Mar 31, 2009

Uganda မွာ သာသနာေရာင္၀ါထြန္းဖုိ႔ ျမန္မာေတြလည္း ကူညီေစခ်င္


မေန႔က ဘုန္းဘုန္းဦးဗုဒၶရကၡိတ ဓါတ္ပုံနဲ႔ဗီဒီယုိေတြကုိ ၾကည္ညဳိခဲ့ရလုိ႔ ၀မ္းသာၾကည္ႏူးမွဳေတြ ရခဲ့ၾကမွာပါ။ ဒီေန႔မွာ ဦးဇင္း ေမြးတဲ့အခ်ိန္က စျပီး Uganda မွာ ဘုန္းၾကီးေက်ာင္းေဆာက္လုပ္တဲ့အထိ ရွင္းျပထားတဲ့ စာတမ္းေလးကုိ ipaper နဲ႔ တင္ျပလုိက္ပါတယ္။ စုစုေပါင္း စာမ်က္ႏွာ ၆၀ ရွိပါတယ္။ အဂၤလိပ္လုိေရးထားေပမယ့္ ရုိးရွင္းစြာ ေရးထားတာမုိ႔ အားလုံးဖတ္ႏုိင္တဲ့ အေနအထားမွာ ရွိပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ စာတမ္းေလးမွာ ခက္ခက္ခဲခဲနဲ႔ သာသနာျပဳရတဲ့အေၾကာင္းေတြ ေရးထားပါတယ္။ ဒီအထဲ ကားေတြက အစီးမခံလုိ႔ လမ္းေလွ်ာက္ျပန္ရတဲ့ အျဖစ္မ်ဳိးကလဲ မၾကာခဏ ပါပဲ။ ပုိျပီးၾကည္ညဳိဖုိ႔ေကာင္းတာက အခက္အခဲေတြၾကားက ၀ိနည္းကုိ ၾကိဳးစားေစာင့္ထိမ္းျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အက်ယ္ကုိေတာ့ မိမိဖာသာ ဖတ္ၾကည့္ပါ။

အဲဒီစာတမ္းေလးဖတ္ျပီးရင္ သာဓုေခၚရုံနဲ႔ေတာ့ မျပီးသင့္ဟု ယူဆပါတယ္။ ဘုန္းဘုန္းေနရာကေန ကုိယ္ခ်င္းစာၾကည့္ပါ။ ေက်ာင္းကုိ အျပီးျဖစ္ေအာင္ ေဆာက္ရဖုိ႔ရွိပါတယ္။ ေရဖုိး၊ မီးဖုိးအပါအ၀င္ အေဆာက္အဦး ထိမ္းသိမ္းခ အတြက္ လစဥ္ ေခါင္းခဲေနရမယ္ဆုိရင္ မဟုတ္ေသးဘူးထင္တယ္။ ျပီးေတာ့ အဲဒီမွာက အလွဳရွင္က သိပ္နည္းလြန္းပါတယ္။
ဒါ့ေၾကာင့္ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ျမန္မာလူငယ္ေတြအေနနဲ႔ မိမိတုိ႔ မိသားစု၀င္ေတြနဲ႔ ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ မိမိတုိ႔ လုပ္ေဖၚကုိင္ဖက္မ်ားႏွင့္ ေသာ္လည္းေကာင္း စုစည္းျပီး လစဥ္ေထာက္ပံ့သြားႏုိင္ရင္ ဘုန္းဘုန္းအတြက္ ေတာ္ေတာ္ကုိ အဆင္ေျပမွာပဲေနာ္?။ တစ္လကုိ တစ္ေယာက္စီက ၅ ေဒၚလာစီပုံမွန္ အလွဴခံေပးႏုိင္ရင္ အေယာက္ ၂၀ ဆုိရင္ ေဒၚလာ ၁၀၀ ရမွာပါ။ ဒါဆုိရင္ လစဥ္အသုံးစားရိတ္ေလးေတာ့ ဖူလုံမယ္လုိ႔ ယူဆပါတယ္။ ျဖစ္ႏုိင္ရင္ေတာ့ ေက်ာင္းေဆာက္ေရးနဲ႔ ေ၀ယ်ာ၀စၥအတြက္ပါ လွဳဒါန္းသင့္ပါေၾကာင္း တေလးတစား အၾကံျပဳပါတယ္။ (အင္တာနက္ေပၚမွလည္း လွဳဒါန္းႏုိင္ပါတယ္ခင္ဗ်ာ)

Uganda Buddhist Centre
Plot 31, Garuga Road, Bulega, Entebbe
P.O.Box 16650, Kampala
UGANDA

Telephone: +256-(0)414-662203
Mobile phone: +256-(0)782-159985

E-mail : ugandabuddhistcentre@gmail.com
Web site: http://www.ugandabuddhistcentre.org




Planting Dhamma Seeds the Emergence of Buddhism in Africa Planting Dhamma Seeds the Emergence of Buddhism in Africa uppermyanmar3
(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

North Indian Muslim Woman Leaves Islam and Marries a Jew


Rohana write to Dr Ali Sina:

First of all let me salute you for the bravery and the resolve you have at exposing the lies of Islamists and the teachings of the Quran. Many a times I thought of writing to you, but have exercised restraint, partly because I did not want to expose myself to more pain.

I am a grown up woman with three adult children, I was born into a Muslim family in a North India. Fortunately, I was born with a sense of right and wrong. At a very young age I started questioning the the Imam who came home to teach me to read the Quran in Arabic. I could not understand what I read and he would not tell me what was written in the Quran. Simple reason, he himself did not know and needed to know. He was just doing a job he was being paid for. Moreover he did not understand Arabic like most Imams in non-Arab countries. I was supposed to read it as it was the word of Allah and not question it.

At the same time I could not stand male domination in my family and community. I made up my mind at an early age that I will not allow such domination in my life. I had seen grown up women in the family being beaten up with canes when they did not comply with the demands of the men or God forbid asked for equality or respect. I was just fortunate, I somehow through sheer perseverance and hard work got a college degree. All throughout I had to keep my feelings towards Islam to myself as I was too afraid to be vocal about it. I got higher education and did all a good Muslim girl is not supposed to. Move to a different city for education, wear pants, and have male friends.

At some point of my adult life, I decided to read the Quran in English and also read Islam’s history, Hadith and Sira. I was disgusted, and decided never to marry a Muslim; I ended up marrying a Jew, who was a classmate. This is when I saw the wrath of the men in my family. I took the beating but did not budge from my decision.

We ended up living in Israel. Today I live in Kansas and have many of my Muslim family members living on the East Coast. I am seeing their hatred of Jews and Israel. And trust me they are all doctors and engineers but still have the 7th century Arab mentality. Its getting worse. Many women are back in the Hijab, and these members of my family do not miss any opportunity to ridicule me in public or make derogatory remarks about Jews or Israel. I did not live in Israel for very long as I moved to US but I did not feel like an alien in that country. I was accepted and treated like any other citizen.

What is wrong with Muslims is the question. In my opinion, a lot is to do with peer pressure. It’s just like kids who refuse to smoke or drink or do drugs are not cool, the same way Muslims who do not behave in a certain way are not real Muslims. They are always worried about acceptance; being a part of the Muslim community means a lot to them as they do not know better. They have lost the capability to think on their own. I think at some level they envy those who have freedom of thought, for they have not mustered up courage to get out of the bondage they are in. I was very angry for a long time with my family members and the Muslims I knew growing up and those I met here. But now all I feel is pity. They are victims. Victims always will victimize others. My suggestion to Muslims is to look within and see if they really believe that Islam is the best religion. Read and understand the Quran and not get emotional and wound up by the Imam’s sermons. Is the Imam saying the truth. or adding his own feelings, biases and brainwashing the listeners because is a good public speaker. Does he have in depth knowledge of what he is preaching? When every Muslim will read the Quran, Hadith, Sira and Islamic History things will be different. Humans are good, they want to do good. But one has to think for oneself what good means, not what someone said it. May be that someone had or has a hidden agenda.

Thanks you for freeing souls from bondage one at a time.

We are here on this earth for a short while; lets love each other for we all the pieces of the same puzzle: The Universe.

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

Mohammed Was NOT A Pedophile!


(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

အာဖရိကမွ သာသနာ့အလင္းေရာင္


တေန႔က က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဆီပုံးမွာ ကုိ/မ Heart ကေန အာဖရိကန္လူမ်ဳိးတစ္ေယာက္ သာသနာျပဳ ဗီဒီယုိေလးလင့္ေလးကုိ လာေရာက္ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ (ကုိ/မ Heart ကုိေက်းဇူးအရမ္းတင္ပါတယ္။) အဲဒီဗီဒီယုိေလးကုိ ၾကည့္လုိက္ေတာ့ အင္မတန္မွ ၾကည္ညဳိဖြယ္ေကာင္းတဲ့ Uganda လူမ်ဳိး ဘုန္းဘုန္းတစ္ပါးကုိ ဖူးျမင္ရပါတယ္။ ဘြဲ႔ေတာ္ကေတာ့ ဗုဒၶရကၡိတျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဆရာေတာ္ၾကီး ဦးသီလနႏၵက ဥပဇယ္ ဆရာေတာ္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဆရာေတာ္ဦးသီလနႏၵနဲ႔ ဘီလင္းဆရာေတာ္ၾကီး ႏွစ္ပါးရဲ့ တုိက္တြန္းခ်က္အရ အာဖရိကတြင္ သာသနာမ်ဳိးေစ့စျပီးခ်သူျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ပါရမီရွိသူတစ္ေယာက္ေတာ့ ျဖစ္ဟန္ရွိ၏။ ဗုဒၶဘာသာဆုိတာ စကားလုံးေတာင္ မၾကားဖူးတဲ့ ေဒသမွာ အေဖၚမပါပဲ တစ္ဦးတည္း သာသနာျပဳရတာ ဘယ္ေလက္ခက္ခဲမလဲဆုိတာ စဥ္းစားၾကည့္ရင္ သိႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ အားလုံးကုိ အျပဳံးမပ်က္ ေက်ာ္လႊမ္းႏုိင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အခုဆုိဘုန္းဘုန္း၏ မယ္ေတာ္ဟာ မြတ္ဆလင္ကေန ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ေျပာင္းလဲခဲ့ပါျပီ။ ဘာပဲျဖစ္ျဖစ္ အာဖရိကမွာ သာသနာစျပဳတဲ့ သံဃာဟာ ျမန္မာ့သကၤန္းနဲ႔ မုိလုိ႔ အင္မတန္ကုိ ဂုဏ္ယူ ၀မ္းသာမိပါတယ္။

ဦးဇင္း ဗုဒၶရကၡိတကုိ ၾကည္ညဳိႏုိင္ဖုိ႔ ဓါတ္ပုံႏွင့္ ဗီဒီယုိမ်ားကုိ စုစည္းတင္ျပလုိက္ပါတယ္။ ဘုန္းဘုန္းဟာ အခက္အခဲေတြၾကားထဲက Uganda Buddhist Centre ကုိ ေဆာက္လုပ္ေနပါျပီ။ ေက်ာင္းအရြယ္ကလည္း အေတာ္ကုိ ေသးငယ္ပါတယ္။ လက္ရွိအထိ မျပီးဆုံးေသးပါ။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ျမန္မာမ်ားအေနနဲ႔ ဆရာေတာ္၏ သာသနာျပဳလုပ္ငန္းကုိ တတ္စြမ္းတေရြ႔လွဳဒါန္းဖုိ႔ ႏွဳိးေဆာင္အပ္ပါသည္၊ အင္တာနက္မွလည္း လွဴဒါန္းႏုိင္ပါတယ္ခင္ဗ်ာ။ (လွဴဒါန္းမွဳမ်ားျပဳလုပ္ပါက comment ေနရာတြင္ ေရးသားျပီးေျပာျပေပးေစလုိပါတယ္။ သာဓုေခၚခ်င္လုိ႔ပါ)
ဘုန္းဘုန္း၏ ဓါတ္ပုံမ်ားၾကည့္လုိပါက ဒီကုိ Click လုပ္

Uganda Buddhist Centre
Plot 31, Garuga Road, Bulega, Entebbe
P.O.Box 16650, Kampala
UGANDA
Telephone: +256-(0)414-662203
Mobile phone: +256-(0)782-159985
E-mail : ugandabuddhistcentre@gmail.com
Web site: http://www.ugandabuddhistcentre.org






(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

Mar 29, 2009

ကုလားအေရး လက္ပုိက္ၾကည့္လုိသူမ်ားအတြက္

ထုိင္းမွာျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြ ရက္စက္မွဳကုိ တင္ျပလုိက္ပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ျမန္မာေတြက ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္ကုိ ထုိင္းအေနအထား ေရာက္တဲ့အထိ လက္ပုိက္ ၾကည့္လုိဟန္ရွိပါတယ္။ ဗီဒီယုိေတြနဲ႔အတူတူ ပိေတာက္ေျမဘေလာ့က ကုိရခုိင္သား ေဆာင္းပါးမွ ကုလားေတြ ေတာင္းဆိုခ်က္ကုိ ျပန္လည္ ေဖၚျပလုိက္ပါတယ္။
၁။ ရခုိင္ ေျမာက္ပိုင္းကို ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္၊ ကရင္ျပည္နယ္၊ ခ်င္းေတာင္တန္း၊ ကခ်င္ေဒသ ေတြလို လြတ္လပ္ေသာ မူဆလင္ ျပည္နယ္အျဖစအျမန္ဆံုး ဖြဲ႕စည္းေပးရန္။ ျပည္နယ္ စစ္တပ္၊ ျပည္နယ္ရဲ တပ္ဖြဲ႕၊ ျပည္နယ္ လံုျခံဳေရးတပ္ဖြဲ႕မ်ား ထားရိွရန္။
၂။ စစ္ေတြျမိဳ႕ကို ရခုိင္ ေတာင္ပိုင္းႏွင့္ ေျမာက္ပိုင္း ပူးေပါင္းျမိဳ႕ေတာ္ အျဖစ္ သတ္မွတ္ကာ ျမိဳ႕ႏွင့္ ဆိပ္ကမ္း ကြပ္ကဲမႈကို ရခုိင္ႏွင့္ မူဆလင္ ငါးဆယ္ ရာခုိင္ႏႈန္းစီ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ ျပဳရန္၊ ပထမဆံုး ျမိဳ႕ေတာ္ ၀န္ႏွင့္ တုိင္းမင္းၾကီးကုိ မူဆလင္ လူမ်ိဳးအထဲမွ ခန္႕ထားရန္။
၃။ ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္ လက္နက္ကိုင္ တပ္ဖြဲ႕တြင္ မူဆလင္ ငါးဆယ္ ရာခိုင္ႏႈန္း ပါ၀င္ရန္။
၄။ ဗဟို အစိုးရတြင္ မူဆလင္ဆိုင္ရာ ၀န္ၾကီး ခန္႕ထားရန္။
၅။ လူမ်ိဳးစု လႊတ္ေတာ္သို႕ အျခားျပည္နယ္မ်ား နည္းတူ ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ အညီအမွ် ေစလႊတ္ ခြင့္ျပဳရန္။
၆။ မူဆလင္ေကာင္စီထားရိွခြင့္ျပဳရန္။
၇။ မူဆလင္အထက္တန္းေက်ာင္းႏွင့္ ေကာလိပ္မ်ားတည္ေထာင္ခြင့္ျပဳရန္။


ထုိင္းဘုန္းၾကီးေတြကုိ ဘယ္ေလာက္ရက္စက္ခဲ့လဲ ဒီမွာၾကည့္ႏုိင္ပါတယ္။


Violence in Thailand's Muslim South Intensifies




Thailand cracks down on religious





Islamic Crusades 4: Lessons From the Thai Jihad




South Thailand's separatist movement - 27 Sep 07




Muslim insurgency simmers in southern Thailand


Bombing in Thailand caught on camera



Bomb explosion in Thailand.


ကုလားထုံးဆန္အတုိင္း သူတုိ႔ ေခြးအလုပ္လုပ္တာကုိ တစက္ေလးမွာ ထည့္မေျပာပါဘူး။ သူတုိ႔ ခံရရင္ မ်က္ရည္ေလး၀ုိင္းျပီး အခုလုိဗီဒီယုိေတြ ရုိက္ျပတတ္ပါတယ္

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

ဗုဒၶကိုမ်က္စိမွိတ္မယံုပါနဲ႕


ကုလားေတြ ဘယ္လုိမြတ္ဆလင္ျဖစ္လာလဲ? အာရပ္ေတြက ပလီဆရာေတြ ေစလႊတ္ျပီး တရားေဟာစည္းလုံးျခင္းနဲ႔ မြတ္ဆလင္ကုိ ေျပာင္းခဲ့တယ္ထင္သလား? အာရပ္ေတြက ကုလားကုိ လူလုိ သေဘာမထားပါ။ လူလုိသေဘာထားရင္ ပါးစပ္နဲ႔ေျပာျပီး စည္းရုံးမွာေပါ့။ လူလုိသေဘာမထားလုိ႔ စစ္တပ္နဲ႔ တုိက္ခုိက္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူတုိ႔ရဲ့ အဖုိးကုိသတ္၊ အဖြားကုိမုဒိမ္းက်င့္ျပီးမွ အတင္းအဓမၼ မြတ္ဆလင္ေျပာင္းခဲ့တာပါ။ အဲလုိေျပာင္းလဲ ရုံတင္မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ တျခားေသာ ဘာသာအယူ၀ါဒေတြကုိ မေလ့လာႏုိင္ေအာင္ ဘာသာေရး အေဆာက္အဦးေတြကုိ ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ က်မ္းစာေတြကုိ မီးရွဳိ႔ပါတယ္။ ပလီမွာ ေန႔စဥ္ အတင္းအက်ပ္ ၀တ္ျပဳခုိင္းပါတယ္။ တနည္းေျပာရရင္ ဦးေႏွာက္ရဲ့စဥ္းစားႏုိင္မွဳကုိ ဖ်က္ဆီးျပစ္လုိက္တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ brainwash လုပ္ခံလုိက္ရတာပါပဲ။ ဒါ့ေၾကာင့္ မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြဟာ သာမန္လူေတြလုိ ေတြးေခၚႏုိင္စြမ္းမရွိေတာ့ပါဘူး။ တရားမွ်တမွဳဆုိတာ ဘာမွန္း မသိေတာ့ပါဘူး။ မိန္းခေလးေတြကုိ ဖ်က္ဆီးရတာကုိပဲ ဂုဏ္ယူ ေျပာဆုိေနပါျပီ။ ပုိျပီးရယ္ဖုိ႔ေကာင္းသည္မွာ အဖုိးကုိသတ္၊ အဖြားကုိမုဒိမ္းက်င့္ခဲ့ေသာ အာရပ္ေတြ အလုိက် သူတုိ႔မ်ဳိးရုိးစဥ္ဆက္ကုိးကြယ္ေသာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကုိ ဖ်က္ဆီးရန္ ၾကဳိးစားေနျခင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။ (အသက္ရွင္က်န္ခဲ့တဲ့ ကုလားေတြကုိ မြတ္ဆလင္ေျပာင္းယုံတင္ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ အားလုံးကုိ အာရပ္ေတြက ကြ်န္လုပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ျမင္းမွာ အုံးခြံ၊ ကြ်န္မွာ ကုလားဆုိတဲ့ ဆုိရုိး စကား သိပ္ကုိ မွန္ေပသည္)

မ်က္စိမွိတ္ယုံဖုိ႔ တုိက္တြန္းထားေသာ မြတ္ဆလင္ႏွင့္ လူသားေတြးေခၚမွဳကုိ အေလးထားသည့္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ကြာျခားမွဳကုိ ေလ့လာႏုိင္ရန္ ဓမၼေမတၱာဘေလာ့မွ ယခုေဆာင္းပါးေလး ကူးယူေဖၚျပလုိက္ပါတယ္။

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က်ေနာ္အခုေဖာ္ျပေပးမွာက ကာလာမသုတ္ အေၾကာင္းေလးပါ။ ဘုရားရွင္ေဟာၾကားတဲ့ ကာလာမသုတ္ကို ဘာလို႕ဖြင့္ဆိုခ်င္တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအရင္းေလးကို အရင္ဆံုးေဖာ္ျပခ်င္ပါတယ္။ ဘာလို႕ကာလာမသုတ္ကို ေဖာ္ျပရလည္းဆိုေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တို႕ ျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳးအမ်ားစုဟာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကို ကိုးကြယ္တယ္သာဆိုတယ္.. မိရိုးဖလာအစဥ္အလာအရသာ မိဘေတြအစဥ္အဆက္ ကိုးကြယ္ခဲ့လို႕ ကိုးကြယ္ေနရသလိုမ်ိဳးေတြ အမ်ားစု ေတြ႔ေနရပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္လည္း အရင္ကဒီလိုပါပဲ။ ဘုရားဆိုတာ ဘာလည္း.. တရားဆိုတာ ဘာလည္း.. သံဃာဆိုတာ ဘာလည္း ဆိုတာကို ဘာတစ္ခုမွ ေသခ်ာမသိခဲ့ပါဘူး။ က်န္တာမေမးပါနဲ႕.. ရွင္းရွင္းေျပာရရင္ ဘုရားရွင္ရဲ႕ ငယ္နာမည္ကိုေတာင္ ေသခ်ာမသိခဲ့တာပါ။ လူအမ်ားစုဟာ ကိုယ္၀တ္မယ့္ အ၀တ္အစားတစ္ခုကို ၀ယ္ရင္ေတာင္မွ ကိုယ့္အသားအေရာင္နဲ႕ လိုက္ရဲ႕လား.. ကိုယ့္အတိုင္းနဲ႕ေရာ ကိုက္ရဲ႕လား.. ကုိယ့္မွာရွိတဲ့ အ၀တ္အစားေတြနဲ႕ေရာ လိုက္ရဲ႕လားဆိုျပီး ေသခ်ာစီစစ္ျပီး ၀ယ္ၾကတာ မ်ားပါတယ္.. ဒါေပမယ့္ ကိုယ္ကိုးကြယ္ေနတဲ့ ဘာသာကိုက်ေတာ့.. ဘာလို႕ ကိုးကြယ္ရတယ္.. ဘာလို႕ ဘုရားရွင္ကိုၾကည္ညိဳရတယ္.. ဘုရားရွင္နဲ႕ တျခားဘာသာေတြနဲ႕ဘာကြာလည္း.. ငါတို႕ကိုးကြယ္တဲ့ ဘာသာကမွားေနလား.. ဟုတ္ေရာ ဟုတ္ရဲ႕လားဆိုတာကိုေတာ့ ေသခ်ာမဆန္းစစ္ၾကတာ မ်ားပါတယ္။ တကယ္တမ္းက ဆန္းစစ္သင့္ပါတယ္..။

ဗုဒၶဘာသာကမမွန္ဘူးဆိုရင္ တျခားဘာသာကို ေျပာင္းသင့္ရင္ ေျပာင္းရမွာပါပဲ။ တျခားဘာသာေတြက မွန္ေနတယ္ဆိုရင္ တျခားဘာသာကို ယူသင့္ရင္ယူရမယ္။ ဒါမွာ့.. ကိုယ္ကုိးကြယ္တဲ့ဘာသာကို သူမ်ားေျပာလို႕ ဟုတ္ႏိုးႏိုးလို႕ ကိုးကြယ္ေနရတာ မဟုတ္ဘဲနဲ႕ မိမိဥာဏ္နဲ႕ သက္၀င္ျပီးကိုးကြယ္ရာ ေရာက္မွာပါ။ ဗုဒၶရဲ႕အယူ၀ါဒ မွားေနရင္ေတာ့ ဗုဒၶကို ေက်ာခိုင္းလိုက္လည္း အျပစ္မေျပာလိုေတာ့ပါဘူး။ တကယ္တမ္းက အမွားတကာ့အမွားဆံုးမွာ ကိုးကြယ္မႈမွားျခင္းဟာ အဆိုး၀ါးဆံုးပါ။ ဘာလို႕လည္းဆိုေတာ့.. ကိုးကြယ္မႈမွားရင္ ဒီဘ၀မွာတင္မဟုတ္ပါဘူး.. ဘ၀သံသရာ တေလ်ာက္လံုး မွားေနမွာမလို႕ပါ။ က်ေနာ္ခုေဖာ္ျပေပးခ်င္တဲ့ အေၾကာင္းအရင္းကလည္း ဗုဒၶကို ဘာလို႕ကိုးကြယ္ရလည္း.. ငါတို႕ကုိးကြယ္ေနတဲ့ဘာသာနဲ႕ တျခားဘာသာဘာေတြနဲ႕ ဘာကြာလည္း ဆိုတာေလး အနည္းအက်ဥ္း ထုတ္ႏႈတ္ေဖာ္ျပသြားမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

က်ေနာ္တို႕ဗုဒၶဘာသာမွာ တျခားဘာသာၾကီးေတြနဲ႕ မတူတဲ့အခ်က္ေတြ အမ်ားၾကီးရွိပါတယ္။ ထင္ရွားတဲ့အခ်က္ နဲနဲေလာက္ကို ေျပာျပခ်င္ပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တို႕ ဘာသာမွာ ဘုရားရွင္ကို ယံုၾကည္ကိုးကြယ္ ရွိခုိးေနရံုနဲ႕ နိဗၺာန္ကို မရႏိုင္ပါဘူး။ ဘုရားရွင္ကလည္း သူ႕ကိုကိုးကြယ္ရင္ နိဗၺာန္ေရာက္ေအာင္ ပို႕ေပးမယ္လို႕ တာ၀န္မယူခဲ့ပါဘူး။ အတၱာဟိ အတၱေနာ နာေထာ- မိမိကိုယ္သာကိုးကြယ္ရာပါပဲ။ မိမိျပဳမွားတဲ့(အကုသိုလ္) ကို ကုစားေပးမယ္လို႕ တာ၀န္လည္းမခံဘူး။ ကိုယ္ျပဳရင္ကိုယ္ခံပဲ။ ဘုရားရွင္တာ၀န္ယူတာက လမ္းေၾကာင္းမွန္ျပမယ္။ ဒီလမ္းအတိုင္းေလ်ာက္.. ဒီလမ္းအတိုင္းသြား.. ဒါဆိုရင္နိဗၺာန္ေရာက္မယ္။ ဒီအခ်က္ပါပဲ… တျခားဘာသာေတြနဲ႕လံုး၀မတူတဲ့အခ်က္ပါ။ တျခားဘာသာေတြကို ပုတ္ခတ္တာမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ အရွိကိုအရွိအတိုင္းပဲေျပာတာပါ။ ဒါ့ေၾကာင့္ ဘာသာေရးလိုက္စားတဲ့ ပညာရွင္အခ်ိဳ႕ကေျပာၾကပါတယ္.. Buddhism is not a religion တဲ့။ ဟုတ္ပါတယ္.. ဗုဒၶဟာ ဖန္ဆင္းရွင္လည္းမဟုတ္ပါဘူး.. ကယ္တင္ရွင္လည္းမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ဒါေပမယ့္ သတၱ၀ါေတြအားလံုးကို မေသရာနိဗၺာန္သို႕ ေရာက္ေအာင္ ပို႕ေဆာင္ေပးတဲ့ ကယ္တင္ရွင္လို႕ ေျပာရင္ေတာ့ မမွားႏိုင္ပါဘူး။ နိဗၺာန္သြားမယ့္ လမ္းကို ေဖာက္ေပးခဲ့တယ္ ဆိုရင္လည္းမမွားႏိုင္ပါဘူး။

