2012 Spring Retreat and Precept Ceremony

2012 Precept Ceremony of the Taego Overseas Parish in Grand Rapids, MI

The 2012 Spring Taego Protocol Retreat and Precept Ceremony was held over this past weekend at Muddy Water Zen in Royal Oak and also at the Grand Rapids Zen Center & Buddhist Temple from Thursday April 5, 2012 - Sunday April 8, 2012.

The protocol retreat was lead by the Overseas Bishop of the Taego Order of Korean Buddhism, Venerable Dr. Jongmae Park and the participants included the clergy staff of Muddy Water Zen, IBS USA students from Michigan, Indiana, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Friday evening, April 6, 2012, Heather Emerick (Bup Seong) was officially ordained a Dharma Teacher (Bup Sanim) in the Taego Order by Overseas Parish Bishop Ven. Dr. Jongmae Park, which was followed by a sangha celebration.

Sunday, April 8, 2012, retreat members joined the Grand Rapids sangha in a Dharmacari Precept Ordination Ceremony. The Precept Ceremony was held at the Marywood Dominican Center in Grand Rapids and was attended by over 100 people. 17 individuals from the Grand Rapids sangha took the Panca Sila (5 Precepts) under the Dharma family name 'Ahm' (Stony, Diamond). 6 individuals from MWZ also took the Panca Sila under the Dharma family name 'Geum' (Golden). 4 individuals took the 10 Bodhi-cari Precepts and also became Haengja (noviciate), and thereby received permission to travel to Seonam-sa in South Korea later this fall for novice monk training.

The Protocol Retreat and Precept Ceremony were both a great success and sangha fellowship was enjoyed by clergy, students, preceptors, family, and friends. The events held over this weekend mark a significant milestone in the development and growth of the Taego Overseas Parish, the 2nd largest Order of Korean Buddhism, an authentic tradition with a lineage going back over 1600 years.

Check out the Photo Album linked below for some memorable moments from all the recent events.



Link to Photo Album

On Retreat!

2011 Taego/IBS USA Spring Protocol Retreat, MWZ

Today begins the 2012 Spring Taego Protocol Retreat at Muddy Water Zen in Royal Oak, MI. The retreat will be attended by clergy members from Muddy Water Zen, Grand Rapids Buddhist Temple & Zen Center, clergy from Canada and IBS USA Seminary students, including international students. 

 Taego Overseas Bishop Venerable Dr. Jongmae Park (Kunsunim) will lead the retreat. 

A special ordination ceremony for Bup Seong (IBS USA Seminary student and MWZ Dharma student, Heather Emerick) will take place tomorrow evening, Friday, April 6 at 7 PM. Bup Seong will be ordained  Bup Sanim, Dharma Teacher (Reverend). All are invited to come and support Bup Seong and take advantage of the special opportunity to witness an ordination ceremony. 

Saturday, the retreat members will carpool across the state to Grand Rapids to prepare for this year's Precept Ceremony to be held on Sunday, April 8. More than 20 individuals will formally take Buddhist Precepts. 

Blog postings will resume early next week. 

In the meantime, check out some pictures from the 2011 Taego Spring Protocol Retreat and Precept Ceremony here. 

Trailer - The GateKeeper of Enmyoin

Teijun Ogawa, a proud and rare niso (female priest) of Japanese Shingon Buddhist Sect, dies after telling her story to Reiko and Max, a Japanese couple based in New York. She told them about her desolate life since she was given to a temple at the age of seven, and her achievement of building the Enmyoin temple single-handedly. But she refused to share her view as a woman—as if the subject was taboo. Upon hearing the arrival of a young heiress, as though guided by old Teijun, the couple revisits Enmyoin. The GateKeeper of Enmyoin is the product of their journey in search of Teijun's unspoken feelings about her womanhood before and after her death. While the dark reality of Teijun’s female priesthood in the man-dominant rural Japanese Buddhist culture is revealed, new mysteries of the untold parts of Teijun’s life emerge. The story is told through Reiko’s voice, which reflects her own journey of trying to find freedom, balance and integration of her roles as a rebel, new immigrant in the U.S., woman, wife, and mother. Soon the simple unfinished portrait of Teijun develops into a genre-bending, personal detective documentary with rich narrative flavor and spiritual sustenance.

Learn more at http://mrex.org/ and purchase the DVD!

Bringing management lessons to Buddha

In Japan, where on-the-job training is often valued more than academic qualifications, an MBA is not an obvious step to career advancement – particularly if you are a Buddhist monk.

But Keisuke Matsumoto had a grander goal in sight when he decided to take a break from his job as a monk at Komyoji Temple in Tokyo and attend a one-year MBA programme in India.

Mr Matsumoto wanted to acquire management skills to help him realise his vision of transforming Japan’s Buddhist temples into something more relevant to modern Japanese society. The 32-year-old believes temples should be what Peter Drucker, the management consultant, called “change agents”, offering people a place where they can achieve their spiritual awakening.

“I wanted to change the world of Buddhism and in order to do that, you have to enter that world first,” he says....


Continue reading at Financial Times.

