Category: Peace

Happy 90th Birthday His Holiness the Dalai Lama

9/1/2025

His Holiness the Dalai Lama
90th Birthday - Spread Compassion and Loving-Kindness
Atlanta's Tibetan Buddhist Center, Drepung Loseling Monastery at drepung.org

News Coverage NYT HHDL

More about the situation in Tibet from BBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y772jlpgzo

New York Times on the Dalai Lama's Succession plan: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/world/asia/dalai-lama-successor-tibet-china.html?unlocked_article_code=1.T08.-y_G.7ClHbBZ1_VO1&smid=url-share

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Urban Lotus: American Buddhist Folk Music new album streaming - using music as Dharma!

8/17/2025

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More about the creator of the music of Urban Lotus:

Reverend Heng Sure is a senior disciple of Venerable Master Hsuan Hua. When he’s not travelling to deliver talks and lead discussions on topics such Buddhism and Veganism, you’ll find him at home part of the year at Berkeley Buddhist Monastery in California, and the other part at Gold Coast Dharma Realm in Queensland Australia.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, he attended the University of California at Berkeley from 1971-1976, where he was active in theatre and music. After receiving his M.A. in Oriental Languages, he met his teacher, Hsuan Hua, who would later ordain him in 1976 at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas (CTTB ), as “Heng Sure” – a Dharma name which means “Constantly Real.” In 2003, he earned a PhD in Religion from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. He is perhaps best known for a Three Steps One Bow Pilgrimage he made from 1976 to 1979, along 800 miles of the California Coast from Pasadena to CTTB in Ukiah. During his pilgrimage, and for three more years after he arrived at CTTB, he maintained a vow of silence.

Heng Sure began playing guitar at the age of 16, and although he took a break from music while turning his focus towards a monastic life, he returned to the instrument in 2000. Master Hua felt it would be a great way to make the teachings accessible to Western ears, and encouraged Heng Sure to use his musical talents to turn the Dharma Wheel. And so for close to 20 years now, music has played an integral role in his life and teachings. In addition to three CD’s of Buddhist Songs and Stories, he co-produced an instructional banjo DVD, Zen Banjo, drawing on the connections he has found between meditation and music.

As a leading expert on Buddhist Sutras, he works on translating many Mahayana texts from their original Chinese into English. When he’s in Berkeley, he gives weekly Dharma Talks on Saturday evenings at the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, which are also broadcast online .

Listen to Urban Lotus wherever you get music, and more info at
https://www.dharmaradio.org/urban-lotus/

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Discrimination against Asian Americans and Buddhists in the United States

3/5/2021

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Commemorating the Day of Remembrance February 19:

While we are not aware of any Japanese Buddhist temples in Georgia (though there are several groups that practice in various Japanese Buddhist and Zen traditions), it is important for us to mark the historical discrimination that Japanese-Americans and Buddhists faced:

The forced removal and incarceration of roughly 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, into various kinds of confinement sites during WWII began with the arrest of Buddhist priests even before the smoke had cleared at Pearl Harbor. The prewar surveillance of Buddhist temples and the targeting of Buddhist and Shinto priests as threats to national security was based on a long-standing presumption that America is essentially a White Christian nation. The first federal immigration law that targeted a particular group for exclusion was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that deemed the predominantly Buddhist/Taoist Chinese immigrants as the “heathen Chinee,” a group religiously and racially unassimilable. Despite this long history of religion-racial animus, Buddhists drew on their teachings, practice, and community to not only survive the wartime incarceration, but advocate for a vision of America that is multi-ethnic and religiously free. The incarceration experiences of Japanese American Buddhists offer a way to heal and repair America’s racial and religious fractures that endure in different ways even to the present. At a time when the karmic legacy of America’s racial past has put into question what becomes monumentalized, Prof. Williams will outline a major new initiative to remember the names of those incarcerated in the form of a Buddhist monument that he is creating.

Excerpt from: Duncan Ryūken Williams, Professor of Religion/American Studies & Ethnicity/East Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. Williams is the author of the LA Times bestseller American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019)

He will give an academic talk, A REMEMBRANCE OF NAMES: A BUDDHIST MONUMENT TO THE WWII JAPANESE AMERICAN INCARCERATION

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Guan Yin Bodhisattva- She Carries Me (Buddhist Prayer)

8/16/2020

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Guan-Yin is a figure in Buddhism who is said to have more responses than any other figure.
We can rely on her whenever we need any assistance - prayers are efficacious when our hearts and minds are whole-heartedly compassionate.

Rev. Heng Sure sings "She Carries Me" by Jennifer Berezan and tells the story of Gwan Yin Bodhisattva at Teance on 10/28/2014 for a "Tea and Dharma" gathering, a Berkeley Buddhist Monastery community outreach event.

She Carries Me
Melody and Lyric by Jennifer Berezan

She is a boat, she is a light
High on a hill in dark of night
She is a wave, she is the deep
She is the dark where angels sleep
When all is still and peace abides
She carries me to the other side,
She carries me to the other side...
And though I walk through valleys deep
And shadows chase me in my sleep
On rocky cliffs I stand alone
I have no name, I have no home
With broken wings I reach to fly
She carries me to the other side,
She carries me to the other side...
A thousand arms, a thousand eyes
A thousand ears to hear my cries
She is the gate, she is the door
She leads me through and back once more
When day has dawned and death is nigh
She'll carry me to the other side,
She carries me to the other side...

Song here:
https://youtu.be/WitKbWX_voI
and downloadable at http://www.cttbusa.org/audio.asp

Prayer Guan Yin Bodhisattva buddha Hong Kong Pray

Stop Nuclear Proliferation and Arms Race

8/8/2020

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75th Anniversary of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

75 years ago, hundreds of thousands of civilians perished in two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan. Let us work towards a world of peace without the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The current administration is doing just the opposite. We encourage everyone to let your representatives know that spending more money on nuclear weapons and another free for all arms race is not the right choice to ensure the survival of our planet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/opinion/hiroshima-anniversary-nuclear-weapons.html

"We human beings have created many of the problems in today’s world. As long as we have strong negative emotions and we view our fellow beings in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, there will be a tendency to try to destroy them. We must recognise the oneness of humanity, and understand that we will not achieve peace merely through prayer; we need to take action." - His Holiness the Dalai Lama on remembering the victims of warfare throughout time and the nuclear bombs in Japan

https://www.dalailama.com/news/2020/statement-on-the-75th-anniversary-of-the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki

Happy 90th Birthday His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Urban Lotus: American Buddhist Folk Music new album streaming - using music as Dharma!

Discrimination against Asian Americans and Buddhists in the United States

Guan Yin Bodhisattva- She Carries Me (Buddhist Prayer)

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Stop Nuclear Proliferation and Arms Race

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