The Mid Year Seminar of Australasian Cemeteries & Crematoria Association

Dear Friends Please find attached the newsletter of Buddhist Contemplative Care Tasmania. You can see how active we have been over the last four or five months and enjoy with us the many rich aspects of our work together. Please pass this on to others interested in the area of pastoral/contemplative care and the engagement of Tasmanian Buddhists in the area. Best wishes Thích Trúc Thông Pháp

In 2011, Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche began a series of one-month teaching retreats, all to be presented at the Great Stupa of Universal Compassion near Bendigo. The series of these teachings include Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara - A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life as well as preparation for the transmission of the rare Rinjung Gyatsa initiations. The three host centres – Atisha Centre, Thubten Shedrup Ling Monastery and the Great Stupa of Universal Compassion – are pleased to welcome Lama Zopa back to Australia in 2014 to continue these teachings, instructions and transmissions. The three host centres, operating together as Lama Zopa Australia Inc., are also pleased to be hosting the Council for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (CPMT) meeting during the fortnight prior to the 2014 retreat. Please click here for more information about the CPMT meeting. These are two unique Australian events with Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche. If you are looking for a great opportunity

A NEWBORN baby may have been trapped in a storm water drain on the side of a Sydney motorway for up to five days before he was found by passing cyclists yesterday. The malnourished baby boy was found abandoned at the bottom of a 2.4m drain, covered by a concrete slab, after a cyclist and his daughter heard the baby’s screams early Sunday morning.

As a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, working as a Buddhist chaplain at several of Melbourne's hospitals and as well as Melbourne assessment prison, I have witnessed many personal tragedies faced by the living and of course the very process of dying and that of death and many of these poor people faced their death with fear, with misery and pain before departing this world. With the images of all these in my mind, on this occasion, I wish to share my view from the perspective of a Buddhist and we hope that people would feel far more relaxed in facing this inevitable end since it is really not the end of life, according to our belief.

978-0-9945548-5-7 , To live life fully and die serenely--surely we all share these goals, so inextricably entwined. Yet a spiritual dimension is too often lacking in the attitudes, circumstances, and rites of death in modern society. Kapleau explores the subject of death and dying on a deeply personal level, interweaving the writings of Western religions with insights from his own Zen practice, and offers practical advice for the dying and their families.

This teaching appears in the March-April, 1997 issue of Mandala, the newsmagazine of the FPMT. Reflecting on impermanence and death in itself is not really a big deal, but thinking about it because of what follows after the death is important. If there is negative karma, then there are the lower realms of unimaginable sufferings, and this is something that can be stopped immediately.

A few months ago, in sun-drenched, seemingly timeless July, my eighty-eight year old mother-in-law, Norma, entertained her long-time friend, Marvin, also an octogenarian and a recent widower. The setting was the front porch of an old homestead in a small village in northern New York where both had lived for more than half a century.

There are three possible answers to this question. Those who believe in a god or gods usually claim that before an individual is created, he/she does not exist, then he/she comes into being through the will of a god. He/she lives their life and then, according to what they believe or do in their life, they either go to eternal heaven or hell.