Another story on Matsumoto was featured earlier this year,

Japanese creating management model to attract Gen Y to Buddhist Temple

“What’s So Funny About Buddhism?” — cartoonist David Sipress explains

What’s So Funny About Buddhism? 
By David Sipress

It begins with language. Words like “nothing” and “self” are rich in comic possibility when they are transposed from the Buddhist context into our Western context. The space between these two worlds is where the funniness lives. For example, there’s my cartoon of a guy in a meditation class asking the teacher, “Exactly what is this ‘nothing’ I’ve been hearing so much about?” Or the woman in another cartoon who introduces herself to the meditation teacher:

Juxtaposition and incongruity are the working material of cartoon humor. I love taking the richness and ambiguity of the language of Buddhism and juxtaposing it with the more mundane aspects of Western popular culture. I recently drew a cartoon of two people watching a TV show called, “The Amazing Race to Enlightenment.” The announcer says, “This week, can Jim and Suzy achieve right mindfulness? And will Barb and Candy be eliminated for relentless clinging to the self?”

Beyond language, there is the notion of paradox. Paradoxes—which of course, are all about juxtaposition and incongruity– are funny. Our struggles to grasp Buddhist ideas about what we call, “reality” — about its fleeting nature — ideas that lead to an understanding that opposites can be equally true and real at the same time since neither is actually “real” since there is really no such thing as “reality” — oy vey! — all this is terribly confusing to the average western mind, and therefore, fertile terrain for the cartoonist. One of the great New Yorker cartoon tropes is the In box and the Out box, sitting on a businessman’s desk. I did one of a Buddhist monk who has only one box on his desk — the box is labeled, In Out....

Read more at Shambhala Sun

Zen Monster

Zen Monster is a new-ish magazine (it first appeared in 2008 but only recently released its third issue) with the following manifesto: “We commit ourselves to art, poetry, fiction, and subversive political commentary by buddhist, non-buddhist and trans-buddhist writers, artists, and essayists.Zen Monster is committed to mature achievements, beginnings, half-steps, younger artists, older artists, and any ‘fumblings by the way.’” Then, tacked on at the end, a quasi-mission statement: “No inherent limits.” Zen Monster #3 is just as funky, passionate, and raw as the first two issues. Norman Fischer, a contributing editor to Zen Monster, is the subject of a killer interview about writing poetry, “For the Poem Itself: A Language View.” Brad Warner tackles the Genpo Roshi sex scandal in his essay “How to Make a Zen Monster.” Diane DiPrima provides a number of poems dedicated to the memory of Philip Whalen. Zen Monster is edited by Brian Unger, a Ph.D. candidate in English and American Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Copies are hard to find, so if you spot one, grab it, or order one at spdbooks.org.


Source: Tricycle.com

Mind Hack! Train Your Brain for Monk-Like Focus!

The moment you get effortlessly lost in work goes by any number of names: focus, concentration, escapism, flow, and countless others. It's the point where you're able to blur the world around you and calibrate your brain to pay attention to one single task. It's your sweet spot. It's when you Get Things Done. Your entire cognitive effort is concentrated on one task and when you're in that moment the outside world disappears.

We all struggle to maintain focus in our daily lives. Endless distractions keep our brains from focusing on a task as we struggle to get things done at work and complete projects around the house. But what's actually happening in your brain when you're lost in a project? And more importantly, how can you train to induce that focused state in yourself?

It's important to know what's happening in your brain when you're focused on something and what happens when you get distracted. From there we can look at minimizing those distractions and training your brain to focus better. After all, focusing is a skill and takes practice to develop....

Read the full story from Lifehacker.

More Americans say too much religion in politics

 For the first time since 2001, a plurality Americans say there is too much religious talk from politicians, according to a new survey released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

The poll showed 38% of Americans saying there was too much religious expression from politicians, compared to 30% who said there was too little. Twenty-five percent said the current level of religious rhetoric was the right amount.

Those figures represent a shift from 2010, when more Americans (37%) said there was too little talk of faith compared to those who said there was too much (29%).

Asked whether churches should be involved in politics, a majority of Americans (54%) said they should stay out. Forty percent said it was fine for churches to express political and social views.

Overall, a distinctive split appeared between Democrats and Republicans on the question of religion entering the political realm. More Democrats (46%) than Republicans (24%) said there was too much religious talk from politicians, though the number for both groups has increased since 2010....

Source: CNN.com

Source: HuffPost

Is There a “Universal Grammar” of Religion in the Same Way There Is a “Universal Grammar” of Language?

An interesting proposal that attempts to observe and apply a prevalent theory in linguistics to religious thought. 

Following Noam Chomsky, some cognitive linguists have argued that humans naturally develop a “universal grammar” for language that informs and constrains language acquisition. That is, it makes some forms of symbolic communication very easy to acquire because some of the grammatical possibilities come easily or automatically, but at the same time makes communication systems that have different sorts of grammars relatively difficult to learn. 

Analogously, early developing natural cognition creates receptivity to certain cultural concepts over others. Those that fall in the domain of “religion” might be compared to a “universal grammar” for religion, or what I have called “natural religion” (see my new book Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Beliefs. As with language, religious expression that conforms closely to the parameters of natural religion will be easily acquired by children (and adults), readily understood and talked about, and will tend to be widespread across individuals and cultures. But also as in language, the anchoring effect of natural religion allows for variability—particularly through formal instruction, study, and other forms of “cultural scaffolding” provided by institutions and guilds of specialists....

Continue reading from Science + Religion Today

Dharma Talk - Happiness is Helping Others

Talk Given By: Rev. Hae Kyong Bup Sanim
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Duration - 14:01

Subscribe in iTunes!

Listen to other previous Dharma Talks here.