ျပီးေတာ့ ဗုဒၶျမတ္စြာရဲ႕ ၀ါဒဟာ ေ၀ဖန္ပိုင္းျခားတဲ့၀ါဒ ပါ။ ဘယ္အရာမဆို ေ၀ဖန္ပိုင္းျခား ဆန္းစစ္ျပီးမွ ယံုၾကည္ရတဲ့၀ါဒလို႕ ေျပာလည္း ရပါတယ္။ မ်က္စိမွိတ္ျပီးေတာ့လည္း ဗုဒၶျမတ္စြာက မယံုခုိင္းပါဘူး။ ဘုရားရွင္က ငါေဟာတာမွအမွန္.. ငါဘုရားကိုကိုးကြယ္ပါ.. မ်က္စိမွိတ္ယံုပါလို႕.. တခါမွမေဟာၾကားခဲ့ပါဘူး။ အဲ့အေၾကာင္းေလးကို ဘုရားရွင္ေဟာၾကားခဲ့တဲ့ ကာလာမသုတ္ေတာ္ကိုဖြင့္ျပီး ဘုရားရွင္ရဲ႕ အယူ၀ါဒ ၾကည္ညိဳဖြယ္ေကာင္းပံုကို ေဖာ္ျပေပးပါ့မယ္။ ဘာေၾကာင့္ဒီသုတ္ကို ေဖာ္ျပရသလည္းဆိုေတာ့ ဖတ္ေနရင္း သိလာပါလိမ့္မယ္။ ကာလာမပုဏၰားေတြကို အေၾကာင္းျပဳျပီး ေဟာၾကားေတာ္မူခဲ့လို႕ ကာလာမသုတ္လို႕ လူသိမ်ားေသာ္လည္း ပိဋိကတ္ေတာ္မွာေတာ့ ေကသမုတၱိသုတ္ လို႕ပဲ ဆိုပါတယ္.. (အဂၤုတၱိဳရ္- ျမန္မာျပန္(ပထမတြဲ) စာမ်က္ႏွာ-၂၀၆) မွာေတြ႕ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

တစ္ခါမွာေတာ့ ဘုရားရွင္က ေဒသစာရီလွည့္လည္ေတာ္မူရင္း ကာလာမမင္းတို႕ေနထုိင္ရာ ေကသမုတၱိ နိဂံုးရြာကို ေရာက္သြားပါတယ္။ ကာလမမင္းတို႕က ဘုရားရွင္ကို ေလွ်ာက္ထားေမးျမန္းပါတယ္။ သူတို႕ေမးပံုကို ၾကည့္ပါဦး- အရွင္ဘုရား၊ တပည့္ေတာ္တို႕ဆီမွာေတာ့ ဒႆနပညာရွင္ေတြ လာသမားမေမးပါနဲ႕ေတာ့။ တစ္ေယာက္လာလည္း ငါ့အယူ ငါ့၀ါဒမွမွန္တယ္၊ တျခားသူ ေျပာတာေတြက အလကားဟာေတြလို႕ ေျပာတာပဲ။ ေနာက္တစ္ေယာက္လာလည္း ငါ့၀ါဒအယူကမွ မွန္တယ္။ သူတို႕ေျပာတာေတြ အလကားလို႕ ေျပာျပန္တာပါပဲ။ ၾကာေတာ့ ဘယ္သူေျပာတာကို ယံုရမွန္းေတာင္ မသိေတာ့ပါဘူး တဲ့။ သူတို႕ေျပာတဲ့ အဓိပၸါယ္ကေတာ့ ဘုရားရွင္ကလည္း ဘာေျပာမွာလဲေပါ့.. သူတို႕လိုပဲမဟုတ္လား.. ေျပာခ်င္တာသာေျပာ ယံုမယ္လို႕ေတာ့ မထင္ေလနဲ႕ ဆိုတဲ့သေဘာမ်ိဳးနဲ႕ ဘုရားရွင္ကုိ အထင္ေသးတဲ့သေဘာမ်ိဳးနဲ႕ ေလ်ာက္လိုက္တာပါ။ ဒီေတာ့..ဘုရားရွင္က ဘာေျပာသလဲဆိုေတာ့..- ကာလာမတို႕- ေျပာသံၾကားရံုနဲ႕လည္း မယံုနဲ႕၊ ေရွးရိုးစဥ္ဆက္စကားရယ္လို႕လည္း မယံုနဲ႕၊ အဲသလို ျဖစ္ဖူးသတဲ့လို႕လည္း မယံုနဲ႕၊ ကိုယ့္ဘာသာ ေတြးမိၾကံမိတာေလာက္ေလးနဲ႕လည္း မယံုနဲ႕၊ ကိုယ့္ခံယူထားခ်က္နဲ႕ တူတယ္ဆိုရံုနဲ႕လည္း မယံုနဲ႕၊ ကိုယ္ယံုၾကည္ ရိုေသတဲ့ သူရဲ႕စကား ဆိုျပီးေတာ့လည္း မယံုနဲ႕၊ သူမ်ားေျပာတုိင္းလည္း မွန္ျပီလို႕ မယံုနဲ႕၊ အစဥ္အလာ လက္ခံခဲ႕ၾကလို႕လည္း မယံုနဲ႕၊စာေပက်မ္းဂန္ထဲမွာပါတယ္လို႕လည္း မယံုနဲ႕.. ကိုယ္ပိုင္ဥာဏ္နဲ႕ အထပ္ထပ္ ခ်င့္ခ်ိန္ျပီး က်ိဳးေၾကာင္းခိုင္မာမွ ယံုပါလို႕ ေဟာၾကားလိုက္ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ဆံုးမွာေတာ့ ဘုရားရွင္က ကုသိုလ္နဲ႕ အကုသိုလ္ရဲ႕ အက်ိဳးအျပစ္ေတြကို ႏိႈင္းယွဥ္ျပီးေဟာၾကားလိုက္မွပဲ ကာလာမမင္းတို႕ ဘုရား၀ါဒကို လက္ခံျပီးေတာ့ ကိုးကြယ္ ယံုၾကည္သြားၾကပါတယ္။

ဒီအခ်က္ကို ဘာလို႕ေျပာရလဲဆိုေတာ့.. ဒီအခ်က္ဟာ.. ဗုဒၶနဲ႕ အျခားဘာသာေတြရဲ႕ ျခားနားတဲ့ အခ်က္ပါပဲ။ က်ေနာ္ေျပာခ်င္တာကေတာ့ ကိုယ့္ဘုရားမလို႕ သူမ်ားေျပာလို႕သာ ၾကည္ညိဳလိုက္တယ္.. ဘုရားစာလိုက္ဆိုလို႕သာ ဆိုလိုက္ရတယ္.. ဘာမွန္းလည္းမသိ ဘာမွလည္းမသိလိုက္ရဘူး.. ဟုိလူေျပာဟုတ္ႏိုးႏိုး ဒီလူေျပာဟုတ္ႏိုးႏိုးနဲ႕ေတာ့ ဘုရားကိုမကိုးကြယ္သင့္ပါဘူး။ တကယ္တမ္းက ဘုရားေဟာၾကားတဲ့ တရားေတြကို လိုက္နာက်င့္သံုးျပီးေတာ့.. ကိုယ္ပိုင္အသိဥာဏ္နဲ႕ ခ်င့္ခ်ိန္ သံုးသပ္သင့္ပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္ေျပာခ်င္တဲ့ အဓိကအေၾကာင္းအရင္းကေတာ့ ဘယ္သူေတြ ဘာေတြပဲေျပာေျပာ ကိုယ္ပိုင္အသိဥာဏ္နဲ႕ စဥ္းစားဆံုးျဖတ္ပါ။ ဘုရားကို မ်က္စိႏွစ္လံုးပိတ္ျပီး ဇြတ္မယံုၾကပဲနဲ႕.. ကိုယ္ပို္င္အသိဥာဏ္နဲ႕ ဘုရားေဟာၾကားခဲ့တဲ့ တရားစကားမ်ားကို လုိက္နာက်င့္ၾကံၾကည့္ပါ။ ကိုယ့္ဘာသာ ဟုတ္မဟုတ္ဆံုးျဖတ္ျပီး ပညာမ်က္စိႏွစ္လံုး အလင္းပြင့္ျပီးေတာ့ မဂ္ဖိုလ္ နိဗၺာန္ကို တက္လွမ္းႏုိင္ၾကေစျခင္း အလို႕ငွာ ဆႏၵျပဳ ေရးသားလိုက္ရပါတယ္။

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

Mar 28, 2009

ကုလားေလာ့ဂ်စ္



(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

မြတ္ဆလင္သည္ လူရမ္းကား၀ါဒျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သက္ေသဗီဒီယုိ



(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

Meditation—not just for your average JewBu anymore


Jewish Journal

The model for the day was dying for the sake of rebirth. Think meditation, think spiritual awakening, think psychoanalysis.

It is the hard work of introspection that is the antithesis of mainstream modern American culture. We are a nation of pleasure-mongers, and cheap thrills from Paris and Nicole administering enemas at fat camp on the "Simple Life" often win out over sitting in silence on a cushion.

In "Against the Stream," Buddhist teacher and practitioner Noah Levine refers to the hard work of seeking truth in a country that avoids pain. Based in Los Angeles and deeply rooted in the Buddhist tradition, he offers an outlet for those in search of answers and an end to suffering.

Oddly rabbinical in his wording and diction, Levine sits perched cross-legged and coated in tattoos. The ones that stand out: "against the stream" is written across his neck, "wisdom" across his right wrist, and to top it off, knuckle tattoos that read "true love." If lucky, mid-Buddhist quip, one might catch a sparkling glimpse of his gold teeth.

The focus of this meditation session with the Rebel Saint Buddhist group at the Santa Monica Zen Center: death, dying and grief. "The Buddha wasn't big on denial," Levine posited. "He was big on reality."

After addressing the evening's theme, Levine opened the room to discussion. Chock-full of tattooed hipster meditators, many donning black Dharma Punx hoodies, the crowd fearlessly spoke of dead parents, friends, relatives and their coping mechanisms when it came to pain and grief.

"I've got news for you -- no one gets out of here alive," Levine joked. The point was to face death so you could appreciate life. It could even be fun, like Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), where a carnival-like atmosphere follows a celebration of deceased loved ones.

Death was no celebration in my conservative Jewish family. Death was gas chambers and dead babies. Death was a grief-stricken grandmother hysterically attempting to throw herself in her husband's newly dug grave.

Death was not to be resolved, not moved through, but held on to as indelible memory. "Always remember, never forget."

Perhaps this is the appeal of Buddhism to so many Jews. Yesterday is the past and today, the here and now, is all that matters. This is the ultimate prescription for dealing with a traditional obsession with remembering the biblical. Further, few Americans can boast a Conservative Jewish upbringing that featured meditation.

"Liberal Judaism is the child of German rationalism," wrote Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, author and scholar in-residence at the Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco. "Our liberal predecessors dismissed East European Jewish mysticism as unenlightened, irrational, and superstitious."

Rabbi Miles Krassen, former associate professor of religious studies at Naropa University and founder of Gishmey Brachah, or Rain of Blessings, a nonprofit organization for evolving Judaism, explained, "There is a big issue with how Judaism has been presented in modernity. Certain things have been represented as Judaism, that which is in the synagogue and in schools, while other parts of Judaism are kept on the back burner. So many elements are not put forth."

This was a big reason why, in the 1970s, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan came out with books on meditation and the Bible, Kabbalah, and Judaism. "He saw how many Jews were running elsewhere -- unaware that there was such a thing in Judaism, and wrote those books, translating Jewish mystical or Jewish contemplative texts," Krassen recalled. "This was the first effort to make these forms of meditation available to the public."

In fact, Krassen says, "many types of Jewish meditation exist with a long history going all the way back to the prophets in Israel."

There is the Lithuanian Orthodox tradition of mussar which "shines light on the causes of suffering and shows us how to realize our highest spiritual potential, including an everyday experience infused with happiness, trust, and love," wrote Alan Morinis in his book, "Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar."

There are Chasids, who meditate through melodies, and there was Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who practiced a Chasidic meditation of speaking to God, opening his heart to every issue and every concern he had.

"Jewish seekers often get the impression that they would do better to search out the mysticism of Eastern religions than to bother looking in the temple library," Kushner wrote.

Chabadniks might practice hitbonnenut, in-depth meditation, or hitbodedut, experiencing the divine in solitude. This is a meditation practice of placing the mind in key cosmological and theological ideas like: God is that which fills all things and surrounds all things.

"The heart then gets an 'aha moment,'" Krassen explained. "The heart responds and you start feeling an infinite source of love in your heart that flows unending."

Sitting in Santa Monica at the Zen Center, after some tears and some laughing, Levine instructed the group to lie down. Earlier Levine suggested that everyone meditate with real cadavers, spend time in graveyards and sit with dead relatives before burying them.

I lay down and listened as I was asked to imagine my body dead, lifeless and decaying. I was to imagine standing above myself and looking down. I realized, lying there afraid of what I was imagining, that I was terrified of dying. "The terror is extra suffering," Levine said.

He mentioned how everywhere there is death. To the contrary, Judaism speaks of how everywhere there is life, and that is God.

Levine mentioned how everything that happened today had died already. "We are in a constant state of grieving," he explained.

So we lay there and watched ourselves die. We were to imagine our loved ones dying, our friends, our office mates, the people on the bus, all dead. Then we watched our skeletons emerge and then our bones decompose and scatter in the earth.

This was when I missed synagogue. I wanted hugging and songs, and I wanted food. When I felt completely empty I decided I was a Jew, not a Buddhist. According to Levine this is because "every other tradition brings comfort. Buddhism places the faith in the power of practice."

Martin Buber practiced meditation. Initially he was interested in non-Jewish forms. "He understood religious meditation in terms of the different religious cookbooks that he was following," Krassen explained.

Later Buber came to the conclusion that he had never actually united with God, only with his own soul. This is the key difference between Buddhism and Judaism: Judaism is a theistic religion.

Levine gradually brought the group back to life and then explained how every moment is not only death, but also birth. "Pain is not our enemy. Pain is OK," he posited. Every moment is the breathing of newness. This was the Jewish chunk, the "Baruch Hashem, every moment is a blessing."

Among a number of meditations offered, jewishhealing.com suggests Bittul Ha Yesh, a meditation on nothingness. For this practice you close your eyes and gradually imagine life without any senses, any thought. Then you are to imagine your life without these things and gradually reach an understanding of "nothingness." Not so far from what the group did with Levine.

From my simulated death I realized that my own mortality was the shadow I was avoiding. This scary meditation was the hard work required when going "against the stream" of popular choices in consciousness and psychology. This is what my father quotes from the Torah about "working by the sweat of your brow." This is the hard work of facing a certain truth and enduring the subsequent pain.

"Buddhism is part of a greater trend," Krassen explained. "The bigger picture: evolving American spirituality that's going to be a smorgasbord of all these religious dishes." Krassen's goal: "to ensure that the delicacies of Judaism will be served at the table."

He suggests that Judaism promote a belief in God that does not conflict with rational thought. For an evolving nation, with modern ways and new knowledge, Judaism needs to grow. There is Judaism out there that can work for rationalists, Krassen said, positing a spiritual basis for everything that exists.

"The Jewish choice is not rationalism or mysticism, logic or spirituality, but both," Kushner added. "Mysticism is not escapism and madness, but an essential and vital ingredient of a mature and balanced Jewish worldview.... Just beyond the radar screens of our five senses, all being is one luminous organism."

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

Mar 27, 2009

My Journey to Freedom

9/11 ကိစၥရွင္းပါရေစ။ 9/11 ျဖစ္စမွာ အေမရိကန္ေတြ ေသေက်လုိ႔ဆုိျပီး သူတုိ႔က အင္မတန္ကုိ ၀မ္းသာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သူမ်ားေသတာကုိျမင္ရင္ ၀မ္းသာတဲ့ မြတ္ဆလင္ဘာသာ ဘယ္အဆင့္မွာရွိလဲ ေျပာဖုိ႔မလုိပါဘူး။ 9/11 ကုိ အေမရိကန္ အစုိးရ ေနာက္ကြယ္က ပတ္သက္ေနတယ္ဆုိတာ တစ္ႏွစ္အတြင္းမွာ ဗီဒီယုိေတြ ေဆာင္းပါးေတြ အမ်ားၾကီး အင္တာနက္မွ ပ်ံ့ႏွံ႔ေနပါျပီ။ ဒါေပမယ့္မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြက ဘင္လာဒင္အၾကမ္းဖက္လုိ႔ ေသသြားတဲ့ အေမရိကန္ေတြကုိ သနားသလုိလုိနဲ႔ ဘင္လာဒင္ကုိ တဖက္လွည့္ ခ်ီးက်ဴးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဘင္လာဒင္က သတ္တယ္လုိ႔ လူတုိင္းကုိ လုိက္ၾကြားပါတယ္။

ေနာက္ပုိင္းမွာ အေမရိကန္အစုိးရက မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြကုိ သတ္ျဖတ္တာ ပုိမုိဆုိးရြားလာပါတယ္။ ပလီေတြကုိလဲ ဖ်က္ဆီးခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ကမာၻ႔ႏုိင္ငံအသီးသီးက လူေတြကလဲ မြတ္ဆလင္ကုိ ျပင္းျပင္းထန္ထန္ ဆန္႔က်င္လာပါတယ္ (ျမန္မာေတြကေတာ့ ကုလားဖင္ရက္ေနဆဲပါ) အဲဒီေနာက္ပုိင္းမွာ ကုလားေတြက သူတုိ႔အတြက္ 9/11 ဘင္လာဒင္ကုိယ္တုိင္လုပ္တယ္လုိ႔ ေျပာဆုိခ်င္းက အက်ဳိးမရွိဘူးလုိ႔ျမင္လာပါတယ္။ ဒီေတာ့မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြက ဗ်ဴဟာေျပာင္းလုိက္ပါတယ္။ ဗ်ဴဟာအသစ္ကေတာ့ အေမရိကန္အစုိးရကုိယ္တုိင္ 9/11 ကိုလုပ္တယ္ဆုိတာကုိ ေထာက္ခံလုိက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ယုတ္ညံ့၊ ေကာက္က်စ္၊လိမ္ညာ၊ လူသတ္၊ မုိဒိမ္းက်င့္ စတဲ့နည္းလမ္းေပါင္းစုံနဲ႔ ရွင္သန္ေနရတာမြတ္ဆလင္ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဆင့္ရွိတဲ့သူတုိင္း မြတ္ဆလင္ဘာသာကေန ထြက္သင့္ပါျပီ။

When on the otherwise fine morning of 9/11, I switched on the TV and witnessed two planes hit the WTC with the building falling apart like a pack of card – I was amazed, stunned and delighted. A fitting response for the evil US foreign policy, especially towards Palestine. There was no doubt in my mind that this event must have been orchestrated by a Muslim group, most likely by Osama bin Laden but all that played in my mind was that it was all justified; it was necessary to teach America a lesson. Yet, I was never a fan of bin Laden - I would never have wanted his ideology take hold in my own country.

As the first reaction, I jumped up, out of delight, with a loud exclamatory noise. My housemate, a Hindu guy, came out to my shouting. He had already had a glimpse of event. He naturally did not enjoy my delight and glum faced he just went back to his room to get ready for rushing to work. He probably knew it was useless to talk with this folk. Probably he was too depressed to talk about this appalling event.

Next few weeks, I spent explaining to my mates and colleagues about how US has been killing the Palestinians, US's bad policies towards the Islamic world, US sanctions on Iraq, US troops bases in Saudi Arabia and what not.

This is what I was doing despite the fact that I was hardly a Muslim. Although born to religious parents in South Asia – I was never pressed to follow religious rituals and neither did I ever bother to engage myself in those stuffs. My only religious devotion was intermittent praying on Friday Juma and on the 2 yearly days of Eid. I would do fasting only on those days I would be invited for Iftar (fast-breaking) party by friend and relatives. Hindus have been my good friends, as exemplified my having a Hindu housemate. Yet, that's the kind of reaction I had of the 9/11 attack. I kind of celebrated the tragic event of killing so many innocent people who had nothing to do with Palestine or US foreign policy.

In a week after 9/11 attack, I called a childhood friend back home – who could not pass his 10th grade but was a pious person. I was in a goading mood while discussing the WTC attack with him. He was rather cold to my zeal. He was indeed concerned that US might start deporting the Muslims, as rumors were rife. He had depended on me for financial help from time to time. He knows that my family and a host of relatives and friends depend on me for money regularly. All he said, "I don't care whether Palestinians die or not. Palestinians are never going to come with money for your family or for me. Neither are we going to come to help the Palestinians even if they die of hunger. Your staying in the US is important for your family, relatives and friends. Make sure, you don't get into troubles."

I was rather disappointed with his cold response to my elation of the 9/11 event. I had already called my parents the day-after 9/11 and obviously had described the event with glee. They too were not so interested. They are not well-educated people. They don’t keep up with the world. They hardly bothered to know what’s happening in Palestine. They reminded me not to get into troubles - they depended on my staying in the US. Getting a check at the end of the month from me was the most important thing – what is happening to Palestinian hardly bore any importance to them. I was disappointed with the callous responses of my friend and my parents towards the Muslim brothers in Palestine.

I called my brothers and quite surprisingly they were as elated as I was. I felt very good talking to them. My brothers were well educated in science and well-respected people in the locality unlike my friend and my parents. I felt quite happy talking to them that my brothers at least cared for the undeserved suffering of people in Palestine. I thought they were educated – so they responded to the call of their conscience. Justice mattered for them. I felt proud – they have become truly educated and conscientious human being. I didn't talk to my friend for some times after that.

As I was looking for all sorts of news on the web, I stumbled on to this website www.faithfreedom.org (FFI) about a month after 9/11. First time, I came across such a site. I took a couple of days reading and I was extremely disappointed and angry with Dr. Ali Sina and other writers on the site. Quickly I took a few pennames and started writing all sorts of abusive comments against FFI and its writers.

Initially I would mainly write abusive comments without making any solid reference to the points raised by the Islam-bashers. But every time, they would come back with references from the Islamic sources, Koran and Hadiths to shut me up. I thought they were misinterpreting the Quran. I thought there is special meaning in those verses which human knowledge cannot comprehend although they may sound very unsavory; Allah is beyond human comprehension; human logic may not fit to Allah’s; and all such kind of things.

One thing I have to make clear that when I started writing abusing retorts to these Islam-bashers in FFI, I never had read the Koran, or the Hadiths. My knowledge of Islam was from hearsay. After doing this kind of tug of war with the Islam-bashers on FFI for about 6-7 months – I slowly started looking into the Koran and Hadiths. I found online Koran (in multiple English translations) and Hadiths. I slowly started cross-checking the references. Then I got a Koran in my mother tongue. All of the translations were mostly agreeable and also were almost agreeable to the interpretations of these Islam-bashers of FFI. I started becoming quiet on FFI. I kept reading more and more. I started questioning if I wanted to copy-cat Prophet Muhammad – who, I believed, was the most perfect man for all times for 40 years of my life. I started questioning if I want to be an ideal man and have 10-15 wives, a few concubines and wage numerous wars against the idolaters, Jews and Christians. Growing up amongst the Hindu majority of the subcontinent - I thought if I would model myself after Muhammad - I should've waged wars against the Hindus (idolaters) in my neighborhood. In stead, I found many good friends amongst the Hindus - who had been excellent friends, who had been nice and honest people. They have been hard-working people as compared to many Muslims peers. Question after question started striking my head. I was getting mad.

I started contemplating what the world will be like if every Muslim had modeled himself after Prophet Muhammad. I wondered how much blood of my Hindu neighbors would have flown had every Muslims had acted the same way like Prophet Muhammad and his closest of disciples (Sahabas) who are considered the finest bunch of people in Islam. I started visioning, in my mind, all sorts of gory pictures in the neighborhood I grew up in. My idolater Hindu neighbors – hard working, honest and affluent like the Jew and Christian tribes of Prophet Muhammad’s neighborhood of Medina. I started visioning how those sweet, nice and beautiful sisters of my Hindu friends are falling at the lustful hands of my Muslims peers. One day about one year after the 9/11, I called my Hindu friend to a restaurant and ordered pork. He was in a daze. Because of me, he never ever brought pork home although I always cooked beef which my Hindu friend never touched because of the prohibition of his religion. I did not know when I had left Islam but that day formalized and ascertained that I was not a Muslims any more.

A mindful distraction for pain and depression


Irish Times

Dublin, Ireland -- CAN THE WAY you chew a raisin affect the way you experience pain? Trials at St James's and AMNCH (Tallaght) Hospitals in Dublin are beginning to look at how "mindfulness meditation" can be used to help people cope with a diverse range of problems including chronic pain, depression, anxiety, cardiac difficulties and even psoriasis.

"Mindfulness is a secular form of meditation . . . [and] . . . is useful for anyone going through stress and strain in life, which is probably everybody," explains Dr Noirin Sheahan, who has been practising mindfulness meditation for 20 years.

