True Dharma International
Buddhist responses to life's challenges - birth, growth, sickness, aging, and death.
True Dharma International
Spiritual Friends
A Banker Goes to Prison
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- Category: Spiritual Friends
- Published on Monday, 09 April 2012 23:52
- Written by Frank Tedesco
Rev. Mike Stamper
My path to Zen Buddhism had a curious beginning: a corporate retreat that my former Washington-based employer, the infamous financial institution Freddie Mac, conducted for senior executives in the 1990s. The retreat was led by a California-based group of consultants called Human Factors. The purpose of the retreat was to improve executive leadership skills. We learned to become less attached to our own ideas, to become aware of our egos and when they took control, and to speak from an emotionally neutral space. While on the retreat we ate vegetarian, dined silently and practiced meditation.
The immediate result of this retreat was that I became vegetarian and began to practice meditation seriously. My management and leadership skills improved also as I began to use what I had learned. I discovered later that these skills were largely derived from Buddhism. It took a somewhat “enlightened” employer to offer this program to its executives. Yes, it was the same Freddie Mac associated with our dire economic collapse. I was the Chief Credit Officer before the crisis.
Ken & Visakha Kawasaki
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- Category: Spiritual Friends
- Published on Friday, 23 March 2012 13:39
- Written by Frank Tedesco
Ken and Visakha Kawasaki are a remarkably dedicated couple. They are “baby boomer” Americans who discovered Buddhist art and literature in the late1970s when they traveled in India on a world tour. After long careers as teachers of English in Japan and teacher training programs in refugee programs in Southeast Asia, Ken and Visakha are now retired and living in Kandy, Sri Lanka. They are far from inactive, though, since they continue to give all their time to writing, teaching and managing their non-profit charitable organization. They have invested decades of their lives creatively promoting Buddha's teachings and helping Buddhists in need, even in American prisons.
Konchok Jangchup Dorje- Florida Monk
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- Category: Spiritual Friends
- Published on Tuesday, 31 January 2012 23:58
- Written by Frank Tedesco
Growing into Buddhism
The spiritual peregrinations that lead Westerners to Buddhism are often complex and circuitous. They reflect the culturally plural nature of most Western societies and especially the cultural “melting pot” or “smorgasbord” that is the United States. Personal histories reveal “lived experience” that can be helpful to understand why and how Westerners are drawn to the teachings of Buddha. In the “telling” and the “listening” of these human stories, they become our stories and bring us closer to one another in the recognition of our shared human condition, and the wish to be free from suffering.
Betsy Lagana Bluangtook- Artist & Zen Teacher
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- Category: Spiritual Friends
- Published on Tuesday, 31 January 2012 19:48
- Written by Frank Tedesco
“Form is nothing but emptiness. Emptiness nothing but form"
From The Heart Sutra
By some unexplicable karmic connection, a college friend went looking for a bus station in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida in 1967 and happened upon instead The Three Pillars of Zen, a book on Japanese Buddhism, by the American teacher Roshi Philip Kapleau. My friends at Eckerd College read it and were so impressed that they piled into a car to drive up to Rochester, New York to meet the author. Just back from thirteen years of practicing Zen in Japan, Roshi Philip Kapleau inspired us to form a meditation group and attend intensive meditation sessions called sesshins. He encouraged me to fly to Thailand to join a Buddhist nunnery.
Rick Ferriss, BPF Tampa Bay
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- Category: Spiritual Friends
- Published on Tuesday, 31 January 2012 19:03
- Written by Frank Tedesco
Rick Ferriss
Scientist, Singer, Social Activist
One of the most socially active American Buddhists in the Tampa Bay, Florida region is Dr. Richard Ferriss, better known to everyone in the area as Rick Ferriss or simply as “Rick”. Rick is a founder and high profile leader of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship of Tampa Bay. The www.bpf-tampabay.org website designed by him is the “go to” URL for information about Buddhist groups and dharma activities in the surrounding counties. Rick also identified with Change Your Mind Day that he organizes and promotes as a function of BPFTB. Since 2005, these annual spiritual gatherings have been quite successful in bringing together diverse Buddhist groups in the area.
