Shooting victims focus of service at Buddhist center

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Palm Springs, California (USA) -- A Buddhist center will dedicate its monthly service for those who have recently died to the victims of last week’s shooting rampage at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school.

“I decided as soon as I heard,” said Saundra Young, resident teacher at the Dharmachakra Buddhist Center. “I was as shocked as everyone else. I was so happy we already had this powa scheduled.”

The ceremony is set for 7 to 8 p.m. Friday at the center, 1445 N. Sunrise Way. The center has offered such ceremonies around the end of each month since it opened in February.

Powas offer a series of prayers for people who have passed away, but according to Buddhist beliefs, their soul may not have completely departed the body.

“Buddhists believe that when consciousness leaves the body, it can take up to 49 days to happen,” said Jack Todd, another teacher at the center.

Powa participants use prayer to help those souls complete that journey.

“The main part of the ceremony is that we imagine the minds of the dead going on to a better place, and we meditate on that,” Young said. “It’s very moving.”

The services are conducted in English and accompanied by Westernized music, and prayer booklets are handed out to guide newcomers through the ritual. The size of the crowds attracted vary widely, and she’s not sure what to expect Friday.

“Sometimes there’s 50, sometimes there’s six. It all depends on who has a need,” she said.

The center also has prayers for world peace every Sunday, Young said, and last week’s drew quite a few people shaken by the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, which left 20 children, six adult staffers, gunman Adam Lanza and his mother, Nancy Lanza, dead.

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Buddhist-influenced waka poems are focus of lecture

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KALAMAZOO, MI (USA) --The waka poets of medieval Japan and their work will be examined later this month when a Japanese scholar visits Western Michigan University.

Dr. Stephen Miller, assistant professor of Japanese language and literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, will speak about the poets and the intersection of their work with Buddhism at 5 p.m. Thursday, March 22, in Room 3025 of Brown Hall. His presentation, titled "The Wind from Vulture Peak: Japanese Buddhist Poetry and the Heian Aesthetic," is free and open to the public.

Miller is regarded as an expert on medieval waka poetry, a genre of classical Japanese verse and one of the major genres of Japanese literature during the Heian period from 794 to 1185. In his presentation, he will explain how and why the Japanese poets of the Heian period utilized the 31-syllable form of waka poems to speak about the topic of Buddhism, as well as the problems of compiling and translating these poems into English.

Miller's book, "The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period," is forthcoming from the Cornell East Asia Series in 2012. He has also published translations and edited a collection of Japanese literature about same-sex love and eroticism called "Partings at Dawn."

Miller's visit is sponsored by the WMU Soga Japan Center, the foreign languages and comparative religion departments and the Haenicke Institute for Global Education.

For more information, contact Dr. Jeffrey Angles, associate professor of foreign languages, at jeffrey.angles@wmich.edu or (269) 387-3044.

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