Buddhist Hour
Radio Broadcast 235 for Sunday 28 July 2002
on Hillside Radio 88.0
FM
Today’s program is titled: Refining our management
as a global organisation
Today 28 July 2002, the Opening Ceremony for the Buddha
Relic Stupa is being held at the Phuoc Hue Buddhist Temple in
Wetherill Park New South Wales.
Our Resident Practitioners
John D. Hughes and Anita Hughes were invited to attend this occasion.
They wrote to the President of the United Vietnamese Buddhist
Congregation in Australia – New Zealand, Most Venerable Thich
Phuoc Hue. We will share this correspondence with you today.
23
July 2002
Most Venerable Thich Phuoc Hue, OAM,
President
The
United Vietnamese Buddhist Congregation in Australia – New
Zealand
The Buddhist Federation of Australia
Phuoc Hue
Buddhist Monastery
365 Victoria Street,
Wetherill Park, NSW
2164, Australia.
Dear Venerable Thich Phuoc Hue,
OAM,
I wish you and your esteemed organisation long life and
good fortune. Thank you for the invitation to this historic event.
I
enclose a congratulatory message for the Opening Ceremony of the
Buddha Relic Stupa (7 storeys, 30 m high) on Sunday 28 July 2002, at
your Phuoc Hue Buddhist Monastery, 365 Victoria Street, Wetherill
Park, NSW 2164, Australia.
Last month, I wrote a paper titled
'The Spreading of Buddha Dhamma on this Continent of Australia' that
was read by one of my students, Ms Orysia Spinner at the ‘Buddhism
Culture Day’ held on the 30th of June 2002 for Dr. Lam Nhu Tang
Ph. D., Deputy Commissioner of Buddhist Culture for The United
Vietnamese Buddhist Congregation in Australia - New Zealand.
In
the paper, I referred with acclaim to the grand work you have done
for Buddha Dharma in Australia. A copy of this paper is enclosed.
Thank you for your kind invitation to the "Opening
Ceremony for the Buddha Relic Stupa" on 28th July 2002 at Phuoc
Hue Buddhist Temple in Wetherill Park NSW.
Unfortunately,
Anita and I are unable to attend but send our heartfelt wishes to you
for this great event.
Please find enclosed the "Attendance
Confirmation" form.
May you and your organisation
continue for a long time to help the world.
With blessings of
the Buddha Dharma,
John and Anita Hughes
23
July 2002
Congratulatory Message for the Opening Ceremony
for the Buddha Relic Stupa
The Most Venerable Thich Phuoc
Hue, OAM, President
The United Vietnamese Buddhist Congregation
in
Australia – New Zealand
The Buddhist Federation of
Australia
Phuoc Hue Buddhist Monastery
365 Victoria Street,
Wetherill Park, NSW 2164
Congratulatory Message from John
D. Hughes, Vice-President, World Fellowship of Buddhists, Advisor and
Council Member, World Buddhist University.
On behalf of the
Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., World Fellowship of
Buddhists and the World Buddhist University, I extend best wishes to
the organising committee of the United Vietnamese Buddhist
Congregation in Australia – New Zealand on the occasion of the
"Opening Ceremony for the Buddha Relic Stupa" at Phuoc Hue
Buddhist Monastery.
The Buddha has explained in the Sutras
that the merit of building a Stupa is so high, that even if 1000
learned scholars spelled out the merits obtained by talking for 100
years, they could not cover the great merit of such a
construction.
We thank you and your organisation for this
great blessing to Australia.
Yours in the Buddha
Dharma,
John and Anita Hughes
Abhidhamma
Teachings have commenced at our Centre. We will share with you today
a paper entitled ‘Tactics for making persons aware of kammic
debt’, given to those in attendance at Abhidhamma Class Five, 23
July 2002.
Tactics for making persons aware of kammic
debt
22 July 2002
Prepared by John D. Hughes, Anita
Hughes, Julian Bamford, Evelin Halls, Rilla Pargeter and Pennie
White.
Planning actions have been put in place to increase
Members’ merit towards future learning by increasing present
awareness of their Kammic debit.
This will be considered under
five examples involving greed (lobha) and ignorance (moha).
1.0
Refinement of paper handout delivery.
A person who is enjoying
receiving paper handouts of Dhamma without paying any attention to
kamma has somanassa- sahagatam ditthigata-sampayuttam asankharikam
ekam: meaning, one consciousness, unprompted, accompanied by joy, and
connected with wrong view. This is a citta state rooted in lobha
(greed).
