Weekend Retreat at East Down Centre
Friday evening 1st October to Sunday afternoon 3rd
I wrote last week about the new programme and I would like to follow this with a request for early bookings for the retreat and an important announcement.
If you would like to come on this retreat would you let me know as soon as possible please. This is so I can I plan a suitable programme and also to let East Down know likely numbers.
Last week, at the Thursday class, I announced that we (The Triratna Buddhist Community in Exeter) would be moving to a “Dana Economy”. Dana means generosity and generosity has been described as the essential Buddhist virtue. I want to move away from society’s reliance on transaction as the way of relating to each other economically. I think we can do better. Generosity is a practice. It might feel awkward or somehow not based on “pure motives” but as with all of the Buddhist Path it is a question of awareness and then responding creatively instead of reaction to our immediate likes and dislikes. Your creative response might be ‘this is not what I want to do at the moment’ or it might be ‘lets try it and see how it feels’ or it might be ‘Yes, from my heart’ . Ratnaghosha talks of levels of generosity, the stage of Hospitality, the stage of Conditional Giving, the stage of Helping, the stage of Harmonising, and the stage of Spontaneity. We used this text in our last retreat.
This is what ecodharmacentre in Spain says
All our events are offered in the spirit of dana, a Sanskrit/Pali word meaning giving or gift. The practice of generosity takes us beyond separate selfhood and constitutes a basic ethos at the heart of life affirming community. So, a dana economy is a gift economy, or an economy rooted in generosity.
The economic forms of consumerism and capitalism strongly condition our relationship to the world. They encourage us to experience ourselves as discrete subjective entities, producers or consumers, insulated from responsive engagement with others. Rather than emulate this, we want to support economic relationships which contribute towards a culture of sharing.
We don’t want to enter into relationship with you as the providers of a service for a consumer. We want to enter into a wholehearted human relationship with you, as co-producers and collaborators in the transformation of ourselves and our world. To support this intention, rather than offering our work as a service to be bought, we ask for contributions to make this work possible. The basic principle of the Dana Economy is, “give what you can, take what you need”.
The suggested donations in our programme reflect the basic income required to make the events viable. The centre is a registered not-for-profit project. We don’t have any independent means of financing the events. So, we do need financial support to make the events viable. If you can offer more, please do. Similarly, we appreciate that your financial circumstances might mean you need to give less. Either way, please look at the suggested contributions and enter into the spirit of the dana economy by giving what you can, so that we can support you to take what you need. We are also open to discussing donations in the form of skill sharing and other offers of work to support the project. We look forwards to meeting you in the spirit of mutual generosity.
FromSpain to Devon…..
I have been charging £95 for weekend retreats so this would be my suggested donation and with the dana economy, I invite you to give what you can afford, or more if you want to.
At the time of writing the retreat is half full, so please let me know if you would like to come.
If you would like to share your ideas and questions on this please use our ning website. – www.exeterfwbo.ning.com (I have just paid for the subscription for this so it would be nice to see it used!). Go to the Blog page I have just added add your comment(s).
If you haven’t signed up to ning yet, let me know and I’ll send you an invitation. It’s a private site that only members that have been invited can see it.
With metta
Viramitra
Tel: 01392 421139
Mobile:07816 937011
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