Well, after many months off work, we are rather thrilled today to be able to offer you a first sneak peak at our completely re-imagined version of Free Buddhist Audio, which is due to launch at the end of June.

FBA is now three years old, and in that time it has become an amazing online resource for Buddhists all over the world. By the end of 2010, we will have distributed over one million Dharma talks! To put that in perspective, when we started out as a tape company we distributed a few thousand tapes a year at most…

But we didn’t want to rest on our laurels! The internet has changed a great deal in those three years since we first appeared online, so we have completely re-thought the site, and re-designed it from the ground up to make sure it’s fit for the web as it is likely to develop over the next three years. That means putting our user community right at the heart of what we do in our new Community section and through our developing social network presence. The Dharma is still the star of the show – but it’s the Dharma as practiced by all of you and meaningful in your lives.

You can start taking part now, if you like, by coming and playing and leaving feedback for us on this special blog page (all encouragement much appreciated!). We are really excited to hear what you think!

Watch this space for more news of new features as we roll them out in the next wee while…

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ps. The new site has been designed to enable a free service to be kept in place for all. We are now entirely dependent on our community of users for the funds required to maintain and develop FBA. To help us keep going, please think about making a regular or one-off donation.

Many thanks!

We’re pleased to say that very soon we’ll be launching the new look Free Buddhist Audio! We’ve been working hard at this for many months and should be up and running towards the beginning of July, so we thought it was high time we invited our users to come and see what we’ve got in store…

This is very much a work in progress (we’ll be changing it regularly over the next few weeks) but it’s already functional in various places and it’s kind of geeky fun playing with the new features we’re introducing!

Please feel free to look around, click away and get a feel for the new design. And leave any comments you think would be helpful (encouragement welcome!) below, including anything you find that’s not working (it’s useful to let us know what type of computer and browser you are using – eg windows xp with firefox version 3.6).

Enjoy!

Some things we already know about are:

1. Audio previews
2. Video
3. Online Chat
4. Some links aren’t live yet
5. New Donations section not live yet – links to old one (so you can still give!)
6. Audio download section
7. Text version of talk listings
8. Adding new images where needed to replace defaults
9. Text search
10. We’ve heard that some folk are having cookie trouble with the initial splash page for this test version. If you can’t get to the main home page when you try, refreshing the page in your browser should do the trick!

This fantastic talk by Akuppa, given at the 2006 Buddhafield Festival, focuses on how Buddhist practice weaves together with social awareness, and what an Earth Community built on sustainable values might look like.

(Please note: there are a few minutes missing at the start, and the original recording was very poor. But it’s worth it!)

Talk given at Buddhafield Festival, 2006

To help us keep this free, please think about making a donation.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

I work quite a bit with our volunteer community at Free Buddhist Audio. These are all the people who take it upon themselves to devote hours of their own time listening to new talks, making transcripts, separating long talks out into smaller tracks, and sometimes even helping to translate talks into other languages. It is a big job – we have many hundreds of talks online, and more coming through the digital door every day from Triratna centers all over the world.

Currently, we have between 25 and 35 active volunteers working on our audio. Some are able to do many talks. Some, only one. Each and every volunteer is considered by our small, but dedicated staff to be an incredibly invaluable resource to the work that we do. To our current and past volunteers, we’d like to express our great thanks.

In my communications with volunteers, I hear one consistent message. Most feel that they receive more than they contribute. While from our perspective the balance might go the other way, we recognize the sentiment, because we feel it ourselves.

When you really spend time with these Dharma talks, listening carefully for breaks in topic, or working to accurately write down what is being said, there are wonderful side benefits. Not only have you listened to the talk, you’ve absorbed it. If you’ve taken on the work for a talk that you may never have listened to on your own, it can open up new doors in your practice and understanding. The act of working with the audio is in some ways similar to working with the breath – the application of mindfulness makes all the difference.

We can always use more volunteers! If you have a few hours and an interest in helping us to make these materials more user-friendly and accessible, in addition to enriching your own experience of them, please consider contacting us.

To volunteer for track marking, click this link: http://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/trackmarking

To volunteer for transcription, click this one: http://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/texts/volunteer.php

For other volunteer queries, contact me at eric@freebuddhistaudio.com

Thank you, and happy listening!

Eric Wentworth
Community Liaison – Free Buddhist Audio

In ‘Mindfulness of Reality’, the excellent Kulananda (Michael Chaskalson) brings a welcome compass to the maze of Buddhist teachings around the nature of existence itself. After all, it’s not easy, is it? Impermanence, dependent arising, becoming, etc. – it’s enough to make anyone think twice. Or a thousand times. And still get nowhere. But fear not – this is a clear, concise, eminently human and straightforward tour of the last of the traditional four levels of mindfulness. And Kulananda’s approach is born of his experience of over twenty year’s teaching on just this kind of thing. Ready? Then in we go…

Kulananda/Michael Chaskalson has published widely on many aspects of Buddhism and meditation, and runs a variety of mindfulness-based stress reduction programmes for use in personal and business life.

Talk given at Cambridge Buddhist Centre, 2000

Podcast: Play in new window | Download