When teaching this year the key question was, “How
do Members replace the consumption of merit brought about by their
physical consumption of paper handouts received?”, with the
warning that if this is not done they will be unable to receive an
education based on printed material based learning (books, journals,
web site, CD-ROMs) in future times.
The loss of merit our
Organisation experienced by the cessation of publishing the Buddha
Dhyana Dana Review last year on paper (because of a $20,000
Australian dollar per annum printing and postage costs), cut off a
source of returning paper handouts to the world.
Quite often
in the past, our written paper handouts were identical to what was
published in the paper version of Buddha Dhyana Dana Review.
We
have arranged for a web site www.bddronline.net.au to electronically
publish new issues of our Buddha Dhyana Dana Review, with the added
value of supplying hundred of colour photographs to illustrate the
activities. Now we are producing Volume 12 Number 2 having 80 pages
of text online to date (27 July 2002).
The payment of this web
site comes out of general funds in the same manner that some of the
payment of the paper publication of Buddha Dhyana Dana Review.
As
a rough first approximation, we say that money spent out of general
funds blesses all Members equally because their collective efforts
allow the organisation to function.
We are optimistic about
our new policy.
This year we estimate that web site delivery
of page views (equivalent A4) is 290% of paper page views delivered
by the paper publication of Buddha Dhyana Dana Review.
The
basis for this calculation for this year to date, the total page
views of the Buddha Dhyana Dana Review online from two websites was a
total of 2621 paper views. We gave out 907 pages of paper information
of articles appearing in the Reviews to Members.
In the next
financial year, we estimate this figure to be 610% of the paper page
views of our paper publication of the Buddha Dhyana Dana Review
handouts, and within two years, this page view should be 2470% of the
paper pages handed out.
It is unlikely we will give out
twenty five times the present paper handouts at our Centre within two
years. In fact, we will most likely be heading towards more online
distribution and reading on screen.
So there is a steady loss
in replacing the kammic debt of the hand out consumption of paper
learning by Members and the web site and other sources (such as
email) can deliver 9000% of the page views to web site users and when
we publicise this, then we believe Members will become more heedful
of the kamma involved in paper handout delivery.
When they
think of the kamma involved as this handout is the labour of many
beings and so on. Members can reflect on this blessing akusala
component of their minds ought to vanish or contract and be replaced
with some kusala (perhaps a sense of gratitude?) state.
Consider
what happens when our Members pick-up our standard paper chanting
sheets when they chant in Suite 1, or pick-up puja sheets and suttas
when they undertake Pureland pujas. The Pureland pujas’
copyright is held by other publishers so we cannot reproduce the
Pureland pujas on our web sites without infringing copyright, which
we will not do. Hopefully, we will explore ways and means to get
permission to place these suttas on our web site.
Persons
reading textbooks in our library are encouraged to buy copies of the
text they read to add to the library collection.
In the case
of Prajnaparamita, persons were encouraged to donate their personal
copies of the text to the library. We obtained eight copies by this
method. For the persons donating their personal copies, they went
some way towards balancing their kammic debt accumulated by their use
of the printed text.
The fact that we videotaped teaching
sessions and intend to copy these tapes helps reduce the kammic debt
to some extent.
We print about 20 to 30 paper copies of the
Brooking Street Bugle per issue and five copies are placed in our
library as well as the text being placed on our web site
www.bsbonline.com.au and a paper copy is sent to the State Library of
Victoria.
These paper copies are generally paid for out of
general funds so that the kammic retribution for use of this
publication is covered to about 5%. The person physically
photocopying and collating the Brooking Street Bugle, (provided the
text used does not have to be reprinted due to spelling errors),
probably breaks even on kammic terms.
Dhamma books translated
by our Teacher are available for sale, but only one member has
systematically sold these. The text is one of the references in
Abhidhamma classes. The text of this book is available on our web
site at www.bdcu.org.au . If Members made every effort to sell copies
of this text they could help replace the publications costs involved
in the years past.
This year we have been printing A3 signs to
prompt and remind Members of coming events, what is to be done, and
what is to be attended to.
Only a few persons are involved in
the printing and placement of these signs.
We think that if
they entered a Heaven World next life, it may be unlikely that they
will be able to read them. For most Members there would be serious
kammic debt to these signs.
Next financial years we will
involve more Members to equalise this system. These signs are for
internal use only to inform the local Devas and Devatas and do not go
onto our web sites.
2.0 Refinement of physical surroundings
within which the Teachings occur.
We do not like clutter of
the premises.
There are eight cittas (consciousness of the
senses or awareness of an object) rooted in greed. We doubt if most
Members could use the citta upekkha-sahagatam ditthigata-vippayuttam
asankharikam ekam: meaning one consciousness, unprompted, accompanied
by indifference and disconnected with wrong view.
When they
think of off-site storage, being aware of this type of consciousness
could be thought of as reasoning about kamma you consume by having
off-site resources with neutral feeling, but still appreciating the
lack of clutter on the premises.
A considerable amount of
storage of archives have been placed at four different sites off the
premises. We have yet to devise a method whereby Members can reduce
their kammic debt of these Members who provide valuable off-site
archive places.
One suggestion is we buy a large warehouse
having about four times our current off-site storage, and Members
fund the purchase of this building. We prefer ownership to
rental.
Over the last year, the Library and office area have
been refined. We intend to re-carpet and refurbish Suite 1 this
year.
We think more comfortable seating is required in Suite 1
when used for teaching purposes and more comfortable seating is
required in Suite 2 when it is used for teaching purposes.
3.0
Refinement of our support systems to modify recalcitrant cultures of
Members.
At our Centre, on most Tuesdays, two to four
different Teachers will teach Abhidhamma practice in at least two
small classes at the same time.
We wish to make it easy to
learn.
If a participant has too much repeated difficulty
learning in one class, it is possible for him or her to apply to be
taught in the other class.
Participants who do not follow
these guidelines will get three written warnings and will be offered
counselling. Ultimately, persons may be suspended from both classes.
There is no appeal from such a decision under the Equal Opportunity
Act.
Religious institutions are not subject to the Equal
Opportunity Act 1995: “Part 3. When Is Discrimination
Prohibited?” The Act states that nothing in Part 3 applies to
section 75 Religious Bodies, section 76 Religious Schools, and
section 77 Religious Beliefs or Principles. The Equal Opportunity Act
1995, Version No. 035. Act No.42/1995 incorporating amendments as at
1 January 2002 can be viewed at URL www.dms.pdc.vic.gov.au
4.0
Refinement directed toward team teaching.
Our President
supports all our team teaching endeavours. The year before last we
had two foci Teachers. This last year more adaptive foci occurred at
our Centre. They are now four foci.
They are the four members
of our Teaching Team, three female and one male, who have worked
together for some years at our Centre. For some years, they have
conditioned themselves to work together in pairs. They had learnt the
common nomenclature we use; that is, a polygot Pali/English
understood by Buddha Dhamma Practitioners overseas.
We
publish regular Pali/English glossaries.
We unify English as
a Second Language.
We regularly write and publish
recollections of Teachings at our Centre.
The four foci
communicate with each other rapidly and accurately. They have learned
the strengths of every student in the historical past and present.
They can all write about Teachings articulate within our Five
Styles of delivery. These are Friendliness, Practicality,
Professionalism, Cultural Adaptability and Scholarship.
They
are teaching Abhidhamma for the next nine years.
The
Abhidhamma covers all areas of knowledge. One of the requirements to
learn Abhidhamma is that students develop a knowledge framework into
which they can store and from where they can retrieve what they have
learnt.
It is recommended that participants rote learn the 100
classifications of the Dewey Decimal system (4) to use as a knowledge
framework for storage and retrieval of the Abhidhamma knowledge they
learn.
Participants must read voraciously.
Participants
are expected to read our Buddha Dhamma texts and handouts given on a
weekly basis. Participants must increase the amount of data they
handle.
Also they ought to read the Buddhist Hour weekly radio
broadcast, the Buddha Dhyana Dana Review, the Brooking Street Bugle,
Longhair Australia News, photographs, reports, papers and any other
written materials published on our web sites and elsewhere.
Much
of our material is available online on our web sites, so that
participants can research off-site. We will also prepare CD-ROMs for
offline reading.
Reflection of these events shows there are
many chances for greed (lobha) to arise in these processes over the
next nine years.
5.0 Refinement of translations of
commentaries used.
When being taught there are two types of
ignorance or delusion (moha) that cause trouble. One is accompanied
within indifference and gives to itself skeptical doubt about the
Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha and the training. This is termed
vicikicca. The other is accompanied by indifference and connected
with restlessness. These two cittas are of equal strength.
A
person who is having doubt about kamma and its affect will have a
moha-mula citta by the name: “Upekkha-sahagatam
vicikiccha-sampayutta citta”.
A person is listening to a
lecture but he does not understand a word because his mind is
restless. What is his citta?
Is it a moha-mula citta. The
name is “Upekkha-sahagatam uddhacca-sampayutta citta”.
6.0
Lessons Learnt
Members find it easy to believe that you can
avoid making light of not having studied Buddha Dhamma
enough.
Members do not find the notion of kammic debt in other
Australian popular religions such as popular Christianity, or
atheistic systems.
At our Centre, you learn about what you
must do to create sustainable teaching conditions and the causes
needed for learning the Abhidhamma in the heaven
worlds.
References:
1. Mon, Dr. Mehm Tin. The Essence
of Buddha Abhidhamma. Publisher: Mehm Tay Zar Mon, Yadanar Min
Literature. Yangon. Union of Myanmar. 1995 First printing 500
copies.
On 26 July 2002 Anita Hughes, R.N. Div.1, was admitted
to Life Membership of the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. as
a token of our heartfelt gratitude.
On the same day 26 July
2002 Working Paper 1011, entitled ‘Working paper No.1011,
entitled ‘Looking for Growth in our Assets in the Right Places’
was accepted as policy of the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey)
Ltd.
‘Working paper No.1011
‘Looking for
Growth in our Assets in the Right Places’
Prepared by:
John D. Hughes, Julian Bamford, Rilla Pargeter and Pennie
White.
Prepared on: 26 July 2002
Our Management
Team in the global context
We are part of a set of people who
consider themselves part of a larger group within the World
Fellowship of Buddhists context and in the World Buddhist University
context. We have frequent or meaningful contact with our customers
and are able to touch a large number of customers. We have the
authority of having a reputation as experts in our given field.
Altering the cultural mindsets towards the development of our
management team
The Harvard Management Update, July 2002 issue
is devoted to coverage of the Harvard Business School Publishing’s
Burning Questions 2002 conference.
Burning Questions 2002
brought together executives from more than 75 organisations and 11
countries for two days. Among them was Kim Campbell, Canada’s
first female prime minister and visiting professor at Harvard’s
John F. Kennedy School of Government.
“The most important
things now is to avoid all-male leadership cultures,” says Kim
Campbell. Research on Emotional Intelligence and gender shows that
women tend to have stronger empathy and relationship skills than men
do. “These strengths of women’s leadership are not so much
innate aspects of femininity as they are the result of
disempowerment,” says Campbell. Women developed them as a means
of survival in male-dominated cultures. Men can, of course, exhibit
these skills to, just as women can demonstrate toughness and
decisiveness. When there’s sufficient trust on a leadership
team, gender diversity can boost the team’s ability to manage
its own emotions and respond to those of others in the unit. (Gary,
Loren, 2002, p5)
Integration of women into our management
team
We have integrated women into our management team
Key
Positions Filled
Julian Bamford, President
Pennie White,
Secretary
Evelin Halls, Vice-president Corporate Governance and
Reporting
Two resident practitioners 1 male, 1 female.
This
change has been the result of many years of altering the cultural
mindsets of Members by our Teacher.
We are sure our new
management strength will make us put our assets in the right place
for sure.
Every year since its inception our organisation has
experienced impressive growth rates in terms of assets held at 30
June (the end of our Financial Year).
In business at the
global level, in recent years it has been found that the development
of entirely new products has proven to be an unreliable source of
growth. Some of the high-tech leaders surveyed performance over the
past two decades reveals a disturbing pattern. They experience
spectacular market value growth followed by equally spectacular
collapse.
The lesson that can be learnt is that businesses
built around high-tech and high-product innovation are dramatically
unstable. Because of our insight gained from our websites, the
discipline of quality team writing and editing, and digital camera
recording of events, we have developed much growth momentum that can
maintain our future strategies.
Skilfully leveraging our
hidden assets
We believe we have an array of under-utilised
resources that we can lever. We have spent many years, thousands of
staff hours and probably one million dollars building our hidden
assets – the natural by-product of creating and delivering core
products and services.
Skilfully employed these hidden assets
ought to be able to produce a portfolio of related offerings with
unusually high margins. The beauty of such assets is, once created,
they can be applied, re-used and extended at little or no marginal
cost.
What is more, is that new rivals would be hard-pressed
to replicate our strategy.
Any start-up organisation that
attempted to build from scratch the hidden assets we hold would be up
for extraordinary expense both in dollars and hours in employee
learning.
