The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Archives

We are happy to be on air again and are pleased to bring our Australia Day program to you.

We wish you a Happy Australia Day. Australia Day was 26 January 1999.

There may be countless imagined duties and obligations that might be thought about when civilised persons, for their own or their country's advantage, enter a strange and almost empty land.

As Sir Russell Grimwade recalled in 1954, the first duties consist in establishing what is known in modern military parlance as a bridge-head, a landing where the occupation is secure and whence sorties can be made inland to survey and explore new territory.

The making of the bridge-head of British persons on the coast of Australia towards the end of the eighteenth century is now a well-known matter of history and is not dealt with in this talk.

The difficulties of the first settlement in an empty and comparatively harsh land were tremendous and of such magnitude that it was doubtful at times whether the planned occupation could be carried on.

Carefree Australians today are apt to forget that at the time of first entry their land produced no orthodox food and its soils had never been cultivated and that the abundance of foods produced within its boundaries to-day all have their origin overseas.

The provision of food, storage of water, and the development of communication constituted the first duties of the pioneers.

Within half a century of entry this land was carrying millions of hoofed animals where not a single specimen had existed before.
New trees, new crops and new insects were rapidly introduced - all prospered with a fecundity that brought the country fame and fortune.

Few countries have been so violently subjected to change.

The change continues to bring Australia out of isolation and into harmony with our trading partners, the world community.

In no other country does the responsibility of preserving a knowledge of the past rest quite so heavily upon its citizens. Many of our trading partners have followed Buddha Dhamma well before Australia was occupied. We hope you celebrated Buddha Dhamma on Australia Day this year with us by remembering a few good facts.

Some general Remarks on Australia Felix were written a few years ago by John D. Hughes Dip. App. Chem., T.T.T.C., G.D.A.I.E.; Nick S. Prescott B.Sc (Hons), MBA; and Dr. Mark J. Shackleton M.B.B.S..

That paper was presented to the World fellowship of Buddhists Conference in Thailand several years ago.

We are pleased to provide a few of the ideas from this paper today.

In 1836 in the early days of European settlement of Australia, Thomas Mitchell the explorer, described it as "rich and well watered Country" as deserving the name Australia Felix.

Although much time has passed since "Australia Felix" was first coined, its accuracy as a descriptor of our country is now questionable.

These brief comments are dedicated to those who seek some qualified comprehension or seek to understand how the local history of Australia can be framed from a Buddhist perspective.

The notion of a history of "something" is in general, an individual's view of it.

Subjectivity is inherent in most such commentaries.

An even deeper structural dilemma is the mismatching of problems and the time element with which they are addressed.

If a notion of history has focused excessively on macro-issues, some individuals may feel they could do nothing about it except generate unwholesome feelings about some issue that happened in their country and lapse into an inequity view of nihilism.

For persons inclining to inequity nihilistic views, it would be more useful if they be bequeathed a notion of history reframed as a series of more tangible micro-issues.

From this view, they could apply their bequeath to similar micro-issues and create practical transforms of employment to afford change for the better.

Over-emphasis on the forest tends to blur definition of the trees themselves, and is often not necessary anyway.

According to Foss and Hakes, commenting on the processes by which thought becomes language, "we are almost unaware of whether the final phonological segment of singular nouns is voiced or unvoiced, but we consistently make use of the voicing information when we add plural markers."

Once a direction or policy is established, there is no need to continually refer to it--its "initiation energy", to borrow a chemical concept, will automatically do this if correctly aimed at the outset.

Moreover, such emphasis on "the big picture" can serve as a distraction from the smaller issues that see it come to fruition.

And so, in retrospective analyses, in the recording of and commentary on previous events and occurrences, on histories, there is a valid and useful place for the examination of micro-issues.

* Which instances contributed to the overall direction of an entity?
* Which changed it?
* What was the nature and circumstance of those instances?

Ch'an alive in Australia Felix

The Buddhist scriptures traditionally refer to the eighty-four thousand illusions (misunderstandings), or causes of sufferings, that plague all living creatures, and also to the eighty-four thousand Teachings of the Buddha designed to combat these illusions through understanding things as they really are.

Our Members work to help persons find the key to a good life style in Australia.

To train persons we have to provide a secure place where Members can function in the Hall of Assembly and library at our Centre.

Just recently, we have been working to improve the image and style of our library. One thing we did to make it more comfortable was to install air conditioning.

In addition, we repositioned some of the shelving to make room for more computers which connect to our file server from our library..

A Phrapasut (Buddha-to-be) image donated by one of our patrons has been affixed near the Eastern entrance to the library.

When we place Images we arrange offerings for respect according to what we know and with the advice of senior Australian Monks and other who visit us from many countries.

Many traditions are conserved in our library so we can teach them. For example, we have records from the time of the Three Kingdoms and the Six Dynasties ( A.D. 220 - 589) of the ancient Chinese Masters who evolved criticism for paintings.

The Six Principles formulated by Hsieh Ho are taught even today by our Teacher.

Because Teaching does need the correct atmosphere, so we created it in a suitable environment. We are not too bound by ritual to an extreme, because if we were we would hardly install air conditioning!.

But seriously though......certain types of infrastructure work chosen by our ancestors makes it now possible for suitable conditions to arrive at our Centre where the Buddhist Practice of Ch'an can be taught and valued in this country.

Many human beings wish to improve and are willing to allot time and energy to work in return for rewards.

The implication of this situation is that our organisation may need to provide some prior encouragement and incentives to influence persons into believing training and development will benefit them.

Caution is needed against persons developing overtly intense motivation ("becoming too tight") because ability to learn may suffer adversely. Inability to achieve these goals may result in a sense of failure and therefore loss of willingness to learn.

Group and peer pressures can place strong pressures and sanctions to encourage their compliance with the behavioural norms.

Situational behaviour theory can be an instrument to use in training.

It is difficult to prepare a "checklist of Ch'an motivation techniques" because prime Ch'an motivation is an internal process controlled by the individual, not the Ch'an trainer or anyone else.

Historically, the first task of the Ch'an trainer is to convince persons that they work to seek a Buddha Dharma paradigm selected from the many truth sets of the "right motivation" series.

The prime language of the Buddhist Canon (in three parts) is Pali. Translation of these texts and their publication was the enterprise of Buddha Dharma centres of excellence by teams of Pandits to altogether about 80 Asian (non-European) languages.

Commentaries in thousands gave diversity. We have a few score of these in our library, some awaiting to be translated from Chinese. Excellence and quality were achieved in ancient times by noting what was in the texts.

A twelfth-century catalogue of the Sung emperor Hui-tsung's collection classifies subjects under 12 headings.

It is only in recent times that The Pali Text Society (U.K) Translation Series began to render these texts into the English language. The PTS translators have worked alone, or, at best, as a pair with too little co-operation. It could hardly as yet been otherwise.

Beside the charms that translation has to the reflecting student, the communication age (internet) promises new teams can be formed to refine the translation processes. Our Academy is preparing now to be the backdrop for this task.

The processes of translation of Buddhist Canonical logic with multitudinous listings of topics is suitable for Ch'an practice.

For example, The Pali Canon ( ref. The Book of the Tens - Text V (130), ) notarises useful "topics of talk" may include talk about wanting little, about contentment, seclusion, solitude, energetic striving, virtue, concentration, insight, release, release by knowing and seeing.

As Mark Twain said: "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human..."

In modern times, it was held that literate persons were the guardians of taste and good judgement because they had access to a written tradition - reflecting centuries of collective experience.

There is a self-perpetuating social agenda to this debate because the common sense ways of arguing are outlawed or not seen. Confusion can then arise between the technical and the evaluative senses of the term "decontextualised language". No matter how careful the definitions are formed, any consideration of the uses of literacy seems to come back to a social judgement of functionality in this situation.

Debates over literacy gained prominence in the 1960's when the growing demand for schooling as a means to achieve social change was rated as a partial failure.

It had been thought that the ability to reason abstractly was a main outcome of literacy.

The main aim of Australian public education was to overcome the diversity of background experiences by verbal or written exchange. Today, Students can reach internet from Australian Schools. It is ironic to remember in the 70's how restricted were public education opportunities to exploit the knowledge resources in Australia.

Members must know that whilst literacy is certainly a requirement of learning, it does not guarantee that cognitive skills will result - let alone wisdom!

Our universities, with their current disposition for deconstructualist analysis, are symptomatic of this.

Indeed, all too often students of this system are lured by "the seduction of reductionist theory" whilst ignoring the possibility that "the whole is more than the sum of the parts".

The Buddha warned against the extreme wrong views of nihilism and eternalism. So, when partaking of learning look for more than the literacy that just reflects the knowledge base of society and develop the cognitive skills that lead to wisdom. Fortunately, there are newly emergent functional approaches that lead towards to four forms of critical thinking that can transform stale cultural knowledge bases into practical wisdom tools.

A first model of logic

"The great diversity of our ties was born by shared experience and common values. Our pioneers both settled vast frontiers, and built free nations across entire continents. In one another we see a distant mirror of our better selves, reflections of liberty and decency, of openness and vitality." From President Clinton's (1996) Address to the Australian Parliament (4).

Due to the common cultural heritage adopted by both Australia and America the first model of logic allows Australians an understanding of the import of the American President's noble sentiments.

Our Australian educational paradigms originated in the cultural heritage of the United Kingdom and its universities. Historically, graduates of high integrity from such institutions helped frame the concepts used by the Westminster system of Government, being the system employed in Australia.

The recent adoption of American educational research paradigms by Australian research has been and will continue as a useful tool, allowing us to continually reinvigorate our ideas through the role of the university and its relevance to the information age.

There is no monopoly on ideas. Research of topics conducted within the private sector provides leadership for much of the current thinking in our Universities.

The conceptual framework informing current research in contemporary western societies is attributed in its foundations to Greek and Roman logic, especially in relation to fundamental questions of law. However such value-based reasoning is not confined to the West, and has been significantly developed in other ancient, non-Western traditions.

The first model of logic has as its organisational principle the belief in the existence of an all-powerful creator God (or gods); some traditions conceiving of a God independent of and superior to matter, others conceive a God both immanent and transcendent, and others a God manifest in the World.

Numenius of Apamea maintained in his various treatises, (in The Departure of the Academy from Plato, and The Good for example), that Platonic thought is fundamentally contiguous with the thought of Pythagoras, Moses, The Brahmans, the Eastern Magi, and the ancient Egyptians (5).

This first model, having shaped the prevailing attitude toward Law reform through an essentially rationalistic paradigm, is unable to fully account for cultural indoctrination and conditioning. Such an account requires a considered look at the way cultural precedent is framed in law.

A second model of logic

"A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of words". Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In developing laws which help shape society it is important to understand the role our language plays in the practical applications of such law. Our language formation and use is predicated on certain underlining assumptions, that if not adequately understood, can undermine a society's value system.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (10) demonstrated understanding and language use to be essentially tacit. Learning and language use are essentially the mastering of a certain technique. Once the technique is mastered, our understanding becomes implicitly manifest in the acts which we engage in.

Law, as a prime example of language in use, guides individual action through familiarising the individual with certain acceptable modes of behaviour. Once adopted, these modes of behaviour are essentially followed without reflection, becoming tacit within behavioural dispositions.

The individual relinquishes present and conscious intention in a cultural exchange with society. A person in effect defers individual moral responsibility to the broader social environment, in a sense conditioned through habitual and tacit behaviour.

Without sufficient self-reflexive awareness, a person is essentially ignorant of such an exchange and it having taken place. Though a person may believe conscious intention to be present in an act, such intention is in fact subsumed within the broader cultural context.

We are privy to this in the enigma of behavioural modification in drug addicts. Without a critical awareness of the cultural forces shaping the decision making process, a person finds it extremely difficult to effect behavioural change, repeatedly giving in to habitual behaviour.

Cult induction is an extreme example of an effective solicitation of behavioural change via sustained "brain washing".

"Brain washing" techniques are obviously unacceptable in enacting cultural change. It is therefore essential to institute an educational regime within society to ensure people adopt sufficient critical awareness, allowing them the ability to engage in thorough ethical reflection.

The ability to generate the required intentional impetus necessary to ensure due reflection is paramount in such a serious undertaking as the taking of life. In instituting Law, we must ensure a culture of sound ethical reflection based on an adequate level of critical awareness, established via a sound educational initiative.

John Locke (1632-1704) believed that given appropriate education, people are capable of ordering their lives through reason to secure conventionally defined prosperity in conformity with higher morality.

There is, however, general disagreement amongst theorists in constructing an account of rational human behaviour. Taken within the scope of the first model of logic, intellectual force is pivotal in providing the necessary grounds on which to enact cultural change.

We have seen, however, that given a person's inability to bring a sufficient level of critical awareness to bear upon cultural integration, such rationality may rendered ineffective. The importance of sustained education implementations is therefore of great importance to ensure sound ethical reflection.

Our Centre's heritage collection includes buildings and grounds of great significance in the Buddhist world when assessed from an historic, aesthetic, cultural and monetary viewpoint.

Our Ch'an Garden is world class.

Within our grounds, are Bodhi Trees, black bamboo, the Ajaan Bell Tower, a Quan Yuan Pond, the "Australia" Pond, and the unique Australian built Padmasambhava and Protector images.

To preserve something, the object must be made significant by documentation of its historic, aesthetic,scientific, cultural or monetary value.

For heritage preservation, skills development of our Members over time is needed to build up preservation expertise.

Collection management must be promoted to be achieved.

Our Centre has a world class collection and although we are short of display space we can present viewing from time to time.

This is not a public viewing space because we concentrate on keeping the space for our students to learn.

We are located in a forest area where we can provide a historical mental map: a bag of memories coordinated about well-known paths, images for offering dana, landmarks such as the Australia Pond, and markers such as the four Gates within our heavenly dharma garden.

The well-known paths are the paths we use for circumambulation where we pass down the drive, past the caravan (suite 7), past suite 4 (the business library), past the Padmasambhava image, through the Western Gate, past the Northern Gate Bell Tower, around the Bodhi Tree, around the Australia Pond, across the Eastern Gate entrance and re-entering the suite 1 Hall of Assembly.

Organisation of cities about a central focus has numerous expressions. Beijing, from the sixteenth century onward, emphasised the Chinese conception of order.

In British colonial settlements, the post office was the symbol of authority and it too, was centrally located.

To emphasise the importance of the central city, and in keeping with the tradition of military surveyors, green belts bordered the central city.

Originally the park land was intended as a barrier against surprise attack, but today it remains as glorious open space.

According to Gordon J. Fielding in his Geography As Social Science, the garden city ideal stimulated the growth of suburbia and new towns resulted from the same psychological desire to impose centrifugal order upon urban development.

The garden suburbs were to be a residential foci outside the industrial city, connected by mass transit corridors.

Within the new town, order was imposed to reinforce perceptual identity.

Emphasis is placed upon creating a visual environment that will be perceived by the perspective residence as providing a meaningful lifestyle.

Activity centres, like schools and commercial centres, provide the nodes for both community and neighbourhood life.

In our system, we make the Hall of Assembly and its accompanying Living Instruction Manual, the John D. Hughes Collection, the focal point of all meaningful emotional connotation; therefore, it provides a perceptual image that may be widely and equivalently shared by all members.

By morphing the space within the Hall of Assembly, the Ch'an Academy teaching space is provided for a small, select number of students.

This Ch'an Academy operational space can be appealing only to a small minority of the population.

The reason is it is necessary to practice with vigour and have the Right View of the Way of the Brush.

This means that the rules of the Ch'an Academy must be followed.

The Major Rules are:

1 Bow to your Superiors; Buddha, Dharma, Ch'an Masters
2 Observe respect for Superiors
3 Observe obedience for Superiors
4 Maintain concentration
5 Keep the mind inside
6 Observe seven precepts, body, speech and mind:

No Lying
No Killing
No Stealing
No Sexual Misconduct
No Intoxicants that Cloud the Mind
No Slander
No Idle Chatter

That our Centre Rules makes a valuable contribution to Australian culture is recognised globally by the election of our founder John D. Hughes as a Vice president of the World Fellowship of Buddhists. We need helpers who may or may not become Members to help us develop our new library system.

Phone 9754 3334 and speak to John Hughes.

May all beings be well and happy.

This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes and Leanne Eames.

Disclaimer:

As we, the Chan Academy Australia, Chan Academy being a registered business name of 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 Chan Academy Australia (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.