Swimology by S. N . Goenka

Once a young professor was making a sea voyage. He was a highly educated man with a long tail of letters after his name, but he had little experience of life. In the crew of the ship on which he was travelling was an illiterate old sailor.

Every evening, the sailor would visit the cabin of the young professor to listen to him lecture on many different subjects. He was very impressed with the learning of the young man.

The Buddhist Attitude!

People should not pander to their aggressive instincts. They should uphold the ethical teachings of the religious teachers and display justice with morality to enable peace to prevail.

         Treaties, pacts and peace formula have been adopted and millions of words have been spoken by countless world leaders throughout the world who proclaim that they have found the way to maintain and promote peace on earth. But for all their efforts, they have not succeeded in removing the threat to mankind. The reason is that we have all failed to educate our young to truly understand and respect the need for selfless service and the danger of selfishness. To guarantee true peace, we must use every method available to us to educate youths to practice love, goodwill and tolerance towards others.

            Buddhists should not be the aggressors even in protecting their religion or anything else. They must try their best to avoid any kind of violent act. Sometimes they may be forced to go to war by others who do not respect the concept of the brotherhood of humans as taught by the Buddha. They may be called upon to defend their country from external aggression, and as long as they have not renounced the worldly life, they are duty-bound to join in the struggle for peace and freedom. Under these circumstances, they cannot be blamed for becoming soldiers or being involved in defense. However, if everyone were to follow the advice of the Buddha, there would be no reason for war to take place in this world. It is the duty of every cultured person to find all possible ways and means to settle disputes in a peaceful manner, without declaring war to kill his or her fellow human beings.
  The Buddha did not teach His followers to surrender to any form of evil power be it a human or supernatural being.

Interview

Interveiw on the current situation

Buddhismus und Politik

Fragen: Sollten sich budhistische Mönche politisch engagieren?

Antworten: Burma hat eine lange Geschichte von Mönchen, die sich politisch engagieren, wenn es um das Wohl der Menschen geht. Denn jeden Tag essen wir Mönche Mahlzeiten, die gespendet werden von einer Bevölkerung, die zum Großteil in Armut und Unterdrückung lebt.
Sicher wir buddhistischen Mönche sollten nicht an etwas oder jemanden anhaften. Aber wir leben nicht in völliger Isolation. Wir Mönche leben in Kontakt mit den anderen Mitgliedern der Gesellschaft. Begeht nun jemand irgendwelche Taten, die den Frieden und die Harmonie der Gesellschaft stören, wie können wir dann Frieden und Harmonie in uns selbst haben?

GLÜCK

Das Leben ist nicht immer einfach. Es bedarf großer Anstrengung Geld zu verdienen damit wir es bequem und luxuriös haben. Was auch immer wir tun, tun wir hauptsächlich um glücklich zu sein. Sogar Religion betreiben wir um glücklich zu sein. Werden wir es auch?

Einige Menschen denken dass ein Partner, ein guter geistesverwandter Partner, eine Quelle von Glück ist, und dies kann er tatsächlich auch einige Zeit sein. Die wahre Quelle von Glück findet man aber auch in einer Partnerschaft nicht. Wenn wir aus irgendeinem Grund getrennt sind, was früher oder später der Fall sein wird, fühlen wir uns unglücklich.

FREUNDSCHAFT

Menschen sind von Natur aus soziale Wesen; niemand kann alleine leben. Wir leben nicht für uns allein. Wir leben für einander. Folglich existieren wir ohne die anderen überhaupt nicht. Stell Dir vor es gibt nichts und niemanden, was wären wir dann? Jeder den wir kennen, beeinflusst unser Leben auf irgendeine Weise. Unsere Lebensqualität hängt stark von der Qualität unserer Freundschaften, mit den uns umgebenden Personen, ab.

