Engaged Buddhism in Australia

Engaged Buddhism in Australia is a form of Buddhist practice which aims at relieving sufferings for all sentient beings, including the practitioners themselves.  Their Engaged Buddhist activities mainly focus on education and healthcare, but they may also extend to providing financial and emotional support to all being living in distress, oppression, and endangered situations.  There are nine categories of these activities:
1 Educating adults in the community
2 Educating children in the community
3 Supporting the sick and the dying in hospitals and hospices
4 Supporting the sick and the dying in the community, and taking care of those who have incurable diseases
5 Visiting prisoners in prisons
6 Providing emotional support and guides to the addicts
7 Raising funds to help the poor and the needy
8 Organizing lectures about human rights and against oppression
9 Humanitarian activities for plants, trees and animals
Over 96% of Buddhist organizations in Australia are engaged in community education programs.  An example is The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order with its various centers in Melbourne, Sydney, and Toowoomba in Queensland.  It organizes dharma talks for local communities to teach the causes of sufferings and how to relieve sufferings, mental health programs to teach meditation and stress management.  The Toowoomba Center offers martial arts lessons to promote physical health.  The International  Phat Quang Son/Phat Quang Mountain Organization with its branches in Wollongong, Perth, Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne also has similar community programs.  For example, they give dharma talks, teach meditation practice, provide developmental and cultural activities and lessons about flower arrangement, calligraphy, and cooking vegetarian meals.  A temple in Perth regularly has dharma talks and discussions about Buddhist ethics and contemporary issues such as abortion, divorce, homosexuality, suicide, depression, and addiction.  The purpose is to apply what the Buddha taught to daily life to relieve sufferings according to the Four Noble Truths.

(To be continued)

Source:

http://giacngo.vn/nguyetsan/phatgiaovaxahoi/2012/01/02/7F720A/

Some Notes About Original Buddhist Texts

Early Period of Buddhism (From the Buddha's Enlightenment to His Demise)
The Buddha was born in 566 BC, and demised in 486 BC at the age of 80.  He got enlightened at the age of 30 (in 536 BC).  During this period original suttras and vinayas were circulated orally.  Those circulated towards northern India were called Agamas; those circulated towards the south were Nikayas.  Western scholars such as Hermann Oldenberg and Rhys Davids,  have studied the Pali texts in an attempt to find out the Buddha's authentic teachings.  Their Japanese counterparts, on the other hand, compared these two groups of texts in order to find out what was the Buddha's authentic teachings.  This was the method used by such scholars as Anesaki Masaharu.  Later, Ui Kakuju not only used comparative methods, but also resorted to logical analysis of the development and the structure of Buddhist texts both in the north and in the south to trace back to what the Buddha original taught, and distinguish it from what was added later on.
It is a daunting task to try to revive the Buddha's original and authentic teachings.  The reason was that Buddhism has gone through so many ups and downs, and has become so sectarian that it became too difficult to trace back to what was originally taught by the Buddha.  Based solely on the existing present texts would not be able to provide enough persuasive evidence.

Sources:
http://www.daophatngaynay.com/vn/kinh-dien/pali/12329-Khai-quat-lich-su-truyen-ba-kinh-dien-va-nhung-dac-diem-cua-kinh-tang-Nikaya.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinayana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikaya

Free Access to Online Academic Materials and Social Justice

Aaron Swartz is too idealistic to survive in the current structures.  Some may label his downloading activities as stealing, but if one examines his motivation, integrity, and behaviors, one will find him a young talented dreamer who has seen the power of knowledge and the Internet, and whose thoughts and dreams are far beyond his times.  Aaron is among those who would like to challenge the limits imposed by the systems.  He chose death probably because he has found this world was not for him.


Quotes:


Sir Tim Berners-Lee - the British inventor of the world wide web
"Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep."
Peter Eckersley, Electronic Frontier Foundation, non-profit digital rights group

"Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way.  While his methods were provocative, the goal that Aaron died fighting for - freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it - is one that we should all support.

Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of US computer crime laws, and particularly their punishment regimes."

Larence Lessig, Harvard Law professor and ex-mentor
"Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behaviour.

From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterise what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The "property" Aaron had "stolen," we were told, was worth "millions of dollars"- with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime.

But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21011663

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21001452

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12613617

http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N61/swartz.html

http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html




  

Early Buddhist Suttras - Part II

Some Characteristics of the Early Buddhist Suttras:

1. Both the Nikayas and the Agamas come from original Buddhist texts, but they have been disseminated in two geographically different regions.  They contain simple but very rich authentic Buddhist teachings.
2. Both were circulated orally for 400 years after the Buddha's demise.

3. There are a lot of narrations and repetitions in these texts.  They reflect many customs, social and religious issues, life and thoughts at the Buddha's time. 

4. They contain what the Buddha taught to the four groups of His Sangha (monks, nuns, Buddhist followers) about how to develop spiritually and how to live, behave and treat one another.  All these teachings are simple and easy to remember.

5. They contain the fundamentals in Buddhism, the core from which all other Buddhist sects developed: the Four Noble Truths, the Dependent Origination, the Eightfold Path, Impermanence, Suffering, and No Self, and the spiritual development path of Disciplines, Meditation, and Wisdom. 
6. For the first 400 years after the Buddha's demise there was no mention of Mahayana nor Theravada/Hinayana. 


Sources:
http://www.daophatngaynay.com/vn/kinh-dien/pali/12329-Khai-quat-lich-su-truyen-ba-kinh-dien-va-nhung-dac-diem-cua-kinh-tang-Nikaya.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinayana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikaya