write things that are true. We print the truth..
We train our editors to be very observant when editing our publications and we must become sharp with everything we do by paying attention to the small rules of writing.
It is easy to detect the big errors. These are like logs.
As Ajaan Mun once said: Logs have never gotten into people’s eyes but fine sawdust can, and it can blind you.
We must smooth the text so it will not blind us by making it clear to read. But it does not have to be easy to read. We do not want to be trivial. Just as translations should display the order of complexity of the original texts, our topics must include 2nd and 3rd order thought as a significant proportion of our writing.
Our Teacher wants to thank all those persons who helped in the preparation and fundraising for BDDR Vol. 10 No.3 which was posted on Monday 18 June 2001.
Our missionary activities in the future depend primarily on running a non-stop Internet crusade.
This will be followed by good public speaking by invitation.
We develop our public speaking on air at the Radio Station.
We vow to do credit to our religion by decent broadcasting.
To write well about Buddha Dhamma requires is a high set of cognitive skills. We teach such skills.
To announce well requires a set of vocal skills.
If you put laughter in your voice, it can be heard on air.
We teach these announcing skills.
The weekly “Buddhist Hour” radio broadcasts can be heard at 11.00am Sundays on Hillside Radio 87.6FM and 88.0FM and 1620 AM in Victoria, Australia.
We are different from commercial radio in Australia in so far as we are peaceful and calm.
We get the text of our broadcast program on line before the broadcast.
The ages of our webmasters range from 22 to 44. No generational shift is needed to sustain our technology inputs which means we are stable.
Over the last two months we have arranged to teach speed reading classes for several Members of our Team.
Our general writing training program has been for running three years. It is specialised training.
We have style manuals available. Because we insist on the truth being set down, the major training we give our writers is to get them to look up the meaning of the proposed word in the Oxford Dictionary. We have superior reference in the complete edition of “The Oxford English Dictionary” Second Edition in 20 Volumes.
We say we write and present our radio broadcast scripts in our 5 styles. These are Professionalism, Cultural Adaptability, Practicality, Friendliness and Scholarship.
Each of these styles requires years of training to become proficient.
To maintain credibility, we cite references from authentic texts from our comprehensive libraries.
Our radio broadcasts seldom cite our reference material details in the radio script, but we do include footnotes on the text version on our Internet site.
Clear diction and an even flow of words are important for public speaking.
Our Members have a variety of accents and we do little to remove these.
It is important that writing entertains to some extent and displays some human warmth and kindness.
As our radio script texts are archived and can be viewed on the web for some years, the focus of our recent training, is to double our efforts to edit in a style suitable for ‘English as a second language’ readers. We try to find the balance between something that is to be read and something that is to be heard.
Script writers are expected to cultivate practicality above all and keep five or more precepts when writing. This develops their ability to read with higher orders of knowledge.
Their lemma is “Let goodly co-mates in the righteous life come here in the future, and let those that have already come live happily”.
We want to train more persons. We will be training another three Webmasters within the next six months. If you are well organised please contact us about this opportunity.
This lemma about living happily is the seventh condition for communal stability of our Buddhist Centre.
The seven conditions for communal stability of anything are:
1. To assemble repeatedly and in large numbers
2. To assemble in harmony and disperse in harmony, so long as they do the business of the Order in harmony
3. Introduce no revolutionary ordinance, break up no established ordinance, but live in accordance with the appointed charges
4. To honour the elder brethren, men of many days and long ordained, fathers of the Order and men of standing in the Order
5. To not fall subject to that craving which arises and leads back to rebirth
6. So long as there shall be brethren who are fond of the forest life and lodging
7. To establish themselves in mindfulness with the thought:
“Let goodly co-mates in the righteous life come here in the future, and let those that have already come live happily”.
Persons who cannot live happily with our teams leave our organisation over the years and go elsewhere. We do not see this fact as a loss but as a gain. Slander of work mates (co-mates) is an organisational weakness. There is no place in our organisation for anti-social persons who slander their co-mates.
We wish for our script writers to come together as a team at special times to obtain a common transmission of blessings from visiting Great Masters.
Last week, Our Teacher John D. Hughes and many of our Members were most fortunate to attend the Teachings given by His Eminence Chogye Trichen Rinpoche on Friday 22 June 2001 at Holy Redeemer Hall in Surrey Hills. The “Shakyamuni Buddha” Empowerment was taught by His Eminence Chogye Trichen Rinpoche and translated by his student Lama Choedak.
The Rinpoche was born in 1920 C.E. this life.
The event was organised by the Jamchen Buddhist Centre which is located at 19 Austin Street, Balwyn, Vic, 3103. Approximately 300 laypersons were present for the Shakyamuni Buddha Empowerment which was the Teaching given by His Eminence on this occasion.
Our Teacher recommended Members attend this opportunity.
20 Members of our team attended that evening.
Members gave various gifts to the Rinpoche. His Eminence is a pre-eminent Tibetan Buddhist master, a teacher to some of the greatest Tibetan spiritual leaders of our time, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama and His Holiness Sakya Trizin. He is a fully accomplished yogi and lineage holder.
This is his 18th rebirth as a Trichen Rinpoche.
His Eminence, arrived in Melbourne on Thursday 21 June 2001. During his Melbourne visit, he taught three Dhamma Teachings from 22 to the 25 June 2001 which were held at Holy Redeemer Hall, corner Mont Albert Rd & York St, Surrey Hills, Victoria, 3127.
Several team Members went to the Puja and subsequent Teachings.
Our Management thanks Lama Choedak and the Jamchen Buddhist Centre for organising this prime event in Melbourne and wish that they prosper and endure in the future. We appreciate the blessings that came to our Centre by this visit.
Sadhu Sadhu Sadhu
An Australasian tour by His Holiness tour by His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, has been confirmed for 16 to 31 May 2002. His Holiness has indicated his support and attendance at the planned Nobel Peace Prize Laureates’ Forum in Hobart from 16-19 May 2002. His Holiness will then travel to Victoria (19-23 May), ACT (24 May) New South Wales (25-26 May) and New Zealand (27-31 May).
Melbourne will be the major focus of other events including a public talk, a three day teaching program on the great Buddhist text by Atisha, Lamp of the Path to Enlightenment. We have Atisha relics at our Centre and have good connection with this style of teaching.
We wish the organisers all success for this tour. For further information about this visit please visit the website www.dalailama.org.au.
We imagine most of our writing team will attend these teachings next year and learn together what they wish to know to help our Centre prosper in Buddha Dhamma.
Buddhist Hour radio scripts are online at www.bdcublessings.net.au/radio.html.
May you be well and happy, lead a happy life and never slander co-mates at work or at home.
This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes, Lisa Nelson, Evelin Halls, Leanne Eames and Rodney Johnson.
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.
References
“Life as a free agent” in Australia Personal Computer, Published February 2001 (p 85).
“Brooking Street Bugle” ISSN 1321-1463 (new series) Issue 60 Published 24 June 2001 (p5)and (p4) You may view the Brooking Street Bugle online at website address: www.compnanyontheweb.com/buddhamap.
“Dalai Lama in Australia May 2002” A.C.N. 093 226 389 letter Published 18 June 2001.
Document
Statistics:
For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us. |
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This Radio Script is for Free Distribution. It
contains Buddha Dhamma material and is provided for the purpose of
research and study. © Copyright. The Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. |