Sunday, February 15, 2009

Two Items

Venerable Sheng-yen's last instructions to his disciples was that his funeral should be a simple and unostentatious one and that without looking for 'relics' that his ashes should be ground up and sprinkled onto the earth somewhere. To me this is further confirmation that he was a true son of the Buddha. Not only that, his disciples carried out his wishes. To me this is a confirmation that they had a good understanding of the Dhamma and genuine respect for their teacher.

Have a look at these breathtaking pictures of the piety of the Tibetan people and the grandeur and splendor that results from it. These pictures really are extraordinary. http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/tibets_great_prayer_festival.html

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Venerable,

I came across this website whilst researching certain topics on the origin of the Universe and how it came into being from both Buddhist and Christian's viewpoint. The results from Christianity are usually just slightly different from one another. And the Buddhist one makes more sense to me when compared to scientific evidence. But here's a very different approach and view I came acorss from one website. Things like evolution, the origin or the universe and quantum theory can be explainable in the Bible here. Have a look at it. Interesting and challenging view with no conflict with Scientific evidence. (*Note*: Almost a first on this with my experience with Christianity and Biblical views. Also quite a first where the earth wasn't 6000 years old. ;)

http://www.hpcisp.com/~kls/page4.html

T

Samsara said...

Hi Venerable,

I am from Hong Kong, and the first 7-day meditation camp was in Ven. Shen-yian's Dhamma Drum Hill in Taiwan.

We all know he was sick. He was not well for a long time. But still, when I first learnt his death, it was a shock to me, and I was really sad.

Ven. had been very kind to us layman. He understood how much we suffered in our daily life. He had been developed a lot of teachings tailor-made for layman, and one of them is: simple Buddhist funeral.

It is a tradition for Chinese and particularly Taiwanese to have very expensive, noisy and smoky funeral. He organized the volunteer to host some simple yet serene funerals for BUddhist.

His death is a great lost for Taiwan, and all of us.

May he have reached nibbanna!

Joe Lim said...
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Joe Lim said...
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Joe Lim said...

dats reminds me of one chinese mahayana monk i respect a lot.He resides at the touristy Sam Poh Buddhist Monastry up at Cameron highlands; to cut the long story short 3 things impressed upon me

1)when you meet him for the first time, you most probably will think he must be one of those junior monks; cos he does everything from sweeping the floor to cleaning the toilets(it is hard not to notice his presence as he simply works non-stop even before the gong sounds at 5am daily); He is actually the caretaker monk of this rather huge monastry; ie COO.
(chief Operating Officer)

2)there was once when i saw him going out one of the evenings (which he hardly does); so i became curious and ask him where is he going to? he said a devotee's dad just passed away...and he was invited to do some chanting at the wake; so we started having a conversation on chinese funerals; and he mentioned something along the lines like "The chanting has only limited effects; if a person is good/evil no amt of chanting can change which path he got to be reborn in...Eg for a person is mostly evil; during his wake...even the dalai lama cant change the fact that he is going to be reborn in the lower realms.

3)During my most recent trip up there last year in Dec; he casually remarked..."Joe, There's just so many monks being ordained these days; too much in fact. And do you know monks are amongst the ones mostly commonly found at the gates of hell these days."(because living a life of alms/charity but not propagating the dharma correctly will have very bad karmic effects)." I was stunned...i felt very awkward hearing this from a very humble and unimposing monk. Am i suppose to agree or not to agree?