ဒကာမ ေလး ေဝႏွင္း ႏွင္႔ အၿမင္ ဖလွယ္ၿခင္း

ဒကာမ ေလး ေဝႏွင္း

ႏွင္႔

အၿမင္ ဖလွယ္ၿခင္း

  

ဒကာမေလး ေဝႏွင္း ဦးဇင္းက ဗုဒၶဘာသာရဟန္းတစ္ပါးျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒကာမေလး ေဝႏွင္းကို ဦးဇင္း ပထမဆံုး သတိထားသိလိုက္ရတာက အဂၤလန္၊ မန္ခ်က္စတာက ေလဘာပါတီကြန္ဖရင့္မွာ ထင္ပါရဲ႕။ ဒကာမ ေလး မိန္႔ခြန္းေျပာတုန္းက စၿပီးသတိထားမိတာပါပဲ။ အဲဒီ ဗီြဒီယိုကို ၾကည့္ၿပီး ဦးဇင္းအေတာ္ေလး အားတက္ခဲ့ မိပါတယ္။ အင္မတန္မွ ဂုဏ္လည္းယူခဲ့မိပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ အဲဒီဗြီဒီယိုကို ၾကည့္ၿပီးေတာ့၊ ဦးဇင္းမ်က္နွာေပၚမွာ မ်က္ရည္တစ္စက္မွ မက်ခဲ့ေပမယ့္၊ ရင္ထဲမွာ မ်က္ရည္အျပည့္ႏွင့္ ဘုန္းႀကီးတန္မဲ့ ဝမ္းနည္းၿပီး ငိုခဲ့ဘူးပါတယ္။ ႀကိတ္ၿပီးေတာ့လည္း ဝမ္းသာမိခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဝမ္းနည္းရတဲ့အေၾကာင္းက ျပည္သူေတြေလးစားတဲ့ ကိုျမေအး၊ ျပည္သူေတြအတြက္ အက်ဥ္းက်ေနတဲ့ ကိုျမေအး၊ ဒကာမေလး ခ်စ္တဲ့ ေလးစားတဲ့ ဒကာမေလးရဲ႕ ဖခင္နဲ႔ ေကြကြဲၿပီး ခြဲခြာေနရတာ သိလိုက္ရလို႔ ဝမ္းနည္းတာပါ။ ဝမ္းသာမိတာက ဒကာမေလးက အားမာန္အျပည့္နဲ႔၊ ခံစားမႈအျပည့္နဲ႔၊ ၾကားရတဲ့သူေတြ ၾကက္သီးေမႊးညွင္းထေလာက္ေအာင္ ေျပာသြားတာကို ျမင္လိုက္ရလို႔ ဂုဏ္ယူဝမ္းသာမိခဲ့တာပါ။ ဒကာမေလး ဟာ ဒို႔ဗမာျပည္က ဒို႔လူမ်ိဳး၊ ဒို႔အားကိုးရေတာ့မယ္ဆိုၿပီး ဝမ္းသာခဲ့တာပါ။ မူစလင္မို႔လို႔၊ ဟိဒၵဴမို႔လို႔၊ ခရစ္ယာန္မို႔လို႔၊ ဗုဒၶဘာသာမို႔လို႔ ဆိုတာ ဦးဇင္းတို႔ရင္ထဲမွာ မရွိခဲ့တာအမွန္ပါ။ ဒကာမေလး ဘယ္ဘာသာကို ကိုးကြယ္ ကိုးကြယ္၊ ကိုယ့္ႏိုင္ငံ ကိုယ့္လူမ်ိဳးအတြက္ ယံုၾကည္ရမယ္၊ အားကိုးရမယ္ဆိုရင္၊ ကိုယ့္ႏိုင္ငံ ကိုယ့္လူမ်ိဳးတိုင္း၊ လူမ်ိဳးအားလံုးက ေလးစားၾကမွာ၊ ၾကည္ညိဳၾကမွာ၊ ခ်စ္ခင္ၾကမွာ၊ အားကိုးၾကမွာ ေျမႀကီးလက္ခတ္မလြဲပါ ဒကာမေလး။

