The December Five Day Course was held at the Centre and guided by our resident Teacher, John D. Hughes.

On the first day Francisco So organised chanting of the Prajna Paramita Sutra.

The predominant intention of these teachings was to lead Students to establish, each for himself or herself, intelligible certainty of the actuality that the majority of human beings will be carried by their karma to a series of unhappy rebirths.

There are three difficult things that need to be established within the Prajna Paramita framework of the teachings.

The first thing to be equally understood is that we are indeed human beings this life. This was established by looking at macro issues that have cause to rise and or other problems that occur in the delivery of infrastructure projects.

It is difficult for most persons to detach from an ATMAN adhesion. The correct view is ANATTA.

The second difficult thing to be understood is to stay debtless when we build, operate, own and transfer infrastructure projects for a viable Temple within Australian laws in the 21^st Century, the interested parties would include the following: government departments at local council, state government and federal government, private sector operators and builders who have the know how in construction, insurance companies and the use of written contractual documents with risk allocations for infrastructure projects.

We wish to operate by combining ownership with management and operation in order to eliminate contractual risk on operation. We rely on large utility companies that have the resources and expertise to generate water, gas, electricity, waste collection, and general supply chain management to ensure appropriate allocation of operation and technological risk.

We do not seek government funding or borrowings because financing then has a certain ‘volatility factor’ that we do find tolerable because we will not borrow money and go into corporate debt for capital works. (1)

The third difficult thing is to obtain the significant experiential training for some of our Members at the World Fellowship of Buddhists 21^st General Conference in Bangkok Thailand in December 2000. Our Centre participated with a delegation comprising John D. Hughes Vice President WFB, Julian Bamford and Vincenzo Cavuoto as delegates, Julie O’Donnell and Anita Svensson as observers and Jocelyn Hughes and Vanessa Macleod as Rapporteurs.

Participation at the WFB conference has become a very significant training device for our Members to:

· Get them to interact with persons for whom the practice of Buddha Dhamma is an essential part of their history and culture.

· Take them away from their habitual environment so they can better experience a Buddha Dhamma culture.

· Create a more homogeneous culture at our Centre within the spirit of Buddha Dhamma.

· Get them to practice working for long hours and learn to handle the stress of a high-pressure environment in a skilful way.

· Enable them to gain a better perspective on the high profile our Centre has in the Buddhist world and on the leverage opportunities to preserve this Buddha Sasana.

· Update and increase our network of contacts with Buddhist organisations around the world.

Our Centre is well positioned to play a leading role within the context of the WFB and for various reasons.

The major reason is we are non-secterian and teach and practice.

Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana and Ch’an are practiced at our Centre. Our Members are culturally adaptable enough to withstand globalisation without cultural shock.

The process of globalisation is, to a greater or lesser extent, producing some kind of disorientation in traditional Buddhist societies, which is weakening the confidence in the relevance of Buddha Dhamma in the younger section of the population.

Doctor Ananda Guruge in his keynote address at the inauguration of the World Buddhist University on 9 December 2000 (2) described what has been inaugurated on that day as the nerve centre of what we hope to develop into a vast network of educational institutions contributing to the promotion of Buddha’s Dhamma. It is from this Centre that inspiration and guidance will reach every nook and corner of this world.

A peep into the past will show us that Buddha Dhamma right throughout history has stressed the importance of learning. The Sangha was a learning and teaching society, dedicated to the perpetuation of the teachings of the Buddha through oral transmission from generation to generation and later through writings and copying books and maintaining substantial libraries.

Parallel to the Buddha’s soteriological mission of ethical and psychological self-transformation, learned disciples like Thera Sariputta led scholastic activities and laid the foundation of Buddhist scholarship.

The Abhidhamma text ‘Synopsis of Fundamentals’ (3) that was taught warns of rejoicing in ‘extension of the mind factors’. Because new untrained Members lack good vision at the beginning of their practice they may be able to see only one or two of the eighty four thousand jewels of Dhamma. Given time and merit they will meet all the gems.

A limited view is caused by lack of fundamentals of Dhamma.

A text that is valuable is the Middle Length Sayings, Discourse on the Synopsis of Fundamentals (Mulapariyayasutta), in which Dhamma is described as an important word with several meanings, such as: conditions, mental objects, states of mind, and things.

During the five-day course, our Teacher gave both strong and weaker versions of why our debtless approach is mandatory and why we continue to place more and more management information, newsletters and our flagship journal text with illustrations on our web sites.

Our broadcast globalisation gives our overseas contacts quality information without us building more and more office space.

We have proved it possible to go from local to regional, from regional to national and from national to global in a rapid amount of time without incurring information technology debt. Our goal is to help others follow the weak version of our debtless approach. The rationale of our seven web sites has been written down during the course. Each day, our Enterprise Development Managers taught four other Members how to add information to our various sites.

