INEB: Don’t allow religious and ethnic lines to worsen

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KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia -- Isolation between races and cultures will lead to mistrust and fear as groups grow more separate, warns an international Buddhist group.

The chairman of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB), Dr Harsha Kumara Navaratne, from Sri Lanka, said isolation would happen if a country allowed religious and ethnic lines to worsen.

“The people in Sri Lanka live in separate areas, attend separate schools and speak separate languages. This isolation contributes to mistrust and fear,” he said, adding that other groups become abstract and were easily stereotyped.

Dr Harsha was speaking at the International Buddhist-Muslim Forum on Peace and Sustainability which was held at the Institute of Islamic Understanding Malaysia (Ikim) on Friday.

The other speakers included Ikim director-general Datuk Nik Musta­pha Nik Hassan and International Movement for a Just World (JUST) secretary-general Anas Zubedy.

“If Buddhist and Muslim communities can overcome the challenges that confront them, there is tremendous potential for the growth and development of ideas and values that may help to transform the region,” said Dr Harsha.

More than 200 people attended the forum held to promote Buddhist and Muslim relations in the region.

Ikim deputy director-general Prof Datin Dr Azizan Baharuddin, JUST president Dr Chandra Muzzafar, INEB founder Ajarn Sulak Sivaraksa and INEB advisory committee’s Rev Alan Senauke, who were also at the forum, discussed moderate ways of addressing social issues between the two religions.

Dr Chandra noted that in the South-East Asian region, Muslims and Buddhists made up 40% and 42% of the population, respectively.

“If we allow violence to erode relations between followers of the faiths, it could destabilise peace in the region. Thus, we must come together to maintain relations,” he said.

The INEB conference has been held every two years since its inaugural gathering in Bangkok in 1989.

The conference has since been hosted in countries such as India, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Taiwan.

This year’s conference also discussed the Buddhist and Muslim tensions that occurred in certain countries such as Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.

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Global Buddhists come to Bodh Gaya for peace conference

The conference started with a special prayer session at the famed Mahabodhi Buddhist temple premises in Bodhgaya, Bihar.

The conference has been held for the last 25 years.

?This annual ceremony has been organising for the last 25 year, more than 25 year and today also as it happened in the morning, we prayed in the Nipunji Japanese temple and conference will take place in the afternoon from today,? said a Buddhist.

Monks from countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, India, Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and several other countries ,including India were participating in the event.

The purpose of holding such an event was to popularize the ideologies of Buddhism, especially peace and solidarity, among the masses from across the globe.

?The message of this conference purpose is to spread the teaching of the Buddha, peace, harmony, brotherhood, and solidarity among the human races in India and outside of India,? said another Buddhist.

Bodh Gaya is regarded as a holy spot as Lord Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment under a tree and it still exists although in a pitiable state, even after thousands of years.

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Dhammaloka: The Irish Buddhist monk who condemned Christianity

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London, UK -- An Irishman, Laurence Carroll has a strong claim to be the first Westerner to become a Buddhist monk, and became famous in Burma in the early 20th Century for denouncing the spread of Christianity there.

Carroll was thought to have been born in 1856 in Booterstown, Dublin. He was to later become known as Dhammaloka, meaning 'light of the Dhamma' (Buddhist teaching) or 'word of the 'Dhamma'.

He left Ireland when he was a teenager and travelled to America. After a number of years travelling from place to place, he began working on the San Francisco/Yokohama mail shipping line, but after just three journeys was thrown off the ship in Japan, reportedly due to drunkenness.

From there he made a three-week journey by steamer to Rangoon in Burma where he got work as a tally man at a logging company. It was at this stage he had his first interaction with Buddhist monks.

"The monks had a lot of respect from people and I suspect that Dhammaloka might have been a drinker and they helped him to overcome his dependency on alcohol," explains professor Brian Bocking, head of the School of Asian Studies at the University College Cork.

"It's notable that in addition to atheism, the issue of temperance became a focus of Dhammaloka's preaching as well as his coded anti-colonialism. He became a temperance campaigner for the rest of his life."

The Irishman began to train as a Buddhist monk and was fully ordained before 1900.

His ordination therefore pre-dates that of Charles Henry Allan Bennett (Ananda Metteyya) who has traditionally been dubbed the 'first western Buddhist monk', as Bennett was ordained in the Theravada tradition in 1902.

But how did Carroll reconcile his atheist principles with a spiritual life?

Professor Brian Bocking explains: "He was an atheist but the Dalai Lama is an atheist.

"Buddhists don't believe in God, not in the Christian sense. They don't believe in a creator God that you could interact with.

"What they say is that suffering is caused by the mind - what you have to do is to distil the mind and extinguish any fires of craving and you do that by following a monastic life.

"In that way Buddhism was completely compatible with Dhammaloka's atheism."

Atheism within Buddhism is a principle that still remains intact and Dr Laurence Cox, author of Buddhism and Ireland: from the Celts to counter-culture and beyond, believes that with a rise in secularism people outside of Asia became more open to Buddhist practices. Church attendances in Ireland in the 1970s were measured at 91% but in 2008 that had dropped to just 36%.

"Most Irish people who convert might have had strong associations to Catholicism or Protestantism and were faced with a lot of dogma and they don't want to do the same thing with Buddhism," argues Dr Cox.

New 'Catholic Buddhists'

"Buddhism allows you to redefine a bit of what matters to you. You're not looking to your own family tradition - you can step outside what can sometimes be stifling conventions and look up and have encounters with a different kind of culture that might have had an effect on you."

Kelsang Chitta is currently the only ordained Buddhist nun in Northern Ireland within the Kadampa tradition.

Having grown up with a Christian background she developed an interest in Buddhism while studying philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. She believes that people are now attracted to elements of the religion due to its unimposing nature.

"Since the summer, we've had the biggest numbers ever coming to our classes at the [Potala Kadampa Buddhist] centre," she says.

"You can practise the teachings in your daily life, developing compassion without calling yourself a Buddhist.

"Many people would practise in that way. Take the essence of the teachings and practise and that's fine within Buddhism. It's not really necessary to label yourself."

Mixing Buddhist practices with traditional Christian faith in Ireland nowadays is not something that would have gained support with Dhammaloka who had strong views both on Christianity and colonialism.

His outspoken opinion gained him followers but also made him a figure of some notoriety in Rangoon during the first decade of the 20th Century.

Law-breaker

And, while his anti-colonial and Christian stance may have made him popular in Buddhist communities in South East Asia it also attracted the wrath of colonial authorities.

Dhammaloka faced minor charges of sedition twice. Once in 1902 and again in 1910.

In 1910 opponents reported him to the chief court of Rangoon after he publicly accused Christians of being immoral, violent and set on the destruction of Burmese tradition.

He was bound over by the judge for a year and his supporters paid the sizeable sum of approximately 1,000 rupees as a surety he would not re-offend.

"Dhammaloka was famous for two things," explains Professor Bocking.

"One, he was a Westerner but a Buddhist monk and secondly, he made speeches that were controversial denouncing Christian missionaries and European colonialism."

Professor Bocking also believes the most significant aspect of Dhammaloka's conversion was that his background was no barrier to Buddhism.

"I suppose the most important thing for us in learning about Dhammaloka is that he opens up a whole world of early Western Buddhists who were not respectable types but who came out of an imperial underclass that was interested in religion."

The manner in which people in the West are encouraged to practise the religion may have changed since Dhammaloka's time but the concept that Buddhism is open to everyone from all kinds of background still resonates today.

Quick facts

Laurence Carroll was born in 1856 in DublinEmigrated to the USA in 1871Arrived in Rangoon in the early 1880sOrdained as a novice Buddhist monk in 1884 adopting the name DhammalokaEstablished the Buddhist Tract Society in Burma in 1907Was tried and convicted for sedition in 1910Believed to have died between 1913 and 1915

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Retreat into a Buddhist way of life

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Durban, South Africa -- Arriving at The Buddhist Retreat Centre just outside Ixopo on Friday afternoon, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. My partner and I had signed up for a retreat titled “Your Life in Ten Pictures”. We weren’t looking to “find ourselves” or expecting to experience anything life-changing as the clichés go, but we were curious.

Too many late nights and too much convenience food had led us to a point where we needed to tune out from reality for a while. If I said that was what we found at the retreat I would be lying. We found a way to completely tune into reality, and that was exactly what was needed.

We arrived just in time for supper. We had heard about the retreat first through friends raving about the food.

Both vegetarians, there are few places we can go out to eat where there is more on the menu for us to choose from than a side order of chips, a green salad, a margarita pizza or a chickpea burger – if you are lucky.

Tastes

So the prospect of exploring new tastes was one of the main reasons we went, and the retreat did not disappoint. All the dishes are prepared from scratch using the finest vegetables, all grown on site, served with freshly baked bread.

They have even published their own cook book with recipes created in the kitchen. The recipe books, Quiet Food and The Cake that Buddha Ate, are top sellers around the country.

Book early if you want to go to one of the cooking classes held over some weekends as they sell out fast.

For me, the main feature of the centre was the spectacular view. It sits on a ridge at the head of the Umkomaas River system.

In the early mornings you see “mist rivers” running through the valleys. And there is no shortage of benches hidden away in little pockets of nature for you to quietly reflect and take it all in.

Wondering around this serene setting as the sun sets is something close to magical. The golden light surrounds you as you meander along cobbled stone paths. You would be forgiven if you thought you had stumbled upon Rivendell.

After dinner we had an introductory talk about what to expect. Here they told us that we would be participating in meditation practise three times a day with talks and activities in-between.

They also made mention of “noble silence”. The retreat asks you to not talk at all from after evening meditation until after breakfast the next day. This may sound strange at first, and it is hard to get the hang of it in the beginning, but the rewards are worth it. You do not

realise how often you pass an unnecessary comment until you are consciously trying not to say anything.

Eating in silence in a room full of people is an interesting experience. My fruit salad tasted amazing, I excitedly looked forward to each piece of fruit, the pineapple, melon, grape and strawberry. How was it different from any fruit salad I had had before? I don’t know, but I am sure that concentrating on the taste of each flavour in silence had something to do with it.

Meditation was a major focus on this retreat, and it is there to help you bring your mind into the present. We are so busy thinking about the past or worrying about the future that we miss what is going on around us right now. When I spoke about completely tuning into reality, this is what I was speaking about.I felt so refreshed and clear-headed afterwards.

Owners Louis and Chrisi van Loon are often at the retreat. Louis sometimes leads the weekend and he did this one.

He is a soft-spoken, charismatic man with a seemingly never-ending supply of knowledge. One of the other guests told me that she often comes to the retreat, and she makes sure to book the weekends that Louis runs.

Chrisi said the retreat used to be one of KwaZulu-Natal’s best-kept secrets, as they normally only had guests from other parts of the country, but they were starting to see more and more Durbanites make the less than two-hour drive to Ixopo – a drive that I hope to take again very soon. - The Mercury

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Study reveals gene expression changes with meditation

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Wisconsin, USA -- With evidence growing that meditation can have beneficial health effects, scientists have sought to understand how these practices physically affect the body.

<< Richard J.  Davidson

A new study by researchers in Wisconsin, Spain, and France reports the first evidence of specific molecular changes in the body following a period of mindfulness meditation.

The study investigated the effects of a day of intensive mindfulness practice in a group of experienced meditators, compared to a group of untrained control subjects who engaged in quiet non-meditative activities. After eight hours of mindfulness practice, the meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including altered levels of gene-regulating machinery and reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which in turn correlated with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation.

"To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that shows rapid alterations in gene expression within subjects associated with mindfulness meditation practice," says study author Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

"Most interestingly, the changes were observed in genes that are the current targets of anti-inflammatory and analgesic drugs," says Perla Kaliman, first author of the article and a researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona, Spain (IIBB-CSIC-IDIBAPS), where the molecular analyses were conducted.

The study was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Mindfulness-based trainings have shown beneficial effects on inflammatory disorders in prior clinical studies and are endorsed by the American Heart Association as a preventative intervention. The new results provide a possible biological mechanism for therapeutic effects.

The results show a down-regulation of genes that have been implicated in inflammation. The affected genes include the pro-inflammatory genes RIPK2 and COX2 as well as several histone deacetylase (HDAC) genes, which regulate the activity of other genes epigenetically by removing a type of chemical tag. What's more, the extent to which some of those genes were downregulated was associated with faster cortisol recovery to a social stress test involving an impromptu speech and tasks requiring mental calculations performed in front of an audience and video camera.

Perhaps surprisingly, the researchers say, there was no difference in the tested genes between the two groups of people at the start of the study. The observed effects were seen only in the meditators following mindfulness practice. In addition, several other DNA-modifying genes showed no differences between groups, suggesting that the mindfulness practice specifically affected certain regulatory pathways.

However, it is important to note that the study was not designed to distinguish any effects of long-term meditation training from those of a single day of practice. Instead, the key result is that meditators experienced genetic changes following mindfulness practice that were not seen in the non-meditating group after other quiet activities — an outcome providing proof of principle that mindfulness practice can lead to epigenetic alterations of the genome.

Previous studies in rodents and in people have shown dynamic epigenetic responses to physical stimuli such as stress, diet, or exercise within just a few hours.

"Our genes are quite dynamic in their expression and these results suggest that the calmness of our mind can actually have a potential influence on their expression," Davidson says.

"The regulation of HDACs and inflammatory pathways may represent some of the mechanisms underlying the therapeutic potential of mindfulness-based interventions," Kaliman says. "Our findings set the foundation for future studies to further assess meditation strategies for the treatment of chronic inflammatory conditions."

Study funding came from National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (grant number P01-AT004952) and grants from the Fetzer Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, and an anonymous donor to Davidson. The study was conducted at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the UW-Madison Waisman Center.

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