ဒီေနရာမွာ ကိုကိုႀကီးရဲ႕ စကားကို အငွားယူၿပီးေျပာရရင္ "အမ်ိဳးသားေရးဟာ 'ဆား' လိုပါပဲ။ ဆားမပါရင္ ဟင္းမျဖစ္သလို ဆားမ်ားရင္လည္း ဟင္းပ်က္ပါတယ္။"  ဒကာမေလး ဆားခတ္ဖို႔ ေမ့နဲ႔ေနာ္။

Taliban condemn Burmese Muslims’ massacre

Strongly condemning the ongoing massacre of Muslims in Burma (Myanmar), Afghan Taliban on Friday called upon the world to immediately take steps to stop the killings.
       Taliban Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid also urged the Burmese government to immediately stop the grave violation of human rights. Read more

Malaysian PM warns against liberalism, pluralism

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said he supported human rights but "within the boundaries set by Islam",Read more!

WHO KILLED AUNG SAN?

Who really killed Bogyoke Aung San was the British government. It was their plot.
 I suppose there were three reasons why he was killed. Firstly, Bogyoke Aung San was the leader who could organise and unite the whole country so they were afraid of the whole of Burma uniting. This was the main reason. Secondly, Bogyoke Aung San could reunite with the Communist Party of Burma. They were worried about that too. And finally, they supposed that they could handle Burma more easily if they removed him. These were the reasons why he was killed. Read more

Nationalism is like salt!

  အမ်ိဳးသားေရးဟာ “ဆား” လုိပါပဲ။ ဆားမပါရင္ ဟင္းမျဖစ္သလုိ ဆားမ်ားရင္လည္း ဟင္းပ်က္ပါတယ္။ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔က အမ်ိဳးသားေရးကို ခ်ိန္ခ်ိန္ဆဆနဲ႔ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ ႏုိင္ငံရဲ႕ အက်ိဳးစီးပြား၊ အိမ္နီးခ်င္း ႏုိင္ငံေတြနဲ႔ ခ်စ္ၾကည္ရင္းႏွီးတဲ့ ဆက္ဆံေရး၊ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ မိသားစုနဲ႔ ခ်စ္ၾကည္ရင္းႏွီးတဲ့ ဆက္ဆံေရး ဆုိတာေတြကို တၿပိဳင္နက္တည္းမွာ တည္ေဆာက္ၾကရမွာပါ။ link

