Signs of Peace Sangha
is holding sitting and walking meditation practice in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hahn every other Sunday evening 7:00 – 9:00pm
510 North Rd.
Fenton, Michigan 48430
(810) 750-9151
violet@mindfulheartcounseling.com
No experience needed. All interested are welcome.

Thank you for your patience.]

Due to a change in domain registrar on Tuesday, February 16, parts of the site are temporarily ‘broken’. Most critical is the Retreats, Events and Speakers page. I inadvertently overwrote the code that pulls the scheduled events and posts them on this page.

D’oh!

I hope to have this fixed Wednesday or Thursday. There are several upcoming events I need to post, and if for some reason I can’t fix this problem, I’ll be sure to make a general post for each.

Thank you to those who have been kind enough to inform me of needed corrections in the Sangha listings. An accurate site is a helpful site, and helping you is really what this is all about.

Yours in the Dharma,

Jim.

Quanam Temple (Tu Vien Quan Am)
1840 North College Rd.
Mason, MI 48854
meets Thursdays 7:00 – 8:30 pm, sitting and walking meditation
(517) 699-3696 or (517) 974-6319

Battle Creek Karma Kagyu Study Group
for information or directions:
Matt (269) 275-0090
info@battlecreekkagyu.org
http://battlecreekkagyu.org/
Wednesdays 7:00pm to 9:00pm – Sitting Meditation and Book Study
Sundays 8:00am to 10:00am – Chenrezig Sadhana and Book Study
Every Third Sunday 8:00am to 9:30am – Green Tara Sadhana

The Mindfulness Meditation Community of Grand Rapids will hold a two day retreat the second week-end of February. Saturday, February 13, 1:30 to 9:00 pm and Sunday, the 14th, 9:00 am to 2:00 pm.

The retreat will be guided by Sokuzan Bob Brown of Battle Creek. Bob is a priest in the Soto Zen lineage.

We will practice sitting and walking meditation both Saturday and Sunday. Individual interviews with Bob Brown are available.

The retreat will be held at Expressions of Grace Yoga Studio. The studio is located at 5270 Northland Dr. NE, Grand Rapids, MI., 49525. (616) 361-8580

Dinner on Saturday will be a supplied by the Grand Rapids Sangha. Sunday, people will brown-bag their lunch.

Come for one day or both.

Out of town guests can spend the night in the homes of members of the Grand Rapids Sangha. If you need overnight accommodations contact Steve at steve.sampson@comcast.net

The event is free, but donations to support the work are very much appreciated.

To register please contact Steve at steve.sampson@comcast.net

Dear Friends,

Our monastic brothers and sisters in Vietnam are in great difficulty.

The 379 monks and nuns who were forced from Bat Nha monastery in September now face immediate violent eviction from their current sanctuary.

Details about this grave situation may be found at the respected web site Human Rights Watch.

More information may be found at the website Help Bat Nha.

A sister at Deer Park Monastery in California has forwarded to us a letter from Sister Chan Kong and I would like to share part of it with you.

Chan Kong writes:

“Please forgive me for disturbing you during this holy season of family and homecoming. But our Bat Nha monks and nuns are now in a position not unlike Mary and her baby Jesus–they do not know where to take shelter, to practice and be together in safety…”

“…the situation has gone from bad to worse, our 379 very young monks and nuns have undergone a kind of baptism by fire, and have achieved a great sucess in training to understand, accept, and have genuine compassion for those who abuse them. Over the past several months they have been verbally assaulted over loudspeakers 24 hours a day and threatened with being bludgeoned to death. Policemen came demanding the monastics’ identification every night from 7 pm to 11:30 pm and cut off their electricity and water for three months.”

“Then, hired mobs arrived on the stormy night of September 27, 2009 to forribly and violently eject 147 monks, smash doors and windows and torment the 232 nuns. They all escaped and sought shelter at Phuoc Hue Temple. At Phuoc Hue the monks and nuns continue to be harrased, and the most compassionate and elderly abbot of that temple, after much resistance, also has been violently forced to sign a letter evicting our monastics. As of December 31, 2009 these brothers and sisters will have absolutely no place to go, and in fact may be drafted by the government into the armed forces. Even if they return to their familial homes the harassment is not likely to cease unless and until they disrobe and abandon their monastic life completely.”

“Now is the most crucial moment for our monks and nuns. Please quickly go to Religious Freedom in Vietnam and sign the petition…

Please sign and write to five friends asking them to sign to achieve the greatest number we could before December 31, 2009. You have come through for me, for us, many times before. I know I can count on you in this, our hour of greatest need.”

