The great Czech monk: Ven. Dhammadipa

Ven. Dhammadipa, Buddhistdoor Global, March 16, 2016; Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

Ven. Dhammadipa on the Buddhist Education Project in Sakarwadi, India

(BDG: Buddhistdoor Global) Born in the Czech Republic, for many years Venerable Dhammadipa traveled the world, ordaining in Chinese Mahayana then in Burmese Theravada at the world-renown Pa Auk Forest Monastery, where he trained with Pa Auk Sayadaw, attaining distinction in knowledge and vision.

• Ven. Dhammadipa (Xing-Kong) AUDIO (BAUS)
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Yogi: Ven. Dhammadipa (mahalaya-nepal.com)

He then continued his travels, giving teachings on serenity and insight meditation and Buddhist Studies. In this interview with Buddhistdoor Global, he discusses his landmark Buddhist Education Project in Sakarwadi, India, which is designed to educate the local Buddhist community (mostly composed of Dalits, formerly "Untouchables," who practice but know little about Buddhism) on bettering their poverty-stricken lives.

Be inspired by more Buddhist content at the Buddhistdoor website: buddhistdoor.net

Snow Monkey caste system, Japan (video)

CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; Nature (PBS), Documentary Galaxy

Hold on. Primate electronics are fun!

"Hell's Valley" (Jigokudani Monkey Park) may not be a familiar name, but one thing about it is very popular -- a place in Nagano where one can see "snow monkeys," Japanese macaques, taking an onsen, a hot mineral bath.

Hell's Valley is easy to pass while driving on the way up to Shiga Kogen. Jigokudani Yaen Koen Park opened in 1964, and since then many thousands of people from around the world have visited to observe the lifestyle of the Japanese macaques, Macaca fuscata, a species of monkey native to northern Japan's "Alps."

It is the most northern-living non-human primate, surviving winter temperatures of below -15 °C. They have brown-gray fur, red faces, hands, and bottoms, and short tails and often seem remarkably human. It arranges itself by heredity with each social position handed down (like India's old Vedic caste system) from the mother. But every rigid system has to eventually give way to an individual, in this case -- as in the case of the Buddha -- a little prince.


 

Human sex trafficking (SCPR.org)

(PBS/Independent Lens) "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women" Urmi Basu, the founder of New Light, explains to America Ferrera the caste system in India and how women end up in prostitution. This landmark transmedia project featuring a four-hour PBS primetime national and international broadcast event, a Facebook-hosted social action game, mobile games, two interactive websites, educational video modules with companion text, and an impact assessment plan all inspired by Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, the widely acclaimed book by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

The series follows Kristof, WuDunn, and six celebrity activists including Diane Lane, America Ferrera, Olivia Wilde, and Nicole Kidman as they travel to nine countries and meet inspiring, courageous individuals. Across the globe oppression is being confronted, and real meaningful solutions are being fashioned through health care, education, and economic empowerment for women and girls. Embedded in the linked problems of sex trafficking and forced prostitution, gender-based violence, and maternal mortality -- which still needlessly claims one woman every 90 seconds -- is the single most vital opportunity of our time. And all over the world, women are seizing it.

• Half the Sky movement: HalfTheSkyMovement.org
• Women and Girls Lead: womenandgirlslead.org 
• Independent Lens: pbs.org/independentlens

O, the hells (naraka, niraya)!

In the wild they spend most of their time in forests and feed on seeds, buds, fruit, invertebrates, berries, leaves, and bark. The monkeys have a body length ranging from 80 to 95 cm. The males weigh around 10-14, kg while the females are usually half that at around 5.5 kg.

The park is located in the Yokoyu River Valley, which flows down from Shiga Kogen, the Japanese Highlands. At an elevation of 850 meters, the area is called "Hell's Valley" due to the steep cliffs and hot water steaming out from the Earth.

 

It is also a fairly harsh environment in winter with snow on the ground for a third of the year. But it is a natural paradise for 200 or so monkeys living there. Humans are lucky, too, because we can enter their world and watch them enjoying themselves.

Watching monkeys play, take a leisurely onsen or a swim is a lot of fun. The monkeys generally ignore their human counterparts and just get on with whatever it is they want to be doing.

Race and Caste - Ambedkar vs. Gandhi
(Arundhati Roy) "The Doctor and the Saint" on the Annihilation of India's Caste System. Maybe the "great soul" Mahatma Gandhi was not who we think he was. Rather than a poor saint who saved a country, he may have been a very rich and privileged, Western-educated political leader who presented himself as a "holy man" (sadhu). Columbia University Teachers' College, 2014. Should "untouchables" (dalits) quit Hinduism and adopt any other religion free of corrupting casteism? B.R. Ambedkar says yes!

• The Buddha on RACISM (casteism) in India
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• Community Cinema: "American Denial" explores the power of unconscious biases and how the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice still impact notions of race and class today.  
• California Native Plant Society

India at 65: Independence Day 2012

Wisdom Quarterly

Saffron, white, and green with Buddhist wheel

AUGUST 15th marks India's independence from British oppression. Much like the United States, the "greatest experiment in democracy" (India) liberated itself from United Kingdom colonialism in 1947. Unfortunately, it meant the loss of a great deal of land ceded in the interest of the departing empire. It has kept India fighting with its neighbors (the new Pakistan and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) ever since. Imperial UK strategists cut India up along religious lines. But ethnic strife has continued to plague the nation as well as its infamous communal violence. Tens of millions of Indian Muslims were given a homeland of sort, but 100 million Muslim remain in India. And Pakistan poses the greatest threat to its sovereignty. With the US military on former Indian land (Gandhara now Afghanistan) as it continues to prosecute the longest war of its short history, the even shorter-lived nation is determined to take sides against its own neighbors squeezing it to give up territory, Pakistan and China. Southern California is privileged to have numerous Independence Day celebrations on weekends throughout the month, particularly in LA's "Little India" (Artesia).

• AUDIO: India planning its own mission to Mars
• An alternative message for India's Independence Day
• More troops sent to India's strife-torn northeast (AP) Clashes between members of the ethnic Bodo community and Muslim settlers in Assam state have left 42 people dead and 13 others missing, state...
  
• India says Pakistan websites caused migrant panic
  (Aug. 19) The exodus followed clashes in India's Assam state in recent weeks between ethnic Bodos and Muslim settlers that killed more than 50 people and...

Indian outcast millionaire mulls caste, riches

Tim Sullivan (AP)

AGRA, India - As far back as he can remember, people told Hari Kishan Pippal that he was unclean, with a filthiness that had tainted his family for centuries.

Teachers forced him to sit apart from other students. Employers sometimes didn't bother to pay him.

Pippal is a dalit, a member of the outcast community once known as untouchables [who often leave Hinduism to become Buddhists, which recognizes no castes]. Born at the bottom of Hinduism's complex social ladder, that meant he could not eat with people from higher castes or drink from their wells.

He was not supposed to aspire to a life beyond that of his father [according to the Vedas, a collection of sacred Indian Old Testament-style texts], an illiterate cobbler. Years later, he still won't repeat the slurs that people called him.

Now, though, people call him something else.

They call him rich.

Pippal owns a hospital, a shoe factory, a car dealership and a publishing company. He owns six cars. He lives in a maze of linked apartments in a quiet if dusty neighborhood of high walls and wrought-iron gates.

"In my heart I am dalit. But with good clothes, good food, good business, it is like I am high-caste," he said, a 60-year-old with a shock of white hair, a well-tailored vest and the girth of a Victorian gentleman. Now, he points out, he is richer than most brahmins, who sit at the top of the caste hierarchy: "I am more than brahmin!" More

How to Get Riches: the Buddha

Once the Buddha addressed the [multi-millionaire] householder Anathapindika:

"O householder, there are five things that are wished for, loved, and agreeable yet rarely gained in the world: long life, beauty, happiness, fame, and rebirth in heaven(s).