  တတ္နိုင္သေလာက္ကူညီပါရေစ၊ ဗမာ နိုင္ငံ ႏွင္ ဗမာလူမ်ိဳးေတြ ရဲ့ အေႀကာင္းကို ဂဃနဏ မသိႀကတဲ႔ နိုင္ငံႀကားသားေတြက ဘဂၤလီ အေရးႏွင္႔ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး၊ ဗမာေတြနဲ ဗမာ ဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေတြဟာ ရက္စက္တယ္၊ လူမ်ိဳးေရးခြဲၿခားတယ္လို႔ တဖက္သတ္ ၿမင္ေနႀကပါတယ္။ သူတို႔ဟာ ၆၀(သို႔) ၇၀ ရာခိုင္နုံးၿပည္႔ေတာင္မရွိလွတဲ လူမူေရးရူေထာင္႔တခုထဲ က ေၿပာဆို ကဲရဲ့ေနႀကတာေတြမ်ားပါတယ္။ သမုိင္းရူေထာင္႔၊ ဥပေဒရူေထာင္႔၊ နိုင္ငံေရးရူေထာင္႔၊ အမ်ိဳးသားအရး ရူေထင္႔၊ ဘာတခုမွ မႀကည္႔ဘဲ ေဝဘန္ကဲရဲ့ေနႀကတာ ေတြ႔ရပါတယ္။ အဲဒီလို ေကာင္းေကာင္းနားမလည္ႀကတဲ နိုင္ငံၿခားသား ေတြဟာ ဗုဒၶဘာသာဘုန္းေတာ္ႀကီးေတြအေနနဲ႔ မိမိတို႔ရဲ တိုင္းရင္းသားေတြကို ကဲရဲ့ ေဝဖန္ၿပီး၊ ဘဂၤလီေတြကို ကာကြယ္ ေထာက္ခံ တာကို ေမွ်ာ္လင္႔ေနႀကပါတယ္။ အဲဒါကေတာ ဆင္႔ဟာ ကို ေခြးမွ်ာ္လို ၿဖစ္ေနေတာမယ္ ဆိုတာ သူတို႔ သေဘာ မေပါက္ရွာႀကပါ။ ဒါေပမဲ ဒါဟာ ဒုကၡေယာက္သူကို မသနားလို႔မဟုတ္ပါ၊ ဒုကၡေရာက္သူတိုင္းကိုသနားပါတယ္။ ဂဒါဖီလို၊ ဆဒန္ဟူစိန္လို၊ သန္ေရႊလို ရက္စက္ယုတ္မာသူမ်ားကိုေတာင္သနားပါတယ္။ ဗုဒၶဘုရား ဟာ ေဒဝဒတ္လို ပုဂၢိဳလ္ ကိုေတာင္သနားတတ္တယ္ ဆိုတဲ၊ ဗုဒၶဘာသာေတြရဲ့ စိတ္ကို သူတို႔သေဘာမေပါက္ႀကရွာေပ။ ေဒဝဒတ္ ဒုကၡေရာက္တာ၊ သူငရဲႀကတာ ၿမတ္စြာဘုရားက မသနားလို႔မဟုတ္ဘူးဆိုတာကိုလဲ သူတို႔ေတြ သေဘာေပါက္နိုင္ႀကလိမ့္မည္ မထင္ေပ။ ရွိေစေတာ ရွိေစေတာ၊ ကိုယ္လုပ္စယာရွိတာကိုသာ စိတ္ရွည္ရွည္ထားၿပီ လုပ္ႀကပါစို႔။ link

Judge

Dear sisters and brothers and seekers after truths,

Not to see pleasant is painful and painful is the sight of the unpleasant.

We live in a world that thrives on conflict. Conflict is being rooted in envy and avarice. Where there is conflict, there are people who are sufferings. And when good people/ good-hearted people have heard about these, they try to show their compassion. Compassion covers the emotional or feeling side of our nature. And we try to preach what we feel is true, even without proper understanding. Sometime even we try to force everyone else to accept it. The more we try to make conditions conform to our ideas, the more frustrated we get. 

အမ်ိဳးမာန္တက္ အေၿပာရခက္သူ အေႀကာင္း

ဘုရားရွင္လက္ထက္က တိႆဆိုတဲ ရဟန္းတပါး ရွိခဲ႔ဘူးပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ တိႆဆိုတဲ႔ ရဟန္းဟာ ၿမတ္စြာဘုရား နဲ႔အမ်ိဳးေတာ္တယ္။ (သုေဒၶါဒနမင္းႀကီးရဲ့ ႏွမေတာ္ အမိတာေဒဝီ မိဘုရားရဲ့ သား) ၿဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အရြယ္ေရာက္ၿပီမွ၊ အရြယ္ႀကီးမွ ရဟန္းဘဝ ေရာက္ပါတယ္။ (တနည္း ေတာထြက္ရဟန္း)

