Spreading the Dharma

Sharing our Practice

Connecting our Community Worldwide

Viriyalila’s UK Centre Tour in Search of 500 Supporting Friends

Viriyalila’s been on a promotional tour to the UK this month, raising funds and awareness for our beloved Free Buddhist Audio. With visits to Liverpool, Nottingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Bristol, Glastonbury, Leeds, Birmingham and West London, she’s been enjoying sharing stories about the history of the project, and the amazing transformation from Dharmachakra Tapes to the web space we have now. From distributing a few thousand tapes and cds a year to sending out over 400,000 talks annually via the internet we are awed by our collective success. Each practitioner who gives a talk, each person who listens, all our donors, all our volunteers working to make the site even better – we would not be here without all of your contributions! Together we bring this inspiring Dharma resource into being and share it with people all over the world.

And all of this is offered for free – for two important reasons:

Simplicity – we want to offer a simple and aesthetic experience when people visit fba. You will not find any advertisements or pop-ups windows when you visit our site. Just a clean, simple, beautiful web experience, one that we hope is conducive to supporting your practice as you deepen your understanding and seek inspiration in the many talks and texts we have available.

Accessibility – we want everyone who longs for meaning and looks to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, to find the Triratna Buddhist Community ready and willing to share ourselves, our practices, and our understandings of the Buddha’s teachings. We want to be there for anyone with access to a computer and an internet connection. And we reach far more people by giving access to our archives for free then if we were to charge for the service. Urgyen Sangharakshita, our Community’s founder, is very happy knowing that talks he gave many years ago to relatively small audiences are now being listened to by people around the globe. Indeed, since we launched four short years ago, more than one million talks by many members of the Triratna Buddhist Order have been downloaded from 118 countries!

We offer fba freely to all, but we are dependent on our donors to keep it all going. If you use the site and appreciate it, please support it. We’ve worked out that if we can find just 500 Friends to give £10/€12/$15 each month, then together we will secure the future of free buddhist audio. This is an average – some people will give less, some more – but any amount is most welcomed. As of the start of this year, we have 125 ‘Supporting Friends’ out of the 500 we need to continue our work effectively.

We love what we do, and we know many of you do too! We urgently need more financial support. If you have been considering taking out a standing order, or making a large one-off donation, please do so today. Our team needs your backing, the world needs your gift of the Dharma…

Show your support for Free Buddhist Audio!

The new Free Buddhist Audio website is here, and aside from a sleek new look, it’s packed to the gills with new features! We’ve worked very hard to make FBA 2.0 more interactive and user-friendly, and to provide even more to our community.

Here’s a run-down of some of the exciting additions to our service:

FBA Members Area

Our Community section connects FBA users with each other and provides access to unreleased content with:

* Exclusive sneak-peek previews of future audio releases.
* Members-only access to unreleased archive recordings.
* Create your own FBA profile – Change your personal settings and add a profile picture.
* Online chat and messaging – talk live with other members and the Free Buddhist Audio team online.

You can set up your own FBA profile, or log in to Free Buddhist Audio’s members section using your Facebook account. Join today at http://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/community/

Enhanced Search Options

Audio talks and text are now divided into intuitive sections for ease of browsing. In the main menu you’ll find links for “Audio,“(for general audio) “Series,” “Meditation” and “Text.” Under these main categories, talks are broken out by theme, speaker, year given, and so on.

Our new and enhanced search bar allows you to set your preferences for searches. Even better, it will remember your preferences the next time you search! And the search results page provides filters that will further refine your search and make it easier to discover what you’re looking for.

New Audio Interface

On most browsers, our new audio interface for talks allows you to play tracks before you download the full talk.

Similar to what you’d find in the iTunes store, you can now click a specific track to listen to it, or you can click on “Play all” to hear each track in sequence. If it’s what you’re looking for, you can then go and download the whole talk.

Social Connection

Connect to Free Buddhist Audio at your favorite social networking sites! FBA is on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, Google Buzz and even Second Life! We’re everywhere you are, so link to us for the latest updates and information.

To find us at our many homes online, or sign up for our newsletter, visit http://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/community/social.

Easier Donation

Free Buddhist Audio depends on the generous donations of our community to keep providing the Dharma for free. Now it’s even easier to help us do so.

1) When you download or stream a talk, you can make a donation right there – quick and easy!

2) Become one of the 500 – Our “500 Friends” campaign is going strong, but we could use your help! We’re looking for 500 people who are willing to become monthly donors at the £10 / $15 / €15 level. This will help to ensure the future security of our work, and it’s only about the cost of 1/4 cup of coffee per day! You’ll get the continual satisfaction of knowing that you’re part of something greater than all of us, free Dharma talks for everyone.

3) Become a regular donor – Regular monthly donations are the best way to give to FBA. They’re helpful to us in planning our budget and helpful to you in that you don’t even have to think about it. The donation is set up to be charged automatically every month through your credit card or bank. Voila! Did I just give to Free Buddhist Audio? Yes, you did, and thank you!

4) Make a one-time donation – No matter how large or small, every donation is very appreciated and put to good use.

5) Create a fundraising page – Through JustGiving or FirstGiving, you can now create your own page to raise funds for FBA. You can do it as an event and get friends to donate to your cause, or just send out your own appeal and testimonial to let others know about our service.

We hope you enjoy all of the new changes to Free Buddhist Audio, and thank you for your support over the years – without you, our community, this would not have been possible.

