Letter: Sharing an interfaith experience

Sometimes when I feel particularly wicked, especially in an American context, I will casually mention that I have attended a celebration of the Prophet Mohamed's birthday at a Shiite mosque. This never fails to raise eyebrows even with some American monks.

If the truth be told, all the monks of our temple went as well, along with two monastics from the Tibetan tradition. I went because of an Iraqi imam whom I had met earlier - he reminded me of a Jewish grandfather, led a mosque of Iranians and Iraqis and thought that my name was Mr. Soto Zen.

I went to the mosque with three preconceptions that seem foolish in hindsight. I thought that no one would speak English, that the women would be suppressed and that people would be "touchy" ,as we say in Newfoundland. I found that we were shown around by young people who spoke excellent English, the women were very outspoken and fearless in their views and that we were made very welcome with baklava and coffee.

I have also participated in interfaith events with a Muslim woman who is a good friend and a Sufi. She is a professor of classical Arabic and chants the Koran at public events.

Therefore Islam to me is not an abstraction, it is these people whose presence in the world I cherish.

Imagine, if you will, an enormous mountain, so high that the top is wreathed in clouds. That is mount Carmel, Sumeru, Sinai, Ararat.

We come towards this mountain from many different directions with
our different maps of the journey - bibles, torahs, korans, sutras, suttas, that have led us to the foot of this mountain. The foolish ones circle around and around the base quarreling over who has the best map. The wise, on the other hand, just start to climb. The farther up the mountain they go the more they are simply grateful to encounter other people there.

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China's Tibetan areas experience fresh turmoil

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ABA, China -- Armed police in full riot gear stand guard along the main street in Aba, a small Chinese town where a young monk burned himself to death last March, setting off a series of self-immolations.

<< China's Tibetan areas experience fresh turmoil 
This photo taken on Sunday, March 11 shows a police roadblock into Aba county town in Sichuan province. Armed police in full riot gear are standing guard along the main street in Aba, a small Chinese town where a young monk burned himself to death last March, setting off a series of self-immolations. (AFP)

Four years after deadly unrest shook China's Tibetan areas in March 2008, beginning in the Tibetan capital Lhasa before spreading to other areas, the region is once again in turmoil.

In the last 12 months, at least 26 Tibetans, many of them young Buddhist monks and nuns, have set themselves on fire to protest against Beijing's rule and call for the return of their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.

Many of the gruesome protests have happened in Aba in the southwestern province of Sichuan, home to the sprawling Kirti monastery, one of the most revered institutions in Tibetan Buddhism.

AFP reporters who briefly gained access to the town before being expelled on Sunday saw hundreds of police in full riot gear lining the streets, some armed with guns, metal bars and fire extinguishers.

A day earlier, rights groups say, an 18-year-old Kirti monk self-immolated in Aba to mark the anniversary of a 1959 uprising in Tibet that led to the Dalai Lama's flight into exile.

But the grim form of protest has become almost commonplace. By Sunday, shops were open and people walked freely around, although the main street was blocked to vehicles and two armored personnel carriers sat outside a small theatre.

“The situation here is very, very serious. March is a very sensitive period in Tibetan-inhabited areas,” a policeman surnamed Jiang told an AFP reporter.

“You are not allowed to be here, and must return to Chengdu as soon as you can,” he said referring to the provincial capital.

Rights groups say the situation is at its worst since the March 2008 unrest, in which Tibet's government-in-exile said more than 200 people died. China denies that account, saying there were 21 deaths and that “rioters” were responsible.

Many of China's ethnic Tibetans accuse the authorities of religious repression, and say their culture is being eroded by an influx of Han Chinese, the country's main ethnic group.

Beijing insists that Tibetans enjoy freedom of religious belief and says their lives have been made better by huge ongoing investment into Tibetan-inhabited areas.

China's reaction to the immolations has been to crack down even further, deploying huge numbers of military police and stationing government officials in religious institutions to organize “political reeducation.”