ၿပီးေတာ႔ သူရဟန္းဘဝ ေရာက္လာတာပံုကလဲ (သဒၶါပဗၺဇိတ)” ယုံၾကည္ျခင္းေၾကာင့္ ရဟန္းျပဳသူ၊ သာသနာ ကိုႀကည္ညိဳလို႔ ရဟန္းၿပဳသူ” မဟုတ္ဘဲ၊ (အသၿပာပဗၺဇိတ) “လာဘ္လာဘ ကိုေမွ်ာ္ကုိးလို႔ရဟန္းၿပဳသူ” ၿဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ၿမတ္စြာဘုရားႏွင္႔ ဝမ္းကြဲညီအကိုေတာ္ေပမဲ႔ သူဟာ ၿမတ္စြာဘုရားကို နားမလည္၊ နားလည္ေအာင္လည္းမႀကိဳးစား။

       

Press Conference with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

                      East Asia 2012 - Press Conference with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

East Asia 2012 - A Conversation with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi

THERAVADA BUDDHISMUS

               

         Der Name des Gründers von dem, was im Westen als Buddhismus bekannt ist, war
Gotama, dies ist der Name des Clans oder der Familie, der er angehörte. Das Wort "Buddha" bedeutet "der Erwachte" oder "der Erleuchtete", und ist kein Name, sondern ein Ehrentitel, welcher dem weisen Gotama verliehen wurde weil er die Erleuchtung unter dem Bodhi-Baum in Buddhagaya in Indien erlangt hatte. 

         

Myanmar's democracy icon begins first trip abroad in 24 years by offering encouragement to migrant workers.

အေကာင္းသံသရာႏွင္႔ အဆိုးသံသရာ

          ဓမၼတာအားၿဖင္႔ ၿမင္႔ၿမတ္သူတို႔ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေသာ ႏုိင္ငံသည္ သာယာ၏။ ယုတ္ညံ႔သူတုိ႔အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေသာႏုိင္ငံသည္ မသာယာ။

             ေလာကၿဖစ္စဥ္တို႔သည္လည္းေကာင္း၊ ေလာကခ်ဳပ္စဥ္တို႔သည္လည္းေကာင္း ပဋိစၥ သမုပါဒ္ ေဒသနာေတာ္အရ စက္ဝိုင္းသဖြယ္ၿဖစ္ပါ၏။ ထုိ႔ေႀကာင္႔ တရားႏွင္႔ အညီ အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေသာဘုရင္မ်ား စိုးစံေသာအခါ ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္သည္ သာယာေအးခ်မ္း၏။

               

Speech By S N Goenka in U.N. Peace Summit

      Satya Narayan Goenka (born 1924) is a leading lay teacher of  Vipassana meditation and a student of  Sayagyi U Ba Khin. He has trained more than 800 assistant teachers and each year more than 100,000 people attend Goenka led Vipassana courses.

Love!

 

“အခ်စ္ အခ်စ္၊ ခ်စ္တိုင္းခ်စ္၍၊ ခ်စ္ေလခ်စ္ေလ၊ ခ်စ္မေၿပတည္း၊ ဆားငန္ေရေနာက္၊ ငတ္တိုင္းေသာက္က၊ ေသာက္ေလေသာက္ေလ၊ ငတ္မေၿပသုိ႔၊ ေပမအရာ၊ တဏွာဖြဲ႔ရစ္၊ ထိုအခ်စ္လည္း၊ အၿပစ္မၿမင္၊ မဆင္ၿခင္ဘဲ၊ ခ်စ္လွ်င္ေပ်ာ္ႏုိး၊ ခ်စ္စပ်ိဳးသည္၊ ခ်စ္ရိုး ခ်စ္စဥ္ ခ်စ္လမ္းတည္း။”

                                                                  (ေရွးပညာရွိပ်ိဳ႔)

“Love! Love! The more they love, the more they are insatiate, just as they cannot quench their thirst by drinking salty water. Love, pema or tanha, turns a blind eye to one’s defects; expecting happiness through love, one nurtures loves. This is the way of love, the nature of love”

                                                                  (An ancient Burmese poem.)

Venerable Ashin Virathus’ thoughts about U Gambira

The famous monk Ashin Virathu, who was released from prison in Mandalay in January 2012 after spending nine years in prison, recently published an article with his thoughts about Ashin Gambira with whom he made contact during their time together at Obu prison.

From Aung San Suu Kyi

 

“If you're feeling helpless, help someone.”

…………………………………………..

“The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”

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“You should never let your fears prevent you from doing what you know is right.”

……………………………………………………………………

“Fear is a habit; I am not afraid.”

……………………………………

“To view the opposition as dangerous is to misunderstand the basic concepts of democracy. To oppress the opposition is to assault the very foundation of democracy.”

…………………………………………………………….

“I don't believe in people just hoping. We work for what we want. I always say that one has no right to hope without endeavor, so we work to try and bring about the situation that is necessary for the country, and we are confident that we will get to the negotiation table at one time or another.”

Life is a series of test!

 Life is a series of tests. Difficulties are tests. We are in school now. Our whole life is a school. From the time we were born until we die, we are in school.

This is an informal school. There is no classroom. Everything we see, everything we hear, everything we smell, everything we feel, all happiness and all suffering, every problem, every achievement, every success and every failure is a lesson. When we have success, this is a test. It is testing how humble we can when we are successful. Most of us become very proud and conceited: "Oh! I am a success. Other people are failures." So we don't treat people with respect anymore. We become conceited and arrogant.

 In the same way, failure is a test. How equanimous can you be? How can you keep your balance and not feel depressed, inferior, or unhappy about not succeeding. Also it is a test to find out whether you will try again.

“လူပ်ံေတာ္မ်ားကို ႀကဳိဆိုၾက” အပိုင္း(၁)

                   ဝီရသူ(မစိုးရိမ္)
          စာေရးသူ လူ႔ျပည္ျပန္ေရာက္မွ နာမည္ေက်ာ္ ရဟန္းပ်ဳိမ်ား လူပ်ံေတာ္ဘဝသို႔ ကူးေျပာင္းသြားသည္မွာ ႏွစ္ပါးပင္ ရွိေလၿပီ။ ႏွစ္ပါစလုံး ထင္ရွားေက်ာ္ၾကားသူမ်ားပင္ ျဖစ္ေပသည္။ တစ္ပါးက ႏိုင္ငံေရးနယ္ပယ္မွာ ထင္ရွားသူျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ က်န္တစ္ပါး မွာ သာသနာေလာက၌ ထင္ရွားသူ ျဖစ္ေလသည္။ ႏိုင္ငံေက်ာ္ ကမၻာေက်ာ္ ဆရာေတာ္ေလးမ်ား ျဖစ္ၾက၏။
          တစ္ပါးကား- ဦးဂမၻီရ ျဖစ္ၿပီး၊ တစ္ပါးမွာ ဦးဣႏၵာစရိယာဘိဝံသ(မစိုးရိမ္စာသင္သား) ျဖစ္ေပသည္။

                                     “ေဘာလုံးပဲြတရားႏွင့္ ဂမၻီရပ်ားရည္”
          ဦးဂမၻီရႏွင့္ လူခ်င္းမေတြ႕ဆုံးဖူးေသာ္လည္း အိုးဘိုမွာေနရစဥ္တြင္ အဆက္အသြယ္ရွိခဲ့ေပသည္။ မိမိက ေရွးဦးစြာ ေရာက္ႏွင့္ေနေသာ ေက်ာင္းသားေဟာင္းႀကီး ျဖစ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ သတင္းၾကားသည္ႏွင့္ လွမ္း၍ဆက္သြယ္ကာ မိတ္ဆက္စာေပး၍ အားေပးစကား ေျပာခဲ့ဖူး၏။ အေၾကာ္အေလွာ္မ်ားလည္း လွဴလုိက္ပါ၏။
          ဦးဂမၻီရထံမွ ျပန္စာရခဲ့ပါ၏။ ၂၀၀၂-အင္းစိန္ရြာမမွာ “အၿမဲ႐ႈံးေနေသာ ေဘာလုံးပြဲ” ေဟာစဥ္က သူဟာအႀကီးတန္း သင္တန္းသားအျဖစ္ တရားနာခဲ့ရေၾကာင္း၊ ဓာတ္ပုံကင္မရာျဖင့္ မွတ္တမ္းတင္သည့္ ဦးဇင္းတစ္ပါးမွာ သူသာျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ပါဝင္ေလ၏။

Happiness!

          

 Life is struggle. The struggle to make money, to feel comfortable and luxury. Whatever we do, we do essentially for happiness. Even in Religion, we do for happiness. Do we get it?
Some people think that a partner, a good congenial partner, may be a source of happiness, and it may be temporary sources of happiness, but not the real sources of happiness. When we are separated for some reason or other, as sooner or later we will be, we feel unhappy. Do we really understand that the outside sources are not the real sources of happiness; the main thing is the mind? Do we really understand only the mind which is controlled and cultured is the real source of happiness? Are we ready to train our mind? How much are we generous with our time to train our mind?
We should try to learn to be contented and happy with what we have. Here I would like to share a short story:

A certain oriental king who was very unhappy sought the advice of a philosopher. The philosopher advised the king to search for the most happy and contented man in his kingdom and to wear his shirt. After a long search the king finally found the man, but he had no shirt!

Ashin Kovida: “Change Will Come, No Matter What.“

“The Pen is sharper than the Sword” – Martin Kovan interviews Ashin Kovida and Ashin Issariya

“The Pen is Sharper than the Sword” Interview with Ashin Issariya (aka King Zero) and Ashin Kovida, 14th March, 2011 The Best Friend Library, Mae Sot
by Martin Kovan
 

Ashin Issariya, also known by the pen-name King Zero, was one of the central architects and organizers of the 2007 Saffron Revolution, and continues his educational, political and social-welfare work in exile in Mae Sot, Thailand, via The Best Friend Library with branches which he founded inside and outside Burma. His colleague Ashin Kovida also coordinates the Library and educates the local and global audience about the ongoing Buddhist non-violent resistance movement inside and outside Burma. Martin Kovan is a writer and scholar of Buddhism currently living and working as an educator in Mae Sot.

The Best Friend Library: Education is the key to Freedom

When you pass through Mae Sots’ busy market with all it’s exotic smells and views, you arrive at a four storey building in Bua Khun Road with a banner over the entrance door saying “The Best Friend Library Free Education Center”. Founded by one of the key figures in Burma’s 2007 uprising, this library has become a safe haven for migrants and refugees from Burma and a meeting place for interested people from all over the world.

Friendship

Man is by nature a social animal; no one can live alone. We do not live for us alone. We live for each other. So without others I do not exist. Imagine that there was nothing and nobody, what would you be then? So everybody we know somehow affects our lives. I think the quality of our life depends much on the quality of our friendship with people around us.

Buddhism and Politics

                                       

               Should Buddhist monks take part in political affairs?

U Kovida: Burma has a long history of monks being actively engaged in political affairs when it comes to the welfare of the people. Because everyday we eat food donated to us by the Burmese peoples, the majority are poor and oppressed. Sure, we Buddhist monks should not be attached to anything or anyone. But we did not live in total isolation. We monks remain in contact with the other members of the society. If someone perform any action, which disturbs the peace and harmony of the society, how can you have peace and harmony within yourself?

INTERVIEW

Vesak celebration in Germany

Buddha Day was celebrated on the 13^th of May 2012 in Frankfurt by the Burmese Buddhist temple.

About 100 people from different parts of Germany were present at the ceremony. First they recited Metta Bhavana altogether in unison. After that, people offered lunch, consisting of traditional Burmese food, to the present monks. Among them U Zawana, Ashin Kovida and others.