For example, digital photographs taken during the New Years Eve (31 December 2000) were edited and placed on the site within about three days. The report dealing with the fusion of our International Dhamma Activities and Knowledge Management Task Units developed during the course was placed on our web site within one day of being completed.

Our two Enterprise Development Managers Evelin Halls and Santi Sukha continue to train four others Members, Anita Svensson, Julian Bamford, Frank Carter and Lisa Nelson after the five-day course.

We are keeping pace with the growth of Buddha Dhamma in Australia that has been rapid over the last two decades.

The Director of the multi denominational Christian Research Association and Uniting Church Minister, Philip Hughes, says that about 1.5 million Australians (11 percent of the population) regularly practice one of the forms of Buddhist meditation. The same percentage regularly attends Christian churches. (4)

Many persons in Australia come to Buddha Dhamma via information found on our web sites and their choice to visit here is influenced by what we write.

Our leading edge is that our writings are stable in doctrine content over two decades.

There is no doubt that despite its benefits globalisation has sparked much debate and criticism, including in Australia. But the greatest myth of this debate is that we can uplift the poor by turning our backs on globalisation. Clearly there is a role for political, business and community leaders to do much more to explain and demonstrate the benefits of globalisation to human fulfillment and happiness. We must also ensure that the benefits of globalisation are equitably distributed within countries and that the costs of change do not fall disproportionately on the vulnerable and disadvantaged. (5)

Whatever the level of attainment of a person or the skill degree, it is better to hear little and understand the meaning than to hear much and not understand the meaning, according to the Nirvana Sutra.

The format of our Teachings always master learning.

We must stress this aspect of Dhammas.

The information on our Websites should not advise others to do things that we do not desire for ourselves. What must be removed are greed, anger, ignorance, self, laziness, sleep, lust and doubt.

It is said that the ideal Bodhisattva never tires of teaching beings and manifests himself or herself according to the Avatamsakra Sutra.

Our censorship model must stress what Mahayana Buddhism is not:

· it is not polytheism, the various forms of the Buddha, displayed for example, in the Shingon Mandala, are not gods, but represent the different forms of the one Eternal Buddha;

· it is not nihilism, Mahayana’s conception of life is always positive; it is not a degenerate Buddhism;

· rather it is a restatement of the Buddha’s teaching with different emphasis; it is not pessimistic, as most Western writers on Buddhism aver.

For some of the students the Teacher taught, for some overtly and for some covertly, that Dharma is not only the basis of the theory of the nature of mind, it is also a preventative medicine for mental sickness. It builds a strong mind that cannot be easily over powered by emotional strains, intellectual pressures or even “evil spirits”.

Of the three humours, wind (air element) is the one primarily associated with mental disturbances. This is a basic Ayurvedic theory. In the classical Ayurvedic tradition, one of the principle terms for madness was vatula, literally “inflated with wind,” and this indicates the central connection. Wind is the humour primarily associated with mind and mental derangements. The relationship between life and mind and breath the life energy (prana) within the breath and the breath’s direct effect (through its control) on mind - is one of the most important and central aspects of Indian thought and yogic practice. (6)

According to both Abhidhamma and medical tradition there are five causes of insanity. These are: karma; grief-worry; humoural (organic) imbalance; poison (organic); and “evil spirits.” (7)

The Bodhi tree protected Lord Buddha in his practice over two and half thousand years ago. During the course, we replaced the temporary plastic surround that we had up to protect our Bodhi tree from frost during winter with bullet proof plate glass. This action is to cause Member’s health to improve.

Over the course, many Members concentrated on reduction of fire hazard by putting cement sheets and iron mesh around the base of the new building in accordance with the Australian Standard dealing with bush fire protection.

Many offerings were done to the various devas who help when the Quail’s Protection is chanted in Pali. (8)

All Members were drilled in safety and our plans to protect the property in case of forest fires. The area where we live is a rainforest having one of the world’s highest fire risk ratings. The local fire brigades have warned that they cannot protect properties in case of a major fire. Our plan for fire fighting includes use of pumps and water tanks in the event of town supply failure. Reduction of fuel was undertaken during the course with no killing of little insects.

An elaborate written plan was developed during the course to allow our operations to become more globalised. This became possible because seven Members had had an experience of working with the WFB Committees in Bangkok Thailand at the 21^st Conference.

With the merging of two of our Task Units into one (International Dhamma Activities and Knowledge Management) a report was prepared and passed by our General Committee. (9)

The report includes our web site rationales. We intend to have an online version of our flagship journal Buddha Dhyana Dana Review and our future printed versions will be abstracts of the full articles on our web site. The cost of printing and postage of each issue will be contained in future. Since we give out free copies, to over forty countries, the abstract form proposed will contain fewer pages and have more content than earlier issues. We have trained more and more of our Members to write within our five styles for our publication.

