Serving Community Meals at the Open Door

Last August, volunteers from the Vajramudra Center began participating in the Open Door Community Meal. The Open Door program is geared toward people in the community who are alone and would like socialization at dinnertime as well as to those of low income or who may have resources but are unable to cook for themselves. Folks from the VMC have financed meals on four occasions through donations collected at the center.  People are asked to volunteer their time to help cook and serve. We have served mushroom lasagna, baked ziti, vegetarian chilli and homemade pizza- all vegetarian meals. For the year 2011, we have committed to providing a vegetarian meal each month - at which we will serve anywhere between 30 and 100 meals.

When we put on a meal we need 4-8 people to volunteer to shop for, cook and serve the meal. We supply salad bar ingredients, the main dish and dessert.

If anyone would like to donate time, there is a sign-up sheet at the VMC. If you would like to help out financially, or if you have any fund raising ideas, please contact Sharon Muddiman at sangha@aci-capeann.org

Community meals take place at The Open Door, 28 Emerson Ave., Gloucester.

The dates of upcoming ACI-CA serving opportunities are: Thursday; February 24, Sunday; March 20, Saturday; April 23, Thursday; May 26, Thursday; June 23, Sunday; July 17, Thursday; August 25, Sunday; September 18, Thursday; October 20, Sunday; November 13, and Thursday; December 15.

Thank you to all who have helped over the past 3 months and thank you to all who plan to help in the future.

- Sharon Muddiman

Getting to Paradise Using the Six Times a Day Book Practice

In August 1999 Geshe Michael Roach gave a teaching in New York City on getting to paradise.  What's the secret? Maintaining our ethics. Just how do we maintain our ethics? Folks who have taken formal vows go to our vow list and enter six for each day in a personal notebook. Each day we stop six times to check-in on how we're doing. For those of us who have not taken vows, the Six Times a Day Book is still a great method for helping maintain an ethical life. How does it work? When we check each vow we note a plus for the ways we have kept this vow in the past few hours, a minus for the ways have we failed to keep the vow, and note a do-able step we can take to make up for our error and promote our ability to keep the vow in the future. The book allows us to rejoice actively in our success and catch ourselves before relatively small transgressions morph into painful afflictions and bad habits. In this way, we are setting ourselves on the path to paradise.

Many Buddhists in our lineage use the book to help them keep the ten Freedom Vows, which are very close to the Ten Commandments: 1) protecting life; 2) honoring other people's property; 3) maintaining sexual purity; 4) trying to be totally truthful all day long; 5) speaking in ways that try to bring other people together; 6) speaking gently to other people; 7) trying to speak meaningfully; 8) being happy for someone else's good fortune; 9) empathizing with the suffering of others; 10) maintaining a Buddhist world-view. Geshe Michael points out that we won't have a chance to throw someone out of the way of a speeding taxi or invent the Salk vaccine every day, but our book entries don't have to be about grand things like that. For example we can protect life by eating well and getting enough sleep, driving within the speed limit or making a nourishing meal for a friend with the flu. 

How about honoring other people's property?  Most of us are convinced that we never steal anything! But have we made copies of personal documents at work or used the office phone for a long-distance personal call without reimbursing our employer? Have we stolen others' time by being chronically late? Have we stolen someone's opportunity to express her idea by interrupting? These are the apparently small transgressions we can catch by checking our vows and confronting our own behavior.  

Most of us consider ourselves empathic. We mourn the suffering of earthquake victims in Haiti and of desperately poor people in Calcutta. But when someone we don't like suffers hardship we may be tempted to take some small measure of delight in his or her suffering. It is in our enlightened self-interest to catch these transgressions early, confess them to ourselves and set a do-able task to remedy them. We can re-pay our employer for personal use of company resources and say a prayer for the challenging person in our life who is suffering. But we must remember to rejoice, too, to note areas where we are doing well.  So, at the end of each day we can review how we fared, celebrate our success, be mindful of areas that need improvement, and move on.  By checking our ethics throughout each day we can free ourselves from the bondage of our afflictions and get closer to paradise. 

These are just a few examples of how we can examine our hearts six times a day. For more information, please go to the Asian Classics Institute web site, and click on  "The Book." 

-  Elizabeth Toulan and Anne Meyer 

At a parent meeting for my kindergartener, the teacher described the role of kindergarten in terms of the qualities a child learns there. I began to notice the parallels between what a child needs to learn in kindergarten, before moving on to the grades, and how our spiritual path progresses -even when it means spending a little longer with the building blocks.  The qualities she outlined paralleled what are called "The Six Perfections" in Mahayana Buddhism. Here I will focus on ethics.

Magpie

My dog came to me abused, abandoned and betrayed.  She was proud and angry, her secrets so fierce that her jaw would quiver when she finally let me touch her face.  I came to my dog rigid and angry. I wanted away with my culture. Away with the rules of power defined by my tribe.  Away with my pile of judgments and of judgments heaped on me.
 