Gene Smith- Tibetan Librarian
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- Category: Spiritual Friends
- Published on Monday, 30 January 2012 09:56
- Written by Frank Tedesco
Gene Smith 1936-2010
American Buddhist Scholar and Bodhisattva Par Excellence
Scholars of Tibetan Buddhism and Tibetan culture are mourning the loss of one of the greatest benefactors of Buddhist culture with the sudden demise of Mr. Gene Smith in New York City last December. Gene Smith was instrumental in salvaging thousands of Tibetan texts that were threatened by loss and/or destruction after the invasion and holocaust of Tibet by the Communist Chinese in the 1950s and 1960s. He was able to do this because of his strategic position as field officer and field director for the US Library of Congress in New Delhi in the late 1960s. I had the good fortune of spending a few days with Gene in his townhouse on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC when he was on leave from New Delhi to prepare for a new country assignment. His home was spare of furniture and other domestic niceties. We slept among piles of classical Tibetan texts that Gene could read effortlessly and then use as pillows to sleep on!According to the The New York Times obituary (12/28/10) “Mr. Smith, a scholar who became so enamored of Tibetan culture that he converted to Buddhism as a young man, was renowned for his seemingly limitless knowledge of Tibetan literature and his equally limitless fervor for saving it.”
David Blundell-Anthropologist, Filmmaker
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- Category: Spiritual Friends
- Published on Monday, 30 January 2012 09:09
- Written by Frank Tedesco
Dr. David Blundell was born and raised in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, California. He has lived an amazingly rich life of constant world travel and creative research in Asia and elsewhere since the early 1970s. He lived in Sri Lanka and studied Theravada Buddhism and Sinhalese culture before completing a doctorate in anthropology at UCLA in 1983. Dr. Blundell has been a professor of anthropology at both National Taiwan University and National Chengchi University in Taipei, Taiwan since the mid-1980s with many visiting professorships in anthropology and international development studies in such institutions as the University of North Texas, UC Los Angeles, UC Berkeley, University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka, and the University of Calcutta in India.
Confessions of a Very Bad Buddhist
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- Category: Spiritual Friends
- Published on Friday, 27 January 2012 21:42
- Written by Frank Tedesco
Debby Sky Black
In 1941, when my father went to fight in WW2, my mother moved from San Francisco to Sonoma feeling that a small town would be better for bringing up three small girls alone. She bought the house I grew up in partly because it was a block from an Episcopal church and a grammar school. She felt her children should have some religious background although she did not go to church herself. Both my parents were far more attracted to Eastern thought and religion. I remember my mother saying she thought she had been a monk in Kashmir in a previous life, and my father had some connection with the Theosophists when growing up in Ireland.
Glenn Mullin, Tibetologist
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- Category: Spiritual Friends
- Published on Friday, 27 January 2012 21:17
- Written by Frank Tedesco
I had had a special opportunity to meet with the renowned Tibetologist Lama Glenn H. Mullin during one of his teaching tours in the United States December 2011. Glenn was invited by the University of Tampa to give special presentations on Tibetan Buddhism and meditation instruction to students and faculty. The morning presentation on styles of Tibetan meditation overflowed with students and guests filling every chair and floor space in a chapel annex. Glenn presented “Adventures in Living and Dying: Principles and Practices from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition” in the evening. This was held in the chapel itself. The talk lasted two hours with an additional hour of questions. Glenn taught about the manner in which the historical Buddha and later advanced teachers prepared die and and the extraordinary conditions of their bodies after death. He explained tantric yoga exercises that can be practiced by anyone to control their physiology through inner alchemy in order to orchestrate their final passage. He shared in detail his experience with the deaths of great masters he has known. With his profound knowledge of Tibetan literature and life experience, Glenn is regarded as a Western expert on the Tibetan practice of death. Some of this wisdom is revealed in his book Living in the Face of Death. Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of modern Western hospice and end-of-life care, considered this book a “masterpiece”. It is a compilation of translations of nine texts from early Dalai Lamas and Karma Lingpa, author of famous The Tibetan Book of the Dead.