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BSPG News and Meeting (No. 147)
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Edited by Stony Brook Buddhism Study and Practice Group

News
1) A reminder that the BSPG will set up a table at the Student Involvement Fair on Wednesday, September 5th, from 12pm to 2pm. The fair will be held at the SAC Plaza. We will be distributing flyers and books.
2) The Peaceful Dwelling Project in East Hampton is holding the OBON Festival on September 22. Obon is a colorful but solemn festival to commemorate those who have passed away and to relieve them of suffering. The Peaceful Dwelling Project is a remarkable program directed by Rev. Madeline Ko-i Bastis, who is a Zen priest in the White Plum lineage and was ordained by Peter Muryo Matthiessen Roshi in 1993. Peaceful Dwelling celebrates OBON every September at an oceanfront home in East Hampton. In addition to its religious function, the festival also serves as Peaceful Dwelling's annual benefit. Peaceful Dwelling is in need of volunteers to help out with the festival. This is a great opportunity for you to learn more about the festival as well as the works being carried out by  Rev. Bastis. Please check out http://www.peacefuldwelling.org/obon.htm for more information.

Meeting
SAC 308
7pm, Thursday, 9/6/01
PLEASE BE ON TIME

Words from the Suttas/Sutras
"Great enlightening beings have ten kinds of spiritual friends. What are they? Spiritual friends who cause them to persist in the determination for enligtenment; spritual friends who cause them to generate roots of goodness; spritual friends who cause them to practice the ways of trancendence; spritual friends who enable them to analyze and explain all truths; spritual friends who enable them to develop all sentient beings; spritual friends who enable them to attain definitive analytic and expository powers; spritual friends who cause them not to be attached to any world; spritual friends who cause them to cultivate practice tirelessly in all ages; spritual friends who establish them in the practice of Universal Good; spritual friends who introduce them to the reaches of knowledge of all buddhas. These are the ten."--Avatamsaka Sutra.
 

Quote of the Week
"In the sutras there is a particular term which points at our capacity for tolerating this world of suffering. Although we recognize that this is a world of suffering, we continue to put up with it. Not only that; we are willingly tolerant of suffering. We remain attached to the concerns of worldly life, the worries, the vanities and the discriminatory categories we use to judge one another. This is a world where we endlessly cope with suffering and rarely go beyond it."--Master Sheng-yen

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