Interviewing anyone in Aba is now virtually impossible, but monks at the Kumbum monastery — known in Chinese as Taersi — in the neighboring province of Qinghai said they were being forced by authorities to undergo “patriotic education.”

“Basically, we must vow to love the Communist Party,” one shaven-headed monk who declined to give his name told AFP at the monastery, which is set against the backdrop of the snow-capped Himalayas.

“This is absurd. We are monks, our love is devoted to Buddha and our spiritual leader the Dalai Lama,” he said, refusing to be identified out of obvious fears of reprisals.

Up to 1,000 of the 3,000 monks in Kumbum have been placed under differing sorts of restrictions due to their failure to meet political requirements, a local Tibetan resident with close links to the monastery told AFP.

Such restrictions range from curbing privileges such as travel to further enforced indoctrination sessions, he said, adding that “there are a lot of officials in the monastery.”

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Inner Experience of Space & Time

Home Dharma Dew

Singapore -- Space feeling is first and foremost connected with the movement or possibility of movement of the body, whereas time feeling is connected with the movement or the realization of movement of the mind. Space is externalized time projected outward. Time is the internalized space, the inner transformation of spatial movement into the feeling of duration.

Though space feeling starts with the body, it does not remain at this stage. It gradually changes into a spiritual function independent of the body and eventually culminating in the experience of the infinity of space as describe in the meditative practice of the Four Divine States of consciousness and in the Higher Immaterial States of absorption. It is not a concept, because infinity cannot be conceived, it can only be experienced. Movement, in relation to space and time is also the fundamental quality and characteristic of life itself.

Changes due to movements are not accidental but dependent on laws, such as the laws of periodicity in which change follows a cyclic movement as in the seasons, the hour of the day, etc. It represents the eternality in time, and converts it into a higher space dimension, in which things and events exist simultaneously, though no perceptible to the senses.

They are in a state of potentiality as invisible elements of future events and phenomena that have no yet stepped into actual reality. Time is not merely an experience of the fleeting existence of oneself but also the inherent nature of life and spirit, which is beyond being and non-being, beyond origination and destruction.

Time as a movement, either of oneself or of something within or outside of oneself is a paradox. We would have noticed, that the less we moved, both inwardly and outwardly, the more we are aware of time.

The more we move ourselves, the less we are aware of time. A person who is mentally and bodily inactive feels time as a burden, while one who is active hardly notices the passage of time. When we move and live in perfect harmony with the innermost rhythm of our being, it becomes timeless in the sense that we do not experience time any more.

What we call ‘eternal’ is not an infinite duration of time, which is a thought construction, but the experience of timelessness. Time cannot be reversed, just like life itself, it is an irreversible process. The whole experience of time is due to movement and memory.
The past that is ever growing in oneself as a widening horizon of experience and wisdom will continue to grow until the individual has reached the state in which the universe become conscious in him as one living organism. This is the highest dimension of consciousness.

Dimension is the capacity to extend or move in a certain direction. If we moved outward we do so in a three dimensional aspect. However, the movement which produces and contained these dimensions is felt as time, and as long as the movement is incomplete or the dimensions are in the making, no conceived as a complete whole, the feeling of time is the feeling of incompleteness. There is no time in moments of highest awareness, intuitive vision or perfect realization.

There is no time for the Enlightened Ones. However for the Enlightened Ones, it does not mean the past has been extinguished or memory blotted out. On the contrary, the past ceases to be a quality of time and becomes a new order of space, in which things and events which we have experienced piecemeal can be seen simultaneously, in their entirety, and in the present.

The Buddha in the process of his enlightenment surveyed innumerable previous lives in ever widening extending view, until his vision encompassed the entire universe. Only if we recognize the past as a true dimension of ourselves in whose womb we dream until we are awakened into the freedom of enlightenment, shall we be able to see ourselves in proper perspective to the universe.

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