kindness to ourselves and kindness to others

Buddha Day Festival

On Sunday 4th May, we celebrated our Buddha Day festival in Berkeley St. It was a lovely day with over 50 attending. In the morning, after a session of meditation, we heard 3 talks on episodes which took place around the Buddha’s Enlightenment. First Gunasiddhi told us of the attack by Mara, taking place just before the Enlightenment. She told us how the attacks can be seen as what happens in our minds - particularly during meditation. She got a laugh and murmurs of recognition when she said it can be like that inside our heads and we look around and think everyone else is full of serenity. 

Dave then invoked the moment when Mucilinda, the king of the serpents wrapped his body around the Buddha to shelter him from the storm. Dave emphasised the compassion aspect of this story exhorting us to act with care and compassion towards others, illustrating this with a sharing of how he does that by taking sandwiches to some of Glasgow’s homeless.

The trio of talks were concluded by Karunaradha telling us of the visit from Brahma Sahampati to the newly Enlightened Buddha. She reminded us that had the Buddha not responded to the Brahma’s request that he teach, we would not be sitting together celebrating with our Triratna community.

All three talks were excellent and, for me, they spoke of gratitude and kindness: kindness to ourselves and kindness to others. Sadly, Gunasiddhi’s talk wasn’t recorded due to a technical error but the other two were and will be made available.

Hopefully this will be the last festival that we celebrate in Berkeley St which brings me to a wee update on Woodside crescent.  

 Woodside Crescent

Things are moving along nicely. Recently Maitrinaga organised a day of clearing out more of the rubble and stuff in the basement and making a trip to the dump. They also did some painting. Overall it is certainly looking more like a centre.

The design workshops as mentioned in the last blog and on the website have started. Last Thursday, 8th of May, saw 8 people join Moksadhi and Sarah for the first workshop.  Sunday 11th May, 16 people attended the morning session with most of them staying for the afternoon. I sadly missed all of them as I was on retreat at Taraloka. I heard that they went well with lots of ‘blue-sky’ thinking and exciting ideas. Of course, not everything can be done but it is great to be generating ideas to work from. I’m looking forward to attending the next sessions.

On a final note, in a previous blog I mentioned about the different kulas being set up to deal with the different aspects of the move. I was delighted to see that almost 30 people are involved in one way or another with the transition. I hope that means that the sangha will really feel that Woodside Crescent is their centre and that they can contribute to the healthy life of triratna Glasgow.  

More about the design workshops and kulas in another blog. For now, as always, may all beings be well, may all beings find true happiness and its causes and may all beings be free from suffering.