Buddhist charity promotes Ghost Month as joyful

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Taipei, Taiwan -- While “Ghost Month” has traditionally been linked to danger and misfortune, a Buddhist charity group has been trying to change that perception by promoting the period as a joyous and auspicious time.

<< Chinese across Asia marks the "ghost month" from Aug 7 to Sept 4, 2013

The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation said it plans to hold more than 900 prayer meetings at home and abroad from now till the end of the month to “communicate positive thoughts” and dispel the myths associated with Ghost Month.

At 12 of the prayer meetings, Taiwanese opera companies will act out Buddhist tales to convey positive messages to the public, said the foundation, which has been holding such gatherings for many years.

Ghost Month, observed during the seventh month on the lunar calendar, is this year marked from Aug. 7 to Sept. 4.

People usually avoid activities such as swimming, traveling, whistling or going out after dark during Ghost Month, as it is believed that spirits are on the lookout for souls to capture.

However, the Buddhist group believes that the seventh month on the lunar calendar is in fact a joyful time.

The 15th day of that month marked the end of an annual summer retreat for Buddha’s disciples when he was alive, the charity said.

On the retreat, the disciples would meditate and lead a conscientious life, Tzu Chi said, urging the public to do away with the negative thoughts associated with the month.

Last year, the foundation organized about 4,000 activities around the world to celebrate Ghost Month, attracting the participation of more than 280,000 people in dozens of countries.

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Dalai Lama promotes vegetarianism on first ever World Compassion Day

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New Delhi, India -- Animal welfare was the topic of discussion and the XIV Dalai Lama propounded the ideals of ahimsa and vegetarianism at the first-ever World Compassion Day, organised at a suburban hotel on Wednesday.

“I was not vegetarian till about five decades ago, but when I saw hens being abused on an animal farm, I decided to become vegetarian,” said the Dalai Lama, at the event organised by Pritish Nandy Communications (PNC), an entertainment company, and the Humane Society International (HSI), the international branch of the Humane Society of United States (HSUS), an animal welfare organisation.

“World Compassion Day is an idea we have had for a while. The objective is to rediscover the relevance of ahimsa. We want to revive the idea of compassion not just as do-good gestures but also as an initiative to create an alternate lifestyle,” said Pritish Nandy, founder, PNC.

The Dalai Lama promoted the need to create awareness about respect for life and vegetarianism. “The media must play an important role, and even the younger generation must be informed about moral ethics through education,” he said.

When asked about his stand towards China, he said, “Though we are compassionate, we will not bow down to them. We have to wait and watch if the new regime acts according to new realities, where there is no room for totalitarianism,” he said.

The guests included actor Anil Kapoor, writer Chetan Bhagat, and police commissioner Satyapal Singh.

“To be compassionate, one requires four things. One must be spiritual, believe in humanity, believe that you will face the consequences for your actions, and one must be vegetarian,” said Singh.

Wayne Pacelle, president, HSUS, said, “Indians consume less meat than many countries. While the meat consumption in India is three to four kgs per person per year, that in the United States is as high as 100-110 kgs.”

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Study: Buddhist Meditation Promotes Rational Thinking

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New York, USA -- Studies looking at the brains of people playing a fairness game found very different responses between Buddhist meditators and other participants.

<< A new study - with brain scans to back it up - suggests that people who regularly practice Buddhist meditation actually process situations involving rationality differently. (Istockphoto.com)

It’s no secret that humans are not entirely rational when it comes to weighing rewards. For example, we might be perfectly happy with how much money we’re making — until we find out how much more the guy in the next cubicle is being paid.

But a new study suggests that people who regularly practice Buddhist meditation actually process these common social situations differently — and the researchers have the brain scans to prove it.

Ulrich Kirk and collaborators at Baylor Medical College in Houston had 40 control subjects and 26 longtime meditators participate in a well-known experiment called the Ultimatum Game. It goes like this:

One person has a sum of money to split with another person. If the other person accepts the offer, they both walk away with cash in their pocket, but if he or she rejects the offer as too chintzy — which happens surprisingly often — neither receives anything.

The rational course is to accept any offer that is proposed, because getting something is better than nothing at all, but the Ultimatum Game suggests that for many people, emotion trumps reason. Being treated fairly is more important than coming out ahead financially.

Kirk’s subjects had $20 to split among themselves. When the offers were wildly asymmetrical (keeping $19 for oneself, while offering only $1), 72 percent of the controls refused the money, meaning both parties left empty-handed. But when the meditators played, only 46 percent rejected such blatantly unfair offers. More than half were willing to take whatever they were offered.

The test subjects played the game while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner, enabling the researchers to see which areas of their brains became active as they responded to various monetary offers. As in earlier experiments with the Ultimatum Game, the control subjects saw increased activity in a brain structure called the anterior insula when they were confronted with an unfair offer — an area linked to the emotion of disgust.

But the meditators’ brains reacted quite differently, activating brain areas associated with interoception — the representation of the body’s internal state. In fact, the researchers found very little overlap in the two groups’ neural responses.

Kirk, who recruited his meditators from the Houston Zen Center and other local Buddhist groups, wanted to explore a different mechanism for managing their emotions than the ones usually studied in cognitive neuroscience.

“To us it seemed that a more ecological way of doing this would be to see the effects of mindfulness,” he says. “Mindfulness, as opposed to emotion regulation, is using an outside perspective on one’s experiences, rather than changing their content (through distraction) or context (through reframing).”

Kirk, now a research assistant professor with the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Virginia Tech, says that while the meditators’ behavior seems generally more “rational” than that of most of the controls, they did not use the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain usually associated with cold, calculated reasoning.

He also informally interviewed many of the meditators after they underwent the brain scans. “They reported that the offers did not actually seem unfair, or rather, that ‘difference’ doesn’t equal unfairness,” Kirk says. “It was as if the perception of difference incites less reactivity in meditators.”

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