“With all our most heartfelt blessings and wishes of peace to you–

—Sister Chan Kong”

Vipassana/Metta Sitting Group
Ann Arbor, MI
Every other week on an evening TBD by group
Becky Freligh
(734) 761-4892
rfreligh@umich.edu

New Dharma materials at FreeBuddhistAudio

Candradasa writes from FreeBuddhistAudio with news of new on-line Dharma resources:

Dear Friends,

We’re delighted to let you know that – after a wee summer hiatus – we have a rush of new modules just posted for the FWBO’s Dharma Training Course for Mitras. The permanent web address to bookmark for the new course is:
http://www.fwbomitracourse.com/

Latest up are most of the modules for Year 2 –

Module 1 – Nature of Existence 1, Conditionality and the Middle Way
Module 2 – What is the Sangha, Spiritual Community
Module 3 – Vision & Transformation, the Buddha’s Eightfold Path
Module 4 – The Bodhisattva Ideal
Module 5 – Transcending Views
Module 6 – Turning the Mind to the Dharma

We hope you’ll enjoy using the online version of the Course, and that you’ll make steady progress in your own Dharma studies.

Year 3 coming soon!

with best wishes,

Candradasa,
The Free Buddhist Audio Team

P.S.: The new site has been developed to enable a free service to be kept in place for all users. To help us keep the service free, please think about making a donation. Many thanks!

John D. Loori, 78, Zen Abbot and Photographer, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

John Daido Loori, a photographer who found that snapping a picture mirrored the instant of spiritual enlightenment, inspiring him to start an influential Zen monastery in the Catskills, died on Friday in Mount Tremper, N.Y. He was 78.

John Loori founded an influential monastery in the Catskills.
The cause was complications of lung cancer, Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, his assistant, said.

In addition to being abbot of the monastery he started, Abbot Loori founded a worldwide Zen order, was a respected photographer and teacher and wrote 20 books on Buddhism and art.

He is to be buried in the cemetery of his Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, where each year a “Hungry Ghost” ceremony honors the dead. In 49 days, according to Buddhist belief, he will be reincarnated. The funeral will be held then, Ms. Goddard said.

Although there are many Zen centers, some larger, Abbot Loori created one of the few Zen orders based in the United States that has members from Brooklyn to New Zealand. He published a 120-page quarterly journal and offered Zen instruction on the Internet, and on an online radio station (WZEN.org).

He set up an institute to apply Zen principles to environmental matters, hoping to bring people closer to “the inherent intelligence of wildness.” He also began a program to teach Zen to prison inmates.

Abbot Loori enforced strict rules both for monks and for weekend visitors. He safeguarded traditions like the precise, meditative Zen way of eating, and decades ago made a video of the ritual that is widely used in Buddhist circles.

But for the thousands who have come to his monastery, he offered not just the expected instruction in traditions like Zen archery but also topics like gay and lesbian spirituality. And unlike traditional Buddhist practitioners, he promoted women as leaders of Zen centers.

Richard Seager, author of “Buddhism in America” (1999), said in an e-mail message that Abbot Loori, who called himself a “radical conservative,” deserved credit for “thoughtfully reworking” Japanese Zen Buddhism for an American context. Some chants were in English.

“He is certainly representative, if not critically important for Buddhism coming to the United States,” he wrote.

John James Loori was born on June 14, 1931, in Jersey City, and grew up as a Roman Catholic. His favorite toy was a Brownie camera. He forged a birth certificate to join the Navy when he was 16 and served on an aircraft carrier.

He went to work for a company that made artificial flavors, meanwhile attending Monmouth College, Rutgers and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.

During the 1960s, he felt his life was collapsing. He was working long hours and spending little time with his children. His marriage was shattering.

Abbot Loori was married to Nancy Decker and Joan DeRiso (both marriages ended in divorce) and had a long relationship with Bonnie Treace. He is survived by his wife, Rachael Loori Romero; his brothers Joseph Lori and Sal Salerno; his sons John, David and Asian; and four grandchildren.

He groped back from his personal crisis by starting a photo studio. His photo career included books, exhibitions and teaching jobs. In 2004 and 2005, he exhibited nature photographs at the American Museum of Natural History.

He pursued Zen even more intensely, mastering two approaches — one “just sitting,” and the other solving paradoxical riddles, called koans. A highly regarded teacher in Los Angeles asked him to start a center in the East.

In 1980, he founded the Mountains and Rivers Order along with an arts center. The complex became a monastery in 1983, after visitors wanted more rigor. At first, the Los Angeles teacher, Taizan Maezumi, was abbot of the monastery, and Abbot Loori headed the order. In 1989, Abbot Loori assumed both roles.

The monastery fit right into a Catskills spiritual scene that already included Zen, Hindu, Tibetan Buddhist, yoga and various New Age centers. Abbot Loori decreed that 80 percent of the 230 acres he had just bought would have to remain “forever wild,” which meant no manicuring of the landscape.

Zen Buddhist elders nearly prevented Abbot Loori’s ordination as a monk, after seeing a tattoo peeking from his robe. A Navy souvenir, it depicted an innocent-enough anchor, but Japanese associate tattoos with criminals, and Abbot Loori refused to erase his past.

The ordination finally went ahead. But the abbot wore a bandage over the tattoo when he visited Japan, Newsday reported in 2004.

“I think they were a bit puzzled when I returned year after year and the burn still hadn’t healed,” he said.