"In 2004, I realised that it was being used clinically . . . [and] . . . about a year ago, a consultant in pain medicine, Dr Connail McCrorey, asked me to teach his patients with chronic pain mindfulness," says Sheahan.

So what is mindfulness meditation? To most, these words conjure up images of Eastern spirituality, incense sticks and chanting. However, while the roots of it are indeed in Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, it's use in its present form started with the work of a US molecular biologist.

Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher who specialised in the mind-body interaction, had been practising Zen Buddhism for many years. He realised that "what he had learned in terms of coping with the difficulties in life . . . could be applied in society as a whole outside of Buddhism", according to Sheahan.

"He felt that the place where the difficulty of life is most manifest is in hospitals where people are trying to cope with disease, chronic illness, maybe even terminal illness." As a result, "he developed an eight-weeks course . . . [in which] there is no chanting, no candles, incense, etc."

The first session begins with the simple task of chewing a raisin. Most people chew and swallow it without any real memory of it having been in their mouth.

The eight, two-and-a-half-hour, weekly training sessions involve learning a state of "relaxed alert attentiveness", says Sheahan.

For the past year, patients referred to McCrorey for help with pain brought on by a range of problems including arthritis, fibromyalgia, cancer and injuries following accidents have been referred to Sheahan, with ages ranging from 18 to 70.

Although in its early stages, results already look promising, which backs-up published findings for patients with chronic pain.

"Kabat-Zinn found that [the patients'] level of pain was reduced after a mindfulness course . . . and it also reduced anxiety and depression." These results were maintained for up to four years, according to Sheahan.

Mindfulness has been combined with conventional Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in the UK for treating depression and anxiety. This model (known as MCBT) has also been used with very positive results at St James's.

Intriguingly, Kabat-Zinn has found that the rate of healing in patients with psoriasis undergoing ultraviolet treatment was quicker for those engaged in mindfulness practice.

•To find out more about mindfulness meditation, contact Dr Noirin Sheahan at nsheahan@stjames.ie.

• Ashok Jansari is based at the University of East London and was on placement at The Irish Times as a British Association for the Advancement of Science Media Fellow

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

JUBU


KRON-TV

They're Jews by birth who practice Buddhism as adults.

Since the late 1960s, a many Americans have looked to the East for spiritual traditions. In this quest, a large number of Jews have found a connection with Buddhist philosophy. For many, Buddhism makes spirituality more tangible through meditation and yet does not conflict with Jewish traditions. These individuals are often called JUBUs – Jews by birth who turned to Buddhist practices in search of a spiritual element they feel is lacking in American Judaism. It's been estimated that about 30 percent of American Buddhists are Jewish by birth.

Specifically, many of these JUBUS say Buddhism helps them to better cope with the Jewish legacy of suffering. The Jewish history of persecution, which started in Biblical times, has continued into this century with anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Also, it’s been said that Judaism in the 20th Century lacked much spirituality because it was primarily focused on healing from the atrocities of World War II. Buddhism is attractive to some Jews because it is a simple, accessible philosophy of suffering that does not require them to abandon Judaism.

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a number of prominent Buddhist teachers who are also Jews. The Rabbi of Congregation Beth Shalom, Alan Lew, spent years studying Buddhism before becoming a rabbi. Norman Fisher, the co-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, is Jewish as is the co-founder of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Sylvia Boorstein.

Rabbi Lew in particular has expounded on the Buddhist-Jewish dynamic. For years he's lead meditation at his synagogue. And more recently, Lew is about to open a Jewish meditation center where he teaches Jews how to meditate using a Buddhist style practice. The rabbi is also the author of "One God Clapping," a book that chronicles his experiences in both religions.


UPDATE

Rabbi Lew's Jewish meditation center is now open in San Francisco. He promoted the center while speaking at the Bay Area premiere of the film, "Jews and Buddhism," a new work by filmmaker Bill Chayes. The film was narrated by Sharon Stone and played at 40 film festivals around the world. It was called "One of the outstanding Documentaries of 1999," by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science.

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္သည္ မြတ္ဆလင္ျပည္နယ္ ျဖစ္သည္


မြတ္ဆလင္ဟာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၊ ခရစ္ယာန္၊ ဟိႏၵဴ ၊ ဂ်ဴး အားလုံးနဲ႔ အဓိကရုဏ္း တခုျပီး တခု လုပ္ေနတာ လူတုိင္းအသိပါ။ တခ်ဳိ႔ ျမန္မာေတြက ဆရာၾကီးအထာနဲ႔ မြတဆလင္ဘာသာကုိ ေလးစားဖုိ႔ ဆုံးမ ၾသ၀ါဒေပးတာေတြ ရွိပါတယ္။ ေလးစားခံေစခ်င္ရင္ တျခားဘာသာေတြလုိပဲ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ေနမွျဖစ္မွာေပါ့။ သူတုိ႔ လူလုိျပဳမူရင္ ဘယ္သူမွ အခ်ိန္ကုန္ခံျပီး ဆန္႔က်င္မွာမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ဘာသာေရးအဓိကရုဏ္းတုိင္း မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြက စခဲ့တာခ်ည္းပါ။ လူနည္းစုျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ အခ်ိန္မွာလည္း တျခားဘာသာေတြကုိ ရန္ရွာတာ မၾကာခဏပါပဲ။

2005 တုံးက ဆုိရင္ အိႏၵိယမွာ မြတ္ဆလင္ တစ္ေကာင္ ဘတ္စကားကုိ အက္ဆစ္ပုလင္းနဲ႔ ေပါက္ခဲ့တယ္။ ခရီးသည္ ၁၁ ေယာက္ ထိခုိက္ျပီး ၄ ေယာက္ မ်က္လုံးဆုံးရွဳံးခဲ့တယ္ဗ်ာ။ ဟိႏၵဴမ်ားမွ ပလီ ၂ ခုကုိ မီးတင္ရွဳိ႔ျခ်င္းနဲ႔ တု႔ံျပန္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ (ကုလားျပည္က မြတ္ဆလင္-ဟိႏၵဴ အဓိကရုဏ္း ေနာက္ကြယ္မွာ နအဖ ပတ္သက္ေနပါတယ္။ အဓိကရုဏ္းျဖစ္တုိင္း နအဖကုိ အျပစ္တင္ရတာ အလြယ္ဆုံးပါ) ကုိယ္ကလည္းရန္စေသးတယ္။ တဖက္က မခံႏုိင္လုိ႔ ျပန္လုပ္ရင္ မ်က္ရည္ေလး ကလည္ ကလည္နဲ႔ မြတ္ဆလင္မုိလုိ႔ အႏွိမ္ခံရတယ္ဆုိျပီး ေျပာဆုိျပန္တယ္ဗ်ာ။ တျခားဘာသာေတြ တီဗီေပၚမွာ ငုိျပတာ ျမင္ဖူးလုိ႔လား? သူတုိ႔ပဲ ငုိလုိက္၊ ရယ္လုိက္၊ ေအာ္လုိက္နဲ႔ အရူးေတြလုိလုိ ငေၾကာင္ေတြလုိလုိ ျပဳမူေနတာပဲ။ (သတင္းအျပည့္အစုံ )

ဒီေကာင္ေတြကုိ လူလုိ သေဘာထားတဲ့ က်ဳပ္တုိ႔ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံမွာ ဘာေတြလုပ္လဲ ေလ့လာၾကည့္ပါ။ မိန္းခေလးေတြကုိ မုဒိမ္းက်င့္တယ္။ အမ်ဳိးသမီးေလးေတြကုိ ဖ်က္ဆီးႏုိင္တဲ့ ေခြးေတြကုိ ပလီက ဆုေငြေပးပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာမိန္းခေလးေတြကုိ အက်င့္ကိကၡာမရွိဘူးဆုိျပီး ပလီက စာေစာင္ေတြမွာ ထည့္ေရးတယ္။ သူမ်ားႏုိင္ငံမွာ ခုိကပ္ျပီး အိမ္ရွင္ကုိ ေစာ္ကားတာပဲဗ်ာ။ ဒီေကာင္ေတြ လူလုိျပဳမူတာ တစ္ခုမွ မရွိဘူး။ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ေမြးဖြားလုိ႔ဆုိျပီး အခြင့္အေရးေတာ့ တျခားလူေတြနဲ႔ တန္းတူ လုိခ်င္တယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ မြတ္ဆလင္ႏုိင္ငံနဲ႔ စစ္ျဖစ္ရင္ မြတ္ဆလင္ဘက္က ပါမယ္ဆုိပဲ။ အဲလုိေကာင္မ်ဳိးေတြ လူအခြင့္အေရးနဲ႔ ထုိက္တန္သလား?

အခုလဲ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္က ေခြးေတြကုိ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာနာမည္ တပ္ျပီး ရခုိင္ေဒသ ပုိ႔ဖုိ႔ၾကိဳးစားေနျပီ။ ျမန္မာအမ်ားစုကေတာ့ ကုလားကုိ ေလွ်ာ့တြက္ေနတယ္ဗ်ာ။ ေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက စိတ္ေအး လက္ေအးျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ တခ်ဳိ႔ကေတာ့ ေကာက္ရုိးမီးလုိပါပဲ တစ္ရက္ ႏွစ္ရက္ပဲ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာအေရးကုိ အားတက္တေရာ ဆန္႔က်င္ပါတယ္။ ခဏာၾကာေတာ့ ေမ့ေပ်ာက္ကုန္တယ္။ အဲလုိေတာ့ မရဘူးဗ်။ ေရရွည္လုပ္ရမယ့္အေရးပါ။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ၂ ေယာက္ကေတာ့ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာအေရးကုိ ေတာ္ေတာ္ကုိ စုိးရိမ္တယ္။ ေသျခာေလ့လာၾကည့္ရင္ သူတုိ႔က လူနည္းစုဆုိေပမယ့္ အားသာခ်က္ေတြရွိေနပါတယ္။
၁။ ဒီမုိျမန္မာေတြရဲ့ ေထာက္ခံ မွဳရရွိထားပါတယ္။ (ဒီမုိျမန္မာအားလုံး မဟုတ္ပါ။ နအဖလူေတြအေနနဲ႔ ဒီမုိေတြအားလုံးကုိ ၀ါးလုံးရွည္နဲ႔ ရမ္းဖုိ႔ေတာ့ မစဥ္းစားပါနဲ႔။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ၂ ေယာက္ ဒီမုိျမန္မာေတြဘက္က ကာကြယ္ဖုိ႔အသင့္ပါ)
၂။ ဒီမုိမီဒီယာေတြက ျမန္မာျပည္က ေလွစီးဒုကၡသည္ေတြဆုိတဲ့ ေခါင္းစဥ္နဲ႔ ၀ါဒျဖန္႔ေပးေနတယ္
၃။ ကုလားေတြက ေငြေၾကးျပည့္စုံတယ္။ ေငြရွိေတာ့ အလုပ္တြင္က်ယ္တာေပါ့။ ၀န္ထမ္းေတြကုိ ေပးေကြ်းျပီး လုပ္ကုိင္လုိ႔ရတယ္။
၄။လူအခြင့္အေရးကုိ အကာအကြယ္ယူျပီး ႏုိင္ငံတကာရဲ႕ အကူအညီကုိ ရထားပါတယ္။
၅။ ျပည္တြင္းနဲ႔ ျပည္ပမွာ မြတ္ဆလင္ အဖြဲ႔အစည္းေတြ ရွိေနပါတယ္။ သူတုိ႔က နည္းေပါင္းစုံ အသုံးခ်ျပီး ကူညီႏုိင္ပါတယ္။
၆။ စည္းလုံးျပီး ပုိမုိတက္ၾကြပါတယ္။ (ယုတ္မာေကာက္က်စ္ဖုိ႔ဆုိရင္ အင္မတန္စည္းလုံးတယ္။ ဗုံးခြဲ၊ စစ္ျဖစ္တဲ့ ကိစၥတုိင္း မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြ ပတ္သက္ေနပါတယ္။ လူသားအက်ဳိးျပဳလုပ္ငန္းေတြမွာေတာ့ မြတ္ဆလင္ရွာလုိ႔ မေတြ႔ပါ)

သူတုိ႔ဘက္မွာ အားသာခ်က္ေတြ ရွိေနပမယ့္ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ဘက္မွာေတာ့ စိတ္ပ်က္ဖြယ္ေတြနဲ႔ ျပည့္ႏွက္ေနတယ္။
၁။ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာအေရးကုိ လက္ေတြ႔ ဆန္႔က်င္လုိတဲ့သူ မရွိပါဘူး။ တေန႔ကုိ ၂ နာရီေလာက္ သတင္းေတြ နားေထာင္၊ ဘေလာ့တြဖတ္ျပီး အခ်ိန္ျဖဳံးပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ၅ - ၁၀ မိနစ္ေလာက္ မြတ္ဆလင္ဆန္႔က်င္ေရးမွာ ကူညီလုပ္ကုိင္ဖုိ႔ စိတ္မ၀င္စားပါဘူး။

၂။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ေတြက လုံး၀ မစည္းလုံးဘူးျဖစ္ေနတယ္။ မိမိတုိင္းရင္းသား အေရး၊ မိမိေခါင္းေဆာင္အေရး၊ မိမိ၀ါဒအေရးပဲ ဦးစားေပးတယ္။ ကရင္က ကရင္အတြက္၊ ကခ်င္ ကလဲ ကခ်င္အတြက္၊ ရခုိင္ကလဲ ရခုိင္အတြက္၊ ဗမာကလဲ ဗမာအတြက္ ပဲ စိတ္၀င္စားပါတယ္။ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာကိစၥကုိ ရခုိင္ကိစၥလုိ႔ တျခားတုိင္းရင္းသားေတြက ခံယူထားပါတယ္။

၃။ ႏုိင္ငံေရးသမားေတြက ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာကိစၥအေပၚမွာ ေျဖာင့္မတ္စြာ မလုပ္ပါဘူး။ ႏုိင္ငံေရး အျမတ္ထုတ္ဖုိ႔ပဲ ၾကိဳးစားေနပါတယ္။ နအဖဘက္က ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာအေရးအေၾကာင္းျပျပီး ဒီမုိသမားအားလုံးကုိ ထုိးႏွက္ေနတယ္။ ဒီမုိသမားေတြကလည္း နအဖကုိ ႏုိင္ငံတကာ အလယ္မွာ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာကုိ အသုံးျပဳျပီး လူအခြင့္အေရးခ်ဳိးေဖါက္ေနတယ္လုိ႔ လိမ္ညာ လုပ္ကုိင္ေနပါတယ္။ တုိင္းရင္းသားအဖြဲ႔ေတြကေတာ့ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအျမတ္ ထုတ္ႏုိင္တဲ့ နည္းလမ္းမေတြ႔လုိ႔ ေဘးမွာပဲ ထိုင္ေနပါတယ္။

၄။ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာအေရးကုိ စိစစ္ရမယ့္ ၀န္ၾကီးဌာနေတြမွာ အေတြ႔အၾကဳံရွိ ၀န္ထမ္းေတြက ေအာက္ေခ်မွာပဲ လုပ္ကုိင္ေနရပါတယ္။ အေရးၾကီးတဲ့ေနရာေတြမွာ စစ္သားေတြကပဲ ခ်ယ္လွယ္ေနတယ္။ လုပ္ငန္းေတြဟာ ထိေရာက္မွဳ လုံး၀ မရွိပါဘူး။ ဒီအထဲလဒ္စားတဲ့ ျပႆနာကလဲ ေတာ္ေတာ္ကုိ ေၾကာက္မက္ဖြယ္ပါ။

၅။ ဦးသန္းေရႊ၊ ဦးေမာင္ေအးနဲ႔ ဦးသန္းစိန္ တုိ႔ေတြဟာ အသက္အရြယ္ ၾကီးေနပါျပီ။ ေခါင္းအပူမခံႏုိင္လုိ႔ ပီးစလြယ္လုပ္ မယ့္အေျခအေနရွိႏုိင္ပါတယ္။

၆။ ထုိင္း၊ မေလးရွား အစုိးရေတြက သူတုိ႔ဆီက လူလိမ္ကုလားေတြကုိ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ ျပန္ပုိ႔ဖုိ႔လုပ္ရတာ ခက္ခဲပါတယ္။ ႏုိင္ငံေရးမတည္မျငိမ္ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဘက္ကုိ ပုိ႔ရတာပုိလြယ္ပါတယ္။ လူအခြင့္အေရးေလးစားပါဆုိတဲ့ စကားလုံးလွလွေလးနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဘက္ကုိေခြးေတြ လက္ခံခုိင္းေနတယ္။ နအဖအေနနဲ႔ သူတုိ႔ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအက်ဳိးအတြက္ လက္ခံေကာင္း လက္ခံႏုိင္ပါတယ္။ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ကုိ ေျမငွားျပီး ေငြရွာေနတဲ့ နအဖကုိ မယုံရဲတာ အမွန္ပါ။

၇။ လူအခြင့္အေရးအဖြဲ႔ေတြကလည္း လွဳပ္ရွားမွ ေထာက္ပံ့ေငြရမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ေငြမ်က္ႏွာၾကည့္ျပီး ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာေတြကုိ နအဖ လက္ခံေအာင္ ဖိအားေပးလွဳပ္ရွားေနပါတယ္။


က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ဘက္မွာ စိတ္ပ်က္ဖြယ္အမ်ားၾကီးပါပဲ။ ကုလားေတြဘက္က အေျခအေနေတြ ပုိျပီးေကာင္းေနတယ္။ အလုပ္တစ္ခုလုပ္ရင္ လူအေရအတြက္က အေရးမၾကီးဘူးေနာ္။ အရည္အခ်င္းက အဓိကပဲဗ်။ ဒီအတုိင္းဆက္သြားရင္ ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္ဟာ မြတ္ဆလင္ျပည္နယ္ ျဖစ္သြားမွာ။ ခင္ဗ်ားတုိ႔ေတြ ငါက ဗမာ၊ ငါက ကရင္၊ ငါက ရွမ္း၊ ငါက ကခ်င္၊ ငါက ခရစ္ယာန္ပဲ ဆုိတာေတြၾကည့္ေနဦးမလား? ဒီဟာက ရခုိင္ကိစၥ ပဲ ငါ့ကိစၥမဟုတ္ဆုိျပီး ျငိမ္ေနမယ္ဆုိရင္ေတာ့ မြတ္ဆလင္ ရခုိင္ကုိရသြားရင္ ခင္ဗ်ားတုိ႔ေတြ အားလုံးအသတ္ခံရပါမယ္။ ခရစ္ယာန္ေတြလဲ အမ်ဳိးျဖဳတ္ခံရပါမယ္။ ေျခာက္ေနတာ မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ခင္ဗ်ားတုိ႔ ခရစ္ယာန္ေတြ အင္ဒုိနီးရွားမွာ ႏွစ္တုိင္း အသတ္ခံေနရတာ အသိဆုံးပါ။ ေရႊတိဂုံေစတီၾကီးဟာလည္း ဖ်က္ဆီးခံရမယ္။


ဘာလုပ္သင့္လဲ?


ခင္ဗ်ားတုိ႔ သတိထားရမွာ ဒီမုိမီဒီယာေတြနဲ႔ ဒီမုိေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြဟာ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာကိစၥမွာ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ဘက္က မဟုတ္ဘူး။ ကုလားေတြဘက္ကေန ျဖစ္ေနျပီ။ သူတုိ႔ကုိ အားကုိးလုိ႔မရဘူးဆုိတာ အက်ယ္ရွင္းဖုိ႔ မလုိဘူးထင္ပါတယ္။

ဒီေတာ့ . . . . အခုလုိပဲ ေဘးကေန ပြဲၾကည့္ ပရိတ္သတ္အျဖစ္ ဆက္လုပ္မလား? ကုလားေတြလိမ္ေနတာကုိ ေဒါသထြက္ေတာ့ ဘာအက်ဳိးရွိလဲ? ကုလားေတြ မုဒိမ္းက်င့္တဲ့အခ်ိန္မွ ကုလားကုိဆဲမွာလား? ကုလားေတြ တုိင္းျပည္ထဲ ၀င္မလာေအာင္ တတ္စြမ္းတေရြ႔မကူညီပဲ၊ သူတုိ႔ ၀င္လာျပီး လူသတ္ မဒိမ္းက်င့္မွ အေဖကယ္ပါ၊ အေမကယ္ပါ လုပ္မလား? ဒါမွမဟုတ္ . . . ရခုိင္ကုိ မြတ္ဆလင္ျပည္နယ္အျဖစ္ ေျပာင္းလဲတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွ ျပည္တြင္းစစ္လုပ္မလား? ေျဖေပးပါ။

ပြင့္ပြင့္လင္းလင္းေျပာရရင္ ျမန္မာလူငယ္ေတြရဲ႕ စိတ္ထားကုိလုံး၀ အားမရဘူး။ မသိမ့္သိမ့္အိတုိ႔ လုပ္ထားတဲ့ petition မွာ ဒီေန႔အထိ လူ ၅၆ေယာက္ပဲ လက္မွတ္ထုိးထားတယ္။ လက္မွတ္ထိုးတယ္ဆုိတာ အခ်ိန္လည္းေပးရတာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ တကယ္ဆုိရင္ “သူတုိ႔ေတြက ႏုိင္ငံအတြက္ ကုိယ့္ထမင္းကုိစားျပီး ဂ်ီးေတာ္ႏြားေက်ာင္းေနတာပဲ” လုပ္ရတဲ့သူ အားရွိေအာင္ လက္မွတ္ေလးထုိးေပးလုိက္မယ္ဆုိတဲ့ စာနာတဲ့စိတ္မ်ဳိး မရွိဘူး။ အဲဒီ petition ကုိ တျခားလူေတြဆီလက္ဆင့္ကမ္းျပီး လက္မွတ္ထုိးခုိင္းတာလဲ မလုပ္ဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔လည္း ဆရာၾကီးေတြလုိျပဳမူေနတာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ အိပ္ခ်ိန္၊ စာၾကည့္ခ်ိန္၊ အလုပ္လုပ္ခ်ိန္ေတြကုိ ေလွ်ာ့ျပီး မြတ္ဆလင္ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး လုပ္ေနပါတယ္။ တျခားျမန္မာေတြကုိ မြတ္ဆလင္ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး ဆီပုံးေတြမွာ ေျပာဆုိဖုိ႔၊ ဘေလာ့ ေထာင္ဖုိ႔ ၊ ေဆာင္းပါးေရးဖုိ႔၊ ကဗ်ားေရးဖုိ႔ ၊ အသိမိတ္ေဆႊေတြကုိ စည္းလုံးဖုိ႔ အမ်ဳိးမ်ဳိးတုိက္တြန္း ေနပါတယ္။ လုံး၀ မကူညီဘူး။ အဲလုိေတာ့ မျဖစ္သင့္ဘူးဗ်ာ။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အိပ္ပ်က္ခံျပီး လုပ္လုိ႔ရလာတဲ့ ရလဒ္က ဆီပုံးမွာ ေန႔စဥ္ အဆဲခံရတာပဲရွိတယ္။

ေနာက္ဆုံးဗ်ာ ေဆာင္းပါး မေရးတတ္ဘူး၊ သူငယ္ခ်င္းေတြကုိ မစည္းလုံးႏွဳိင္ဘူး၊ မြတ္ဆလင္ဆန္႔က်င္ေရးလဲ မေျပာဆုိတတ္ဘူး ဆုိရင္ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ဘေလာ့ ၃ ခုကုိ လူသိေအာင္ ကူညီဖုိ႔ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံခဲ့ပါတယ္။ လုံး၀ လုိက္နာေဆာင္ရြက္တဲ့သူ မရွိပါဘူး။ ဒီေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အၾကံကုိ သေဘာမတူလုိ႔ အေကာင္အထည္ မေဖၚေပးတာလုိ႔ မွတ္ယူပါတယ္။ သေဘာမတူလဲ ျပႆနာ မရွိပါဘူး။ ခင္ဗ်ားတုိ႔ ဦးေဆာင္ပါ။ အဓိက မြတ္ဆလင္၀ါဒကုိ အျမစ္ကေန လွန္ျပစ္ဖုိ႔ပဲ မဟုတ္လား? မြတ္ဆလင္ျပဳတ္က်ေရးနဲ႔ ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာ ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး အစီအစဥ္ကုိ စဥ္းစားေပးပါ။ ျပီးရင္ ကုိဟာဂ်ီ၀က္စလီ ထံ email ပုိ႔ျပီးေပးရင္ သူတုိ႔ ဘေလာ့မွာ တင္ေပးပါလိမ့္မယ္။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ၂ ေယာက္ ေနာက္က လုိက္ပါမယ္။ တစ္ပါတ္အတြင္းျပီးေအာင္ စဥ္းစားေပးပါလုိ႔ ေမတၱာရပ္ခံပါတယ္။



ျမန္မာျပည္အတြက္
ေတာသားႏွစ္ေယာက္

မြတ္ဆလင္ ဘ၀ႏွင့္ စရုိက္

ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၊ ခရစ္ယာန္၊ ဟိႏၵဴေတြဟာ သတင္းေတြထဲမွာ ျမင္ရရင္ သူတုိ႔ ဘာသာေရးအခမ္းအနားေတြကုိ ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္စြာ လုပ္ရင္း ဘ၀ေတြဟာ သာယာေနပါတယ္။ မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြဘ၀ကေတာ့ လမ္းေဘးက ေခြးေလာက္ေတာင္ စိတ္ခ်မ္းသာမွဳမရွိပါဘူး




တျခားဘာသာေတြက လမ္းေပၚမွာ စုရင္ ေပ်ာ္ပြဲရႊင္ပြဲအတြက္ပါ၊ ကုလားေတြစုရင္ ဟစ္ေအာ္ ဆႏၵျပျပီး ဆူညံဖုိ႔ျဖစ္တယ္။




လူဘ၀က ငုိတာနဲ႔စျပီး ငုိတာနဲ႔အဆုံးသတ္တယ္ဆုိေပမယ့္ . . . မေသခင္မွာ ေပ်ာ္ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ရြင္ပါပဲ။ မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြက အခ်ိန္ျပည့္ငုိယုိေနရတာပါ။