We have just recently put our other publication, the Brooking Street Bugle, onto a web site as part of our globalisation strategy. We have interstate Members who we have trained in our culture who need reference to our best practises listed in this publication.

We are looking to form a different class of Membership without voting rights for those who wish to follow our strategic approaches to Buddha Dhamma propagation.

The importance of user-centred structures in web pages is important because the success rate was eighty percent when persons used the navigation scheme structured according to most users mental model and only nine percent were using the navigation scheme structured according to the company’s internal thinking. Comparison of the success rates leads to the conclusion that user centred information architecture had about nine times as high useability as internally orientated architecture. (10)

Around 2010 CE the web is expected to reach a billion users (1000 million). (11)

We are aware that we are a Buddhist organisation and so we try to put our Dhamma Chakra Wheel onto each of our sites. We would not be so parochial as to use any Australian icon because this may be under the protection of Christian or Aboriginal devas that have little use for the propagation of Buddha Dhamma.

Our design for our web sites has to be dominated by users with connections so slow that any reasonable web page will take much longer to download than the response time limits indicated by human factors research. (12)

For this reason, we are using the fast method of zip and unzip compression for colour photographs and we degrade them somewhat to get faster loading times. In the future, we will replace them with higher definition photographs and low-end users will be on fast lines by 2003-2005. (13)

We must investigate and bear in mind that the four main reasons users return to our web sites and not to others web sites is summarised by the acronym HOME: High quality content; Often updated; Minimal download time; and Ease of use. (14)

On the 31 December 2000, 11am to 12 noon our Members did a one hour Radio Broadcast, “Reviewing the last Millennium”. This went global onto Internet.

Then on the 1 January 2001, from midnight to 1am our Members did a one-hour Radio Broadcast, “Meeting with the New”.

The methodology is found in the suttas.

May the merit we made help many Centres ease into the 21^st Century with globalisation.

May you all be well and happy

References:

1. Investing In Infrastructure. Workshop Papers #5 Australian Urban & Regional Development Review. 1995. Commonwealth of Australia. ISBN 0-7306-4808-7

2. Dr. Guruge. Keynote speech at the opening of the World Buddhist University, Bangkok Thailand on 9 December 2000. On this occasion our Teacher praised Dr. Guruge for his scholarship and understanding of the issues and compared him with Sri Atisha Dipunkara (the eye of Asia) of one millennium ago. Atisha wrote the definitive text uniting three Yanas in his text… A Lamp On The Path…

3. Mulapariyayasutta. Middle Length Sayings Majjhima-Nikaya Vol 1, Discourse on the Synopsis of Fundamentals. Pali Text Society Pub. 1954 ISBN 0-86013-020-7

4. The Age Newspaper - News Extra. Article entitled ‘Shopping For God’. Melb. Aust. 23 Dec 2000. Page 1.

5. Message from the Hon. John Howard M.P., Prime Minister of Australia to the World Fellowship of Buddhists 21^st Conference held in Bangkok, Thailand in December 2000.

6. Terry Clifford. The Diamond Healing. (1984) Pub. The Aquarian Press, part of the Thorsons Publishing Group, England ISBN 1-85274-046-9 at page 132.

7. Ibid 6 page 137

8. Vattakaparitta. The Quail’s Protection. In Pali:

ATTHI LOKE SILAGUNO SACCAM SOCEYYANUDDAYA

TENA SACCENA KAHAMI SACCAKIRIYAMANUTTARAM

AVAJJITVA DHAMMABALAM SARITVA PUBBAKE JINE

SACCABALAMAVASSAYA SACCAKIRIYAMAKASAHAM

SANTI PAKKHA APATTANA SANTI PADA AVANCANA

MATA PITA CA NIKKHANTA JATAVEDA PATIKKAMA

SAHA SACCE KATE MAYHAM MAHAPAJJALITO SIKKHI

VAJJESI SOLASA KARISANI UDAKAM PATVA YATHA SIKKHI

SACCENA ME SAMO NATTHI ESA ME SACCAPARAMI TI

9. International Dhamma Activities Task Unit Report July to December 2000. Prepared by John D Hughes, Julian Bamford, Tim Browning, Evelin Halls, Lisa Nelson, Nick Prescott and Pennie White. Dated 28 December 2000. Available for viewing on our web sites at www.companyontheweb.com/buddhamap.

10. Jacob Nielson. Designing Web Usability. (2000) Pub. News Riders Publishing ISBN 1-56205-810-X page 202

11. Ibid 10 page 314

12. Ibid 10 page 364

13. Ibid 10 page 365

14. Ibid 10 page 380

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