Friday Night - The Dharma Test Kitchen

(cartoonstock.com)

Against the Stream is offering a new class -- an exploration of the practical connection of Dharma practice and our daily lives.

The focus of the class is the belief that what we do off the cushion matters more than what we do on it. Success in meditation, after all, comes from being virtuous and mindful enough to get on a cushion in the first place.

Social "engagement" is more than a buzz word. So each month ATS will explore a different fundamental aspect of basic Buddha-Dharma from a variety of participant perspectives. The class has a rotating schedule of teachers, teaching together and individually on a given monthly theme.

Start the weekend with artful practice, sangha community-building, and a connection to basic Dharma philosophy.

• ATS Santa Monica
  
• drop-in, donation-based
• Fridays, 7:30 pm

Buddhist monks vow to protest

Buddhist monks rose against the totalitarian country about which Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four when it was in the British Empire (robertamsterdam.com).

Monks vow to continue Burma protest
AFP (SMH.au.com, Nov. 16, 2011)

The Saffron Revolution never really ended. Five Buddhist monks have staged a rare protest in army-dominated [totalitarian police state] Burma, at one point drawing a crowd of about 500 people with calls for peace and the immediate release of political prisoners.

After talks with senior clerics, the monks said they would continue protesting in Mandalay, the country's second-largest city, for the next three days, giving a speech each day to spell out their demands.

The five in their [saffron and] maroon-clad robes kicked off their demonstration early on Tuesday [Nov. 15, 2011] by briefly locking themselves in a building in a monastic compound a day after an expected amnesty for political prisoners failed to materialize. More

Buddhist monks led a series of uprisings against an Orwellian
government called the Saffron Revolution starting in 2007.

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Occupy Los Angeles (Oct. 1, 2011)

Wisdom Quarterly, Kloncke.com, OccupyLA.org

Let's our country back from bankers and police state officials by occupying it from coast to coast, from Wall Street and downtown Los Angeles. We are the 99% being destroyed by 1%.

[Kloncke] began gathering some friends into a group we call Bay Area Radical Sangha (BARS). BARS is a space for meditators with "radical" politics. How is that defined? Structural critiques of our racist, hetero-patriarchal, war-reliant, capitalist system.

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• Buddhist production, feminist effort, and the god of work
• Meditation Flash Mob: Noon, Saturday, October 8, 2011 at Pershing Square, downtown Los Angeles

Instead, we support one another in contemplative practice and development. Having met and talked with many of you, I know for a fact that everyone has something wonderful to contribute.

If you are established in some sort of contemplative practice (it does not have to be Buddhist, although this is the foundation of the group) and would like to join in building a committed, holistic center of radical struggle, you are warmly welcomed and appreciated. The first BARS meets in the San Francisco Bay Area. New groups are forming in New York at Occupy Wall Street and Los Angeles at this weekend's launch.

All are welcome to stand up in a peaceful demonstration (occupyla.org)

(TheOther99Percent) Consider donating $9.17 to a Media Fund to continue reports from the front line. OccupyWallStreet.org

Police State Brutality on Wall Street
(USLAWdotcom) This is a slow motion video analysis of the NYPD's mace/pepper spray deployment near Wall Street on Sept. 24, 2011. Alternate angle analyses indicate that this crime was retaliation for an immediately preceding interaction between an officer and some individuals on the sidewalk. More information and updates.

2,500 yrs later, Tibetan Buddhists on women

Michaela Haas (author and UC Santa Barbara lecturer) HuffingtonPost.com (edited by WQ)

Tibetan lamas honor the historical Buddha's relics (Choice Kurniawan/Flickr.com)

2,500 years after the Buddha, Tibetan Buddhists acknowledge women

Buddhist women are celebrating a landmark victory: In April, the renowned Institute for Buddhist Dialectical Studies (IBD) in Dharamsala, India, conferred the degree of "Geshe" -- the Tibetan equivalent of Ph.D. -- to Ven. Kelsang Wangmo, a German [Vajrayana Buddhist] nun.

This is a first in many ways: Traditionally, Geshe degrees are conferred on monks after 12 or more years of rigorous study in Buddhist philosophy. For the first time in history, a nun has now received the degree. Even more surprising, it was conferred on a Western woman.

Ven. Kelsang Wangmo [pictured here] was finally rewarded for mastering the strenuous course of study in higher [Tibetan] Buddhist philosophy. She had already been teaching philosophy at the Institute for more than five years.

So why is this such a big deal, and why did it take so long? In the West, the first female professorship was awarded to a woman at a European university in 1732. Almost 300 years ago scientist Laura Bassi taught physics at the University of Bologna. And more than 2,500 [now almost 2,600] years ago the Buddha allowed women into the monastic order [Sangha]. He did this by ordaining his foster mother, Maha Prajapati.

She and 500 like-minded [Shakyan] women donned saffron robes, shaved their heads, and walked 350 miles barefoot to show their unwavering determination. But it was only after Ven. Ananda intervened on their behalf that the Buddha finally granted their request -- a revolutionary decision in India at the time.

[This was a first for a world religion, but it was not a first for India. Not long before, the Buddha's contemporary Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, admitted women into a wandering ascetic order similar to Buddhism's.] More