"But of these five things, householder, I do not teach that they are obtained by prayer or by making vows. If one could obtain them by prayer or vows, who would not have obtained them? For a noble disciple, householder, who wishes to have..." More

• Rags to riches: Rickshaw puller to hospital owner
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Indian Heroes: Mayawati for Queen?

Potential Indian prime minister, Mayawati, the Dalit (untouchable) Regina: To Mayawati and her mentor, Kanshi Ram, goes the credit of finding a strategy that allowed Dalits to parlay their numbers and position in the lower echelons of the state structure into real political power. Today, BSP supremo Mayawati wields power not as a subordinate member of a coalition led by privileged groups, but as the head of an electorally potent coalition of diverse social groups with Dalits in the vanguard.

Assembling a list of 60 people to represent sixty years of the Republic of India is a kind of indoor game, fundamentally no more important than arguing about the ten best Hindi films of the sixties.

But the nation-state is a charismatic beast: it invests everything it touches, even the trivial business of list-making, with significance. When our jurors sat down to the impossible business of finding sixty names to stand in for the nation, there was agreement, argument, accommodation.

Sometimes there were differences of opinion that couldn't be reconciled. And this despite the fact that the three jurors agreed, before they started, to exclude villains from the list, no matter how historically significant they were. See their choices>>

Algeria: Hindu Conversions to Buddhism; Ugly American: CIA Rape Scandal

(AP/ABC News) Officials say the 41-year old CIA officer, a convert to Islam, was ordered home by the U.S. Ambassador, David Pearce, in October after the women came forward with their rape allegations in September.

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Buddhist converts STORY BELOW (Algeria.com)

CIA Station Chief in Algeria Accused of Rapes (1/28/09)

"Ugly American"? Spy Boss Allegedly Drugged Muslim Women, Made Secret Sex Videos
Brian Ross, Kate McCarthy, and Angela M. Hill (ABC World News)

The CIA's station chief at its sensitive post in Algeria is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly raping at least two Muslim women who claim he laced their drinks with a knock-out drug, U.S. law enforcement sources tell ABC News.

• "Rape" in Islam: Unfortunately, under Sharia law, female victims are guilty of "adultery."

• Watch "World News with Charles Gibson" tonight for full report

The discovery of more than a dozen videotapes showing the CIA officer engaged in sex acts with other women has led the Justice Department to broaden its investigation to include at least one other Arab country, Egypt, where the CIA officer had been posted earlier in his career, according to law enforcement officials. The U.S. State Department referred questions to the Department of Justice, which declined to comment.

Obama family move through the eye of a needle (UK Fine Arts)

Low caste Indians set to Convert (Hinduism to Buddhism)

Zubair Ahmed BBC News, Mumbai at Algeria.com (5/27/07)

Thousands of tribal and Dalit Hindus in India are to embrace the Buddhism at a huge gathering in Mumbai (Bombay). The ceremony, which may be presided over by Tibet's exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, is billed as the largest religious conversion in modern India.

The converts hope to escape the rigid caste system in which their status is the lowest. Right-wing Hindus have often opposed conversion, pushing some Indian states to restrict legal changes of faith. The organizers say the number of people to convert in Sunday's ceremony could go up to 100,000 -- easily the biggest mass conversion in India's recent history.

Conversion controversies

The Dalits, once known as "Untouchables," hope the conversion will give them dignity and equal rights. Commentators say that despite the reservation of jobs for the Dalit and tribal communities, their social status and economic conditions have not greatly improved. They say that Dalits still face widespread prejudice and discrimination.

Conversion is a controversial subject in India, especially if it involves Hindus converting to Christianity or Islam. Two weeks ago two Catholic priests were publicly beaten after being accused of trying to bring a group of local people into the Catholic faith.

But converting to Buddhism does not evoke much adverse reaction, as most hardline Hindu leaders believe Buddhism is an extension of Hinduism. Even so, several Indian states, especially the ones governed by the right-wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), have made laws severely restricting conversion.