We have the discipline to invest in new growth by
identifying activities we can scale back to free resources for growth
initiatives.
We have a fairly clear idea what is the right
growth sequence to maximise short term gains while preserving long
term potential. The growth moves open to us if we move now instead of
waiting are very interesting.
We can back our growth vision
by committing time, talent and resources to it.
Our
technological know-how is superior because we possess deep
technological knowledge in areas of importance to our customers and
we own internally developed Information Technology systems with
potential external value.
Our form of growth in assets in
recent years arose from our relationship with one Monk who provided
us with very expensive capital items comprising Buddha images. In one
very early year, we were given A$20,000 of books and images as a
gift. In another early year, we obtained complete Buddhist library
and images under a financing plan that did not charge interest and
was paid off over 20 years.
We have no aversion to rich
patrons provided they do not think they can set our teaching
objectives.
With the rapid increase of our Information
Technology digital archiving strategies, we are documenting and
evaluating the processes that support the long term retention and
accessibility of digital content.
We have adopted the OCLC/RLG
Preservation Metadata Working Group recommendations. The result of
the working group activities are publicly available on
http://www.oclc.org/research/pmwg Their report is dated June
2002.
References:
Slywotzky, Adrian J. and Wise,
Richard, (2002) ‘The Growth Crisis – and How to Escape It’,
Harvard Business Review, July 2002, pp. 72-85.
Gary, Loren,
July 2002, ‘Becoming a Resonant Leader’, Harvard Management
Update, July 2002, pp. 4-5.
May the members and families of
The United Vietnamese Buddhist Congregation in Australia – New
Zealand be well and happy.
May we increase Members’ merit
towards future learning by increasing present awareness of their
Kammic debit.
May our Members continue to help our Life Member
Anita Hughes.
May we look for growth in our assets in the
right places.
May you be well and happy.
May all beings
be well and happy.
Today’s script was written by John
D. Hughes, Anita Hughes, Julian Bamford, Evelin Halls, Rilla Pargeter
and Pennie White.
References
Document
Statistics
Counts
Words: 3,948
Sentences:
194
Paragraphs: 185
Syllables:
Averages:
Words per
sentence: 20.4
Sentences per paragraph: 1.0
Percentages:
Passive
Sentences: 42
Readability Statistics
Flesch Grade Level:
12.3
Coleman-Liau Grade Level: 15.5
Bormuth Grade Level:
11.2
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 52.5
Flesch Kincaid Score:
10.4
Readability Statistics
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Flesch
Grade Level: Flesch Grade Level indicates the Flesch Reading Ease
score as a grade level. See the Flesch Scoring Table.
Coleman-Liau
Grade level : Indicates the grade level of the document based on the
average number of letters per word and number of sentence per 100
words.
Bormuth Grade Level: Indicates the grade level of
document based on the average number of letters per word and per
sentence. These scores indicate grade levels ranging from 6.3 to
11.6.
Flesch Reading Ease Score: Indicates how easy the
document is to read based on the number of syllables per word and
number of words per sentence. These scores indicate a number between
0 and 100. The higher the score, the easier the document is to read.
See the Flesch Scoring Table.
Flesch-Kincaid Score : Indicates
the grade level of the document based on the number of syllables per
word and number of words per sentence. This score predicts the
difficulty of reading technical documents, and is based on Navy
training manuals that score in difficulty from 5.5 to 16.3. It meets
military readability specifications MIL-M-38784 and DOD-STD-1685.
Flesch Scoring Table
Flesch Reading Ease Score Flesch
Grade Level Reading Difficulty
90-100 5th Grade Very easy
80-89
6th Grade Easy
70-79 7th Grade Fairly easy
60-69 8th-9th Grade
Standard
50-59 High School Fairly difficult
30-49 College
Difficult
0-29 College Graduate Very difficult
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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.
Permission is given to
make printouts of this publication for FREE DISTRIBUTION ONLY.
Please keep it in a clean place.
"The gift of
Dhamma excels all other gifts".
© 2002. Copyright.
The Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.
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 another 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.
This Radio Script is for
Free Distribution. It contains Buddha Dhamma material and is provided
for the purpose of research and study.
Permission is given to
make printouts of this publication for FREE DISTRIBUTION ONLY. Please
keep it in a clean place.
"The gift of Dhamma excels all
other gifts".
For more information, contact
the Centre or better still, come and visit us.
© 2002. Copyright. The Buddhist Discussion Centre
(Upwey) Ltd.