- Suvannavira: To Russia with Metta

Recently I had the privilege of Suvannavira staying with me. He is a anagarika and as such lives a life of celibacy with no fixed abode, even though he occasionally participates in community living, and no career and very little in the way of goods and chattels. He is the embodiment of non-attachment and going forth. He is currently re-learning Russian which was his mother tongue but was lost when overlaid with English from the age of 4 when he came over to live in the UK. He intends to establish the teaching of the Buddha according to the interpretation and translation of Bhante Urgyen Sangharakshita. This project is a substantial undertaking, but if anyone can do it, Suvannavira can. He has been circulating friends and contacts with the details of the three Russian language websites so that they can be linked to, something which will increase their prominence and presence in web searches. So here is what he would like us to do if we are able.

The three sites are:

Russian fwbo.org http://russian.fwbo.org

Russian Wildmind http://russian.wildmind.org/

buddhayana.ru http://www.buddhayana.ru/

- this contains 4 books and the first year of the new Mitra study course.

However not many people access or look for these sites via search engines. What is needed are more links from other websites, so if you can add them to your website links page, this would help enormously.

Using ‘FWBO’ is becoming out of date as the new name change becomes widespread, and in due course it will be changed but for now, russian.fwbo.org http://russian.fwbo.org/ will be kept as it is.

Having websites in Russian visible with search engine will help Suvannavira greatly as he will imminently be living in Moscow and working for the Dharma there. ©www.roypeters.co.uk

- The eye of the tiger

When I did a marketing course a little while ago, we were told that in a presentation about 93% of communication is non-verbal. People make certain judgments and inferences about you before you open your mouth and regardless what comes out of it irrespective of the slides you may have sweated over in your PowerPoint presentation. There is a fabled practice in the FWBO which I had heard much about but never actually done until last weekend. It is a communication exercise and it was set within the context of spiritual friendship on a retreat entitled ‘Entering the tiger’s cave’. The title refers to a Zen story where human footprints are said be seen leading into the cave but none do seem to come out.

A route into exploring certain aspects of this commitment was afforded through this communication exercise. You work in pairs, ideally with a partner whom you have never met before. The first part of the exercise involves looking in and around each other’s eyes. Then you break off before going back to repeat the exercise this time taking some awareness to being open and letting the other person in and really being willing to enter into this other person’s being. It is striking how much the superficiality of the first encounter is deepened by engagement with these possibilities in the second. Each mini session is about 3 minutes long.

Then one partner chooses a phrase to be repeated and the other partner affirms it by saying ‘Yes’. The phrases on offer (and it is part of the fable that they are usually these) were:

The cow is in the field

Do birds fly?

Water is wet

Flowers grow here

The sky is blue today

Each partner takes it in turn to utter the phrase and to make the affirmation. All the time you are still holding each other with the eyes.

Finally, the phrases are dropped and you go back to just sitting and staring into one another’s eyes.

What is extraordinary is that there is a real sense of knowing this erstwhile stranger that soon builds up as well as a sensitivity to the tone and cadence of the voice. Some affirmations are more gentle or more brusque than others despite the repetition. Something else is communicated beyond the words themselves. It is a stripping bare of communication. It feels as though you have entered the tiger’s cave because you have poured yourself into another being through the pupils and you have let another person in because you opened the door to your own being as wide as possible and you just don't know what will happen. Friendship is thus a risky business and we have to be prepared for anything and for surrendering ourselves completely.