For a while we spooked each other and hid in different parts of the house.  We'd cast looks on the sly and move cautiously into the kitchen for our respective meals.  She, grabbing what was given, then vanishing through the hallway.  Me, hoping that she'd not hear the refrigerator door open, the clink of spoon in bowl, for it saddened me to see her appear then disappear, a wraith on the edge of my vision, the wanting snuffed by the distrust, the assumption that I wouldn't share.

Over time we began to settle.  She began to see that I'd not harm her and I to see she judged only my actions.  Slowly, our ghosts began to lift and fade, in a languid way, like gasses from a swamp.  We started to come into focus, she and I, and as we did there came an exploration, a question:  Who are you?  And other questions:  What would you like from me?  What can I bring you?  And then:  What is your role and what is mine?

So we began to discover what was fair, what was honest, what was kind.  Who was the boss, when, and who was the helper. In different situations, who was the teacher, who the student.  It wasn't always what you'd think.  We began the dance of the ethical relationship.

Can I tell you secrets now?

Yes, now you can.
 

The secret is I love you.  The secret is we don't need secrets anymore.
 

- Mary Kanda, an artist who is involved with animal rescue work in New Mexico

How Alexander Berzin Helps me Keep my Book (better than before)

Recently, I read Alexander Berzin's Buddhist Ethical Behavior: A Practical Approach, a transcript of a talk that is posted on his archive. In the talk, Berzin addresses "ethical self-discipline and the Buddhist view of it." He notes that that we find ethics in every social and religious system, and sets out to describe how ethical self-discipline becomes "Buddhist" when its ultimate goal is to achieve liberation from suffering and enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings. 
 

Berzin frames his discussion in the context of the four noble truths and  the Lam Rim, or steps on the path. To paraphrase the four noble truths: life is suffering, suffering is caused, suffering can be stopped, and there is a path out of suffering. The steps on the path out of suffering are Renuciation, Bodhicitta, and Correct View of Emptiness.  Ethical self discipline is essential in order to develop meditative concentration, which in turn is essential for discriminating awareness of reality and ultimately freeing ourselves from suffering and helping others. So this context helps us see that the motivation behind Buddhist ethics is to free ourselves from suffering and to reach enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings.
 

Berzin differentiates this motivation from the motivation to practice ethics that is based on obeying laws, civic or religious. This motivation, if taken at its most basic level, may lead one to feel that those who obey the laws are "good," while those who don't are "bad." Berzin says:

 "In the civil sphere we're called a criminal; in the religious sphere we're called a sinner. So we're basically bad and we have the whole phenomenon of guilt; we are guilty. So we have guilt in a legal sense, and we also have guilt in the psychological sense." 

We have heard from our teachers and read in texts that guilt is never a constructive emotion. When we realize we have thought, spoken, or acted unethically, we need to cultivate the "intelligent regret of an educated Buddhist." 
 

This is easy to understand intellectually but, for me, was challenging to put into practice emotionally. At first, even hearing about positive and negative karma suggested the idea of moral "goodness" or "badness" rather than suggesting the idea of positive or negative results for me. Reading Berzin's teaching helped me realize how much I had unintentionally brought my internalized social norms to the conscious practice of ethics. I tended to think I was being "good" and "obedient" when I kept my vows and book consistently, and to think I was "bad" and "disobedient" when I didn't. 
 

This attitude did not train my mind to WANT to focus on ethics. In fact, rather the opposite. It is like the meditation instruction to avoid self-punishment when we lose the object of focus, and instead to rejoice when we notice that we lost it, and gently bring our focus back. Instead of falling into guilt and self-recrimination when I lose conscious focus on ethics, rejoicing when I remember helps me feel good about my efforts.
 

I recommend this article to those interested in getting some grounded, practical help in cultivating positive associations with ethical self-discipline.

All quotations are taken from the article Buddhist Ethical Behavior: A Practical Approach, by Alexander Berzin 
 

-  Anne Meyer

Back to Contents 

Buddhist Refuge: ACI 2 

with Mary Kay Dyer

Mondays, 7:30 - 9:30pm: Jan. 31 - April 4 

----------   

The Great Ideas of Buddhism, Part 3: Asian Classics Formal Review Course 18  

with Jesse Fallon

Wednesdays, 7 - 9pm: Feb. 9, 16, 23; March 2, 9

Saturdays 1 - 3pm: Feb. 12, 19, 26; March 5, 12

---------- 

Weekly Meditation, Yoga, Discussion, Debate and Family Offerings with a variety of wonderful teachers. Visit aci-capeann.org for more information.

This is part two of an article on building a mandala.  

Part one was published in our December Issue.

I built this dharma throne table as a mandala meditation after first hearing the teachings of Lama Marut. I would like to explain the inspirational methodology that found me and followed me through this mediation. This month's excerpt is about one of the end panels of the table.