ကုလားေတြက သည္းခံရင္ေၾကာက္တယ္ထင္ျပီး လူကုိေဆာ္ကားတယ္။ ျပန္လုပ္ရင္ေတာ့ အင္မတန္ကုိ ေၾကာက္တတ္ပါတယ္။ သူတုိ႔ခံရျပီဆုိရင္ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရးဆုိတာ ပါးစပ္က လုံး၀ကုိ မခ်ေတာ့ဘူး။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ႏုိင္ငံမွာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကုိ အၾကိမ္မ်ားစြာ ေဆာ္ကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။ အခုမြတ္ဆလင္ကုိ တကယ္ကုိ အျမစ္ကေနလွန္မယ္လုပ္ေတာ့ မ်က္ရည္ေလး၀ဲ ျပီး. .. ဘာသာေရးကုိ မဖ်က္ေကာင္းဘူးဆုိျပီး အေျခာက္သံနဲ႔ ေျပာေနပါျပီ။




ေခြးေသ၊ ၀က္ေသ ေသရတဲ့ အျဖစ္ဟာ မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြအတြက္ မထူးဆန္းပါဘူး




တျခားဘာသာ၀င္ေတြရဲ့ အေဆာက္အဦးေတြကုိ ဖ်က္ဆီးပါတယ္။ လူေတြကုိ အရွင္လတ္လတ္ မီးရွဳိ႔သတ္ပါတယ္။ တျခားဘာသာေတြကုိ သူတုိ႔ႏုိင္ငံေတြမွာ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ကုိးကြယ္ခြင့္မေပးပါဘူး။ ဘယ္ေလာက္ပဲ ယုတ္မာေနပါေစ . . . မြတ္ဆလင္ကုိ ေ၀ဖန္ရင္ မေကာင္းဘူးဆုိပဲ။




ယုတ္ည့ံသည့္ မြတ္ဆလင္ကုိ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၊ ခရစ္ယာန္၊ ဂ်ဴး၊ ဟိႏၵဴ အားလုံးပူးေပါင္းျပီး အျဖစ္ျဖဳတ္ဖုိ႔ အခ်ိန္တန္ပါျပီ





မြဆလင္ရဲအေဖ ဂ်ဴးေတြ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ကုိးကြယ္ရင္ JuBu လုိ႔ေခၚပါတယ္


မြတ္ဆလင္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ မုိႏွာမက္ဟာ တဏွာရူးတစ္ေကာင္ပါ။ လူက်င့္၀တ္ဆုိတာ လုံး၀ မရွိတဲ့သူေပါ့။ သူတည္ေထာင္တဲ့ မြတ္ဆလင္ဘာသာဆုိတာ ဖာသည္မ ဖင္ကထြက္တဲ့ ကေလးတစ္ေယာက္နဲ႔ မျခားပါဘူး။ အဲဒီကေလးမွာ အေဖေတြမ်ားသလုိပဲ မြတ္ဆလင္ဘာသာကလည္း ဘာသာေပါင္းစုံက အမူအက်င့္ေတြ ခုိးယူေပါင္းစပ္ထားတာပါ။ ဂ်ဴးကလဲ မြတ္ဆလင္ရဲ့ အေဖစာရင္းထဲမွာပါ၀င္ေနပါတယ္။ မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြ အေဖေတာ္ထားတဲ့ ဂ်ဴးအမ်ားစုဟာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ ၀င္ေတြျဖစ္ကုန္ပါျပီ။ တခ်ဳိ႔လည္း ဗုဒၶဘာလုံး၀ေျပာင္းျပစ္သလုိ တခ်ဳိ႔ကေတာ့ ဂ်ဴးလဲကုိးကြယ္.. ဗုဒၶအဆုံးအမလည္းခံယူပါတယ္။ ဂ်ဴးကေန ဗုဒၶဘာသာဘက္လုံး၀ ေျပာင္းလာသူေရာ၊ ဂ်ဴးနဲ႔ဗုဒၶဘာသာကုိပါ ျပိဳင္တူ ကုိးကြယ္သူ ၂ မ်ဳိးစလုံးကုိ JuBu လုိ႔ပဲအၾကမ္းဖ်င္း ေခၚေ၀ၚပါတယ္။ အေမရိကန္နဲ႔ ကေနဒါက Jew ေတြက JuBu ေတြမ်ားပါတယ္။

Los Angeles Times


At One With Dual Devotion

The altar in Becca Topol's living room carries a statue of Buddha and a garden stone painted with the Hebrew word for peace, shalom.

In April she celebrated Passover with a "Zen Seder" feast that opened with a modified Haggada narrative comparing Israel's exodus from Egypt to Buddha's liberation from suffering.
"I'm a Jewish Buddhist -- a JuBu," said Topol, 37. "My Buddhist practice has actually made me a stronger Jew."

While Buddhism has enriched Topol's Judaism -- giving her a deeper sense of spirituality -- it has produced confusion in fellow JuBu David Grotell. Grotell, 41, is so worried about breaking Judaism's ban against idol worship that "although I have a meditation spot in my home, as a Jew, I just can't allow myself to put a statue of Buddha there."

Grotell's conundrum and Topol's confidence show how diverse the JuBu experience can be -- even inside one Zen Buddhist center in Santa Monica. They also underline how a new, American hybrid of Buddhism is blossoming, fed by a large representation of Jewish practitioners.

No one knows for certain how many JuBus there are; the last surveys were conducted in the 1970s. A large majority of the 3 million Buddhists in the United States are Asian, but by some estimates, at least 30% of all newcomers to Buddhism are Jewish. (By comparison, U.S. Jews number 6 million.)

Alan Lew, who studied Buddhism for a decade before changing course to become a rabbi, calls the paradoxical blend of Judaism, which bows to one God, and Buddhism, which has no supreme being, "a fruitful and beautifully creative meeting of two religious streams that came together in the United States."

"Most people don't go very far into Buddhism; they just want to feel a little better," said Michael Shiffman, founder of L.A. Dharma, a nonsectarian Buddhist organization in Los Angeles. "But can you be Jewish and not believe in God? Good question."

Others, however, would say it all depends on an individual's definition of God.

Essentially, Buddhism creates a solitary and quiet path away from suffering and toward a moral life based on an all-inclusive vision of interconnectedness, wisdom and compassion. A method for achieving that awareness is daily meditation. Being nondogmatic, Buddhism does not require that adherents join anything or reject anything -- even the notion of God.

So in this regard it differs vastly from Judaism, a community-based tradition that relies on observances, laws and prayers such as the mourner's kaddish -- the prayer for the dead -- to connect adherents with a personal god.

So what is that Jews find so attractive about Buddhism?

"Suffering is at the heart of the matter," suggested David Gottlieb, whose autobiographical book "Letters to a Buddhist Jew" examines the life of a "Zen Jew" struggling to resolve his two identities. "Judaism, at its best, embraces suffering and, at its worst, enshrines it. Buddhism explicitly seeks to end suffering, and doesn't look to the past."

Lee Rosenthal, 59, of San Diego found that powerfully appealing. He'd just returned from the Vietnam War and was facing the deaths of his two children shortly after they were born, and then his wife's cancer.

"I couldn't buy into the spiritual answers I was getting from people for why my little babies passed away," he recalled. "But I picked up a book on Buddhism and it spoke to me, streetwise and honest."

"Instead of sugar-coating things, it gave me a plain explanation for why I was suffering -- life is painful and difficult," he said. "It said also you can't run away from it. Deal with it."

As the world's leading Buddhist, the Dalai Lama, likes to say: If there is a problem and there is nothing you can do about it, there's no use worrying. If there is something that can be done, there's no use worrying. And with that understanding can come contentment, even joy.

Rosenthal went on to become a Buddhist priest, which his mother, Rosalie, came to terms with a few years ago in a poignant meeting.

"My mother has Alzheimer's disease and thinks I'm a kid who lived down the street from us in the 1950s," he said. "So one day I asked her, 'Rosalie, how's your son Lee doing?' She sat up straight in her wheelchair and with a proud look in her eye said, 'He's a Buddhist priest.' "

"I got teary-eyed," he said.

Buddhism has a history of adapting to new cultures.

It was founded by Gautama Siddhartha in India about the 6th century BCE and then spread to China, Japan, Korea, Tibet and Vietnam. It arrived in the United States in the late 19th century, and was popularized in the 1950s and '60s by the likes of Buddhist missionary D. T. Suzuki, author Alan Watts and JuBu beat poet Allen Ginsberg.

Now, American Buddhist centers long bound by a tradition of remaining politically neutral are adding priorities that reflect those of their large numbers of often liberal, educated and politically active Jewish members: family life, civil rights and programs to feed, house and educate the poor.

Zen Judaism has spawned a genre of JuBu jokes, such as: "If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?"

A majority of the board of directors of a leading Buddhist magazine, Tricycle: A Buddhist Review, are ethnic Jews. Half of the 10 Buddhist abbots to take charge of the Zen Center of San Francisco over the last 40 years were of Jewish ancestry.

Conversely, more and more synagogues are adopting Buddhist-inspired meditation programs, like the one Rabbi Lew recently co-founded in a blue wood-framed house a few doors down from the conservative Congregation Beth Shalom in San Francisco.

Inside, rows of meditation cushions emblazoned with the Star of David are arranged to face a framed image of the silent first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph.

"We get up from here and walk next door to the synagogue," Lew said, "where instead of reading sutras, we study Torah."

"Meditation is really catching on in the Jewish community," he added. "I have a very extensive travel schedule. And frequently when I talk about meditation techniques, synagogues set out 50 chairs and 300 people show up."

A majority of JuBus, as they call themselves, are baby boomers who were raised in loosely religious families and began to feel unfulfilled in the tumultuous and experimental 1960s and '70s. They joined the legions of other young men and women searching for spiritual nourishment, and ended up turning to Buddhism, a welcoming meditative practice devoid of the cultural stigmas contained in, say, Christianity or Islam.

And many, like Alan Senauke, now a Buddhist priest in the Bay Area, discovered the two traditions combined easily, almost on their own.

Although he no longer celebrates Jewish holy days, with the exception of Passover, Senauke said, "My Judaism and Buddhism are like vines so entangled they are not separate."

"Because of my Jewishness, I'm faulty as a Buddhist, and because of my Buddhism, I can never really be a practicing Jew," he said. With a smile, he added: "I'm comfortable with that."

"Look at it this way," said Senauke, who is also a noted bluegrass guitarist. "I've been playing Southern music for 45 years, but I'll never be a Southerner. I'm a New York Jewish boy. But this is my music, it resonates in my heart and I play it as authentically as I can."

The boom in Buddhism has left some Jewish leaders wondering how they could better serve their people.

"I'm encouraged that people want to find something more spiritual," said Rabbi Bentzion Kravitz of a group called Jews for Judaism.

"But I'm also disillusioned that they have not found it in Judaism. Maybe we haven't done a good enough job of making Jewish mysticism accessible to the masses."

But Marc Lieberman, a San Francisco ophthalmologist who helped arrange a historic dialogue between Jewish leaders and the Dalai Lama in 1989, calls the JuBu phenomenon a fine example of "good old American innovation."

"I'm a healthy mosaic of Judaism and Buddhism," Lieberman said. "Is that fair to either religion? Fair schmair! It's what I am.

"My Jewish side is a tribal sensibility; a reflexive identity with the pain and agony of my people, and the pride and glories of their traditions," he said. "But my Buddhist side asks, 'Does that exclude others in the world?' "

How all those clashing religious notions affect JuBus is illustrated in the paths taken by Lew and his lifelong chum Norman Fischer. In the 1970s, they lived in Buddhist monasteries and studied under Berkeley Zen Master Sojun Mel Weitsman, an ethnic Jew.

Their friends figured that Lew, a freewheeling intellectual, would become a Buddhist priest, and Fischer, who was always a studious rabbi's pet, would become a rabbinical scholar.

Instead, the opposite happened. But their theologically competing spiritual realms have acquired a lot of the curlicues and ambiguities that are characteristic of JuBus.

Lew, for example, said, "I don't believe one can be both Jewish and Buddhist; your central commitment should be clear. Personally, my roots are more Buddhist than Jewish, but my spiritual practice is Jewish."

He also firmly believes in God.

But Fischer, a high-ranking Buddhist priest whose first name is now Zoketsu, suggested that a "person can be a faithful Jew and practice Buddhism."

Topol would tend to agree with Fischer.

Six years of Buddhist training at the Santa Monica Zen Center, where reconciling with one's religion of origin is emphasized, has only deepened her appreciation and respect for her Jewish roots.

"I've found that Buddhism has broken apart my fixed beliefs and notions," she said, "so that I can approach Judaism with a fresh eye."

For Topol, that means viewing biblical descriptions of God's active presence in human affairs not as literal history, but as meditation tools and spiritual instructions for coping with daily life.

Rising from a meditation pillow after a Sunday morning Buddhist service, Topol said, "I even look at the writings of the Old Testament, such as Moses' conversations with God, as Zen koans; that is, as questions and statements to be used as meditation disciplines along the lines of 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' "

What happens next is anyone's guess. But some JuBus are predicting the emergence of a unique American-style Buddhism.

"Jews value education, hard work, innovation and strong commitment to family, all of which they are bringing to American Buddhism," said Charles Prebish, a professor of religious studies at Penn State University. "What you get is some kind of a hybrid.

"But ultimately, it's an ongoing story," added Prebish, who calls himself a Buddhist of Jewish ancestry. "I hope I'm still alive when a lot of this plays out."

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

Mar 23, 2009

ကုလား အဖုိးအဖြားတုိ႔၏ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္တူးေဖၚေတြ႔ရွိ


ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္မွာ လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ ႏွစ္ေပါင္း ၁၅၀၀ ႏွင့္ ၁၇၀၀ မွ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ႏွစ္ခုကုိ တူးေဖၚေတြ႔ရွိထားပါတယ္။ ကုလားေတြရဲ့ မ်ဳိးရုိးစဥ္ဆက္ဟာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကုိ ျငိမ္းခ်မ္းစြာ ကုိးကြယ္ခဲ့တယ္ဆုိတာ စကားႏုိင္ေအာင္ လုေျပာေနတာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ အခု ကုလား မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြဟာ သူတုိ႔အဖုိးကုိသတ္ျပီး အဖြားကုိ မုဒိမ္းက်င့္တဲ့ လူရမ္းကား အာရပ္ေတြကုိ အထင္ၾကီးေနၾကပါတယ္။ သူတုိ႔ အဖုိးအဖြားေတြရဲ့ ဂုဏ္ယူစရာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကုိ လုံး၀ ေမ့ျပစ္လုိက္ပါျပီ။အံၾသဖုိ႔ေကာင္းတာက အာရပ္ေတြကုိ စိတ္မနာတဲ့အျပင္ သူတုိ႔အလုိက် ဗုဒၶဘာသာ အေဆာက္အဦးေတြကုိ ဖ်က္ဆီးျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။ ကုလားေတြကုိ ေမးခ်င္ပါတယ္။ လူဆုိတာ ဖုိးဖြားမိဘ အေမြအႏွစ္ျဖစ္တဲ့ ေရွးေဟာင္းအေဆာက္အဦးေတြကုိ ျမင္တုိင္းဂုဏ္ယူရပါတယ္။ ခင္ဗ်ားတုိ႔ေတြ အခုေက်ာင္းေတာ္ၾကီး တူးေဖၚေတြ႔ရွိမွဳကုိ ဂုဏ္ယူႏုိင္ပါ့မလား? ဒါမွ မဟုတ္ရင္ အဲဒီေက်ာင္းေတာ္ၾကီးကုိ အာရပ္ေတြအလုိက် ဖ်က္စီးခ်င္သလား? ေျဖၾကည့္ပါခင္ဗ်ာ

1,700-Year-Old Buddhist Temple Discovered in Bangladesh
Narinjara

A Buddhist temple dating from around 1,700 years ago has been discovered in a recent archaeological excavation in a northern district of Bangladesh, reports a Bangladesh newspaper.
The Buddhist temple was discovered in Shibganj Township in Bogra District when the archaeological department started excavations there.

The regional director of the archaeological department said the entire temple may be uncovered if the excavation work that started in early December, 2006, runs according to plan.
The newly excavated temple is over 1,700 years old and the lower part of the temple was decorated with arched panels of terra-cotta and ornamental bricks, said an official from the archaeological department.

A brick structure comprised of some small rooms has also been discovered in the temple.
Previously, an approximately 1,500-year-old pre-Pal period Buddhist temple was excavated on the same premises.#

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

Buddhism fastest-growing religion in Singapore


မြတ္ဆလင္ဘာသာၾကီးကေတာ့ ကြဲအက္စျပဳေနပါျပီ။ မြတ္ဆလင္ကထြက္ရင္ ေသဒဏ္ေပးမယ္လုိ႔ တားျမစ္ေနရတဲ့အထိပါပဲ။ မြတ္ဆလင္ဘာသာကုိ ေ၀ဖန္တဲ့ ၀က္ဆုိက္ေတြကုိ မြတ္ဆလင္အစုိးရေတြက ၾကည့္ခြင့္မေပးေတာ့ပါဘူး။ ေျခမကိုင္မိ၊ လက္မကုိင္မိ ျဖစ္ေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္ေပါ့ဗ်ာ။ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကေတာ့ လုံး၀ျပတ္သားတယ္။ ယုံၾကည္ရင္လက္ခံ . . . မယုံၾကည္ရင္ လက္မခံနဲ႔။ ဒီေန႔မၾကိဳက္ဘူးေနာ္.. မနက္ျဖန္ တျခားဘာသာ ေျပာင္းမယ္ဆုိရင္လဲ ရပါတယ္။ ဘာအတားအဆီးမွ မလုပ္ပါဘူး။ မေလးရွားလုိ႔ တရားရုံးတက္ျပီး အေရးဆုိဖုိ႔လဲ မလုိပါဘူး။
လူတစ္ဦးခ်င္းရဲ့ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခြင့္ကုိ အေလးထားတဲ့အတြက္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာဟာ ဖြ႔ံျဖဳိးျပီးႏုိင္ငံေတြမွာ အင္မတန္ကုိ တုိးတက္ေနပါတယ္။ အေနာက္ဖက္မွာသာမကပဲ စင္ကာပူမွာလဲ ဖြံ႔ျဖဳိးမွဳအျမန္ဆုံးဘာသာ ျဖစ္ေနပါျပီ။

DPA, May 19, 2008

Singapore -- Buddhism is the fastest-growing religion in Singapore, particularly among the young and educated, a census conducted by The Straits Times showed Monday.

The number of people aged 15 and over who are Buddhists had jumped from 31 percent of the population in 1990 to 43 percent, or 1.1 million people, 10 years later, making Buddhism the largest religion in the city-state.

The census figures published in the newspaper showed a fourfold jump in Buddhists who were graduates between 1990 and 2000.Membership numbers of Buddhist youth groups have soared.

Converts told the newspaper that the religion offered comfort in the face of uncertainties and disasters. Moreover, they said, it was a constant reminder to look beyond materialism to attain calmness and happiness through meditation and reflection. 'Through Buddhism, I can be a better daughter, a better sister, a better friend and a better colleague,' Hindu-born Tara Melwani, the 43-year-old director of a retailing group, was quoted as saying.

Actress Nadya Hutagalung, 34, born into a Christian family, said she was attracted by the philosophy of Buddhism, according to the newspaper.

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )

Buddhism Helping Westerners Find Respite From A Greedy, Violent And Stressed-out World


အျဖဴေတြကေတာ့ ေကာင္းတယ္ဆုိရင္ လက္ခံ က်င့္သုံးရဲပါတယ္။ အခုဆိုရင္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာရဲ့ အႏွစ္ကုိ ေတြ႔ရွိလုိ႔ ၀ိပႆနာကုိ က်န္းမာေရး၊ စီးပြားေရး၊ လူမွဳေရးနယ္ပယ္ေတြမွာ က်ယ္ျပန္႔စြာ အသုံးျပဳေနပါျပီ။ သူတုိ႔က ဗုဒၶဘာသာကုိ အသုံးခ်ျပီး အက်ဳိးထူးေတြ ခံစားေနတဲ့အခ်ိန္မွာေတာ့ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က ရုပ္၀ထၳဴၾကြယ္၀ေရးကုိသာ ဦးစားေပးေနၾကပါတယ္။ တုိက္ၾကီးၾကီး ကားေကာင္းေကာင္းနဲ႔ အထင္ၾကီးမွဳရေအာင္လုပ္ဖုိ႔ပဲ ၾကိဳးစားေနပါတယ္။ ဒါ့ေၾကာင့္ ျမန္မာ့လူ႔ေဘာင္အတြင္းမွာ ေငြအတြက္ ေကာက္က်စ္စဥ္းလဲမွဳေတြ၊ လိမ္ညာမွဳေတြ တေန႔တျခားတုိးပြားေနပါတယ္။ ဂုဏ္တု ဂုဏ္ျပဳိင္ေတြကလည္း စိတ္ပ်က္စရာ ေကာင္းေအာင္ျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္။ အင္မတန္ မြန္ျမတ္တဲ့ ရိပ္သာ တရားစခန္းေတြကုိ လွဴတဲ့ အလွဴကအစ ဂုဏ္ပကာသန အတြက္သာျဖစ္ေနပါတယ္။ အျဖဴေတြဟာ ေလာဘေတြ၊ ဂုဏ္တု ဂုဏ္ျပဳိင္ေတြနဲ႔ စိတ္ေသာကေတြကုိ ဗုဒၶရဲ့ဓမၼနဲ႔ ျငိမ္းသတ္ေနတယ္ ဆုိတဲ့ သတင္းေလးကုိ တင္ေပးလုိက္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒဖတ္ရင္း က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ လူ႔ေဘာင္ကုိလည္း ဗုဒၶအလုိက် ေနထုိင္ ႏုိင္ေအာင္ ျပဳျပင္ရေအာင္လားဗ်ာ?

Madonna made those little red Kabbalah bracelets cool for five minutes, and Tom Cruise talked up Scientology, but Buddhism firmly remains the religion du jour for Westerners looking for respite from a greedy, violent and stressed out world, according to a University of Western Sydney expert.

Dr Cristina Rocha, an ARC postdoctoral fellow with the UWS Centre for Cultural Research, is the author of 'Zen in Brazil: The Quest for Cosmopolitan Modernity', being launched today.

Dr Rocha says increasing numbers of Australians, like those in other Western countries, are shying away from their religion of birth and instead adopting 'spiritualities of choice'.

"Buddhism is attractive because it provides a powerful antidote to the stress, greed and violence of today's world," says Dr Rocha.

"Buddhism is now the fastest growing religion in Australia, growing 80 per cent between the 1996 and 2001 census. Interestingly, this surge is not only due to migration, but also to large numbers of Australian's converting to Buddhism.

"People from Western cultures are drawn to Buddhism because it is seen as a 'feel good' spirituality - not tied to a particular church or central leader - and is associated with peace, love, happiness, justice and enlightenment.

"Westerners find it gives them tools to cope with the day-to-day, and helps them detach from the rampant consumerism and stresses of their busy lives."

She says Western society's eagerness to embrace Buddhism stands in stark contrast to its misunderstanding, distrust and fear of a religion like Islam, which is labelled by Western media as 'violent' and linked to terrorism.

"One of the reasons for this is the fact the Dalai Lama received a Nobel peace prize in 1989 for his peaceful resistance against the Chinese invasion of Tibet," says Dr Rocha.

Dr Rocha says Western society's flirtation with Buddhism was boosted in the 1960s, thanks to increased levels of migration and exposure to other cultures, and the flower-child generation's willingness to explore things spiritual and alternative.

However, it's grown into a full-blown love affair over the last few years, fuelled along by influential Hollywood stars, the media, and other Zen-loving celebrities.

The fascination has even been given a label by commentators - 'Tibetan chic'.

"Western culture's exposure to Buddhism is so much greater now. Books by the Dalai Lama are bestsellers, and people flock to see and hear him speak as he travels the world. In recent years there have been many movies like 'The Little Buddha', 'Kundun', and 'Seven Years in Tibet', and non-Hollywood films like 'The Cup' and 'Samsra'," says Dr Rocha.

"Celebrities like Richard Gere and the Beastie Boys have used their status to bring attention to the plight of Tibet and its struggle against China; and actress Uma Thurman's father, Robert, who is now a professor at Columbia University, was the first Western Tibetan Buddhist monk and an interpreter for the Dalai Lama."

According to Dr Rocha, increasing numbers of Westerners today want to construct their own spiritual practice; a 'pick and mix' of religious elements that suit them best.

"In contrast to Asia, the way Buddhism has been adopted in the West has meant that individualism is emphasised. Western followers regard meditation as the main practice of Buddhism," she says.

"Westerners see meditation as something you can do alone, any time, anywhere; as if there's no need for a temple, or a priest or monk. This enables an individual to embark on their own spiritual quest for enlightenment."

Dr Rocha says the extent of Buddhism's reach into other cultures is best illustrated by the Brazilian experience, which is the focus of her book.

"Brazil is one of the most predominantly Catholic countries on the planet, yet Buddhism has been experiencing a surge in popularity among the urban, cosmopolitan classes over a number of years," she says.

"In the 1990s, Buddhism in general, and Zen in particular, were adopted by national elites, the media and popular culture as a set of humanistic values to counter the rampant violence and crime in Brazilian society."

'Zen in Brazil: The Quest for Cosmopolitan Modernity' will be launched tonight by Associate Professor Ghassan Hage, from the University of Sydney.

The launch is sponsored by the Japan Foundation and the UWS Centre for Cultural Research (CCR).

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Article adapted by Medical News Today from original press release.
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See the latest news from UWS: http://www.uws.edu.au/about/news/

Contact: Amanda Whibley
Research Australia

(ယုံၾကည္ခ်က္ ။ ။ မုဒိမ္းေကာင္ လူရမ္းကား ၀ါဒကုိ ေဒါသမထြက္ပါနဲ႔… ႏွိပ္ကြပ္ရလုိ႔လဲ ပီတိမျဖစ္ပါနဲ႔. . . ကုလားကုိလဲ လူမ်ဳိးေရး မႏွိပ္ကြပ္ပါနဲ႔ . . အဲဒါေတြက အက်ဳိးမရွိပါဘူး။ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္ ၀ါဒဆုိးၾကီးကုိ ျဖဳိဖ်က္ေရးမွာ ခင္ဗ်ားကုိယ္တုိင္ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္ သဲတစ္ပြင့္အျဖစ္ လုပ္ကုိင္ေရးက လက္ေတြ႔အက်ဆုံးျဖစ္ပါသည္ )