Viriyalila started working for this dynamic team-based right livelihood project last fall, and is enjoying the work of doing a face-to-face, grass-roots, ground-up fundraising tour. With two visits to the UK this spring, and presentations planned for the US this summer, she’s been keeping very busy!

She writes ~

When my good friend Candradasa asked if I would consider taking the lead on Free Buddhist Audio’s fundraising campaign, my immediate thought was that I just wasn’t qualified. I have loads of experience working in management and bookkeeping, but none in fundraising. But as we talked, I recollected how much of a fan I have been of Dharmachakra tapes since I first became a mitra. Had I not had access to listening to the lectures that Sangharakshita had given over the years, it is possible that I may not have become a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order. And as I am comfortable with technology, love the internet, and am keen to learn new things, why not give it a try? We strategized for nearly six months, and as I faced a steep learning curve, I found myself coming back time and time again to a strong sense of faith ~ both in the project itself, representing the transmission of the Dharma, and also in the sangha, because without people to learn and live the Dharma, there would be no point!

As I began my training period and made my way through Google Analytics for the freebuddhistaudio.com website, I slowly began to take in just how many people we were contacting, which I found deeply inspiring. 150,000 users visited in 2009, from 180 different countries spread throughout the world. Here, at freebuddhistaudio.com, so many people from so many different cultures are coming into to contact with our unique approach to the Dharma. Imagining the individual people in Belarus, Slovakia, China, Kentucky, Bolivia… tuning into our Dharma talks, to Bhante Sangharakshita, to my various mentors and teachers in the Order, my friends, oh, how my metta bhavana practice was transformed!

Once the training period was more or less complete, I made all the necessary detailed arrangements to embark on an ambitious UK Centre Fundraising Tour. From my “home” spot in West London, I got to know the UK public transport system very well as I made my way to 18 centers and events around the country in two 3-week tours spanning the months of March through June.

Places I’ve been during this tour…

West London Buddhist Centre (walking distance from where I was based!)

Ipswich Buddhist Centre (in a lovely new space!)

Cambridge Buddhist Centre (fabulous to see our dear friend Aryakanta!)

Bristol Buddhist Centre (made it a day early for a very lively ceilidh!)

Norwich Buddhist Centre (a beautiful city!)

London Buddhist Centre (quite the Triratna hub!)

North London Buddhist Centre (gorgeous Tara glass painting!)

Croydon Buddhist Centre (lovely back garden!)

Sheffield Buddhist Centre (where an abandoned church is now an amazing centre, complete with a gold-leafed standing Buddha in the bell tower!)

Manchester Buddhist Centre (the archetypal Triratna mandala of businesses, centre & community!)

Birmingham Buddhist Centre (celebrating Wesak with a talk from Parami!)

Newcastle Buddhist Centre (again, celebrating Wesak!)

International Sangha Retreat at Taraloka (speaking to 400 plus people!)

Brighton Buddhist Centre (what a lively, harmonious sangha!)

National Women’s Order Weekend, Taraloka (inspiring to encourage more support for Women teachers in our archive)

Glasgow Buddhist Centre (do they speak English here? Just kidding! A lively, playful sangha here…)

Each center was slightly different yet unified in our commitment to the Three Jewels and to Sangharakshita’s translation of the Dharma. We are quite a diverse group!

My Free Buddhist Audio

The presentation took on slightly different formats, but primarily was a one-hour talk expounding on the projects history, core values, current developments, and future envisionings. I particularly enjoyed selecting and sharing what we are now calling Dharmabytes ~ a few minutes of Dharma nuggets from the Free Buddhist Audio treasure chest. The three tracks I found myself coming back to throughout the tour were: Sangharakshita, The Buddha, God and Reality, Track 5: The Buddha and Reality (1966); Srivati, Becoming a Citizen of the Present, Track 7, Reality as Change, Poetry and Impermanence (2001); and Kulananda, Mindfulness of Reality, Section 3:41-8:17 (this talk is not yet tracked) (2000). Sign up for our podcast to receive your Dharmabytes!

05 The Buddha and Reality

07 Reality as change, poetry and impermanence

01 Mindfulness of Reality – Excerpt

As we listened to these Dharma Jewels, I brought out the core values underlying this project, namely: providing free, wide-spread access to the Dharma; providing an opportunity to hear various teachers with different lifestyles and ways of teaching; and encouraging the re-invigoration of listening to talks together in groups, to share the working out of Dharmic principles much like in the spirit of how the Buddha originally taught, as an Oral Tradition.

Sangharakshita and FBA

I am personally very inspired by upholding the Oral Tradition and this was one of the topics of discussion when I met with Sangharakshita in his library at Madhyamaloka in Birmingham. He said, “We know that speech is a very powerful medium of communication. We know that the Buddha’s words spoken from, as it were, from his enlightened consciousness changed the lives of so many people. So that tradition of oral presentation of the Dharma has continued right down to the present day. Even though we have printed books many people do find that they learn more quickly and easily from the spoken word.”

It makes Bhante particularly happy to think that talks that he himself gave years, even decades ago, to relatively small audiences, are now through freebuddhistaudio.com reaching perhaps tens even hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

This is Part I of a two-part blog ~ more to come next week!

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!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

We’re absolutely delighted – and somewhat relieved – today to be able to announce the full launch of our new community site!

This represents a very big shift for our service: now any Fwbo centre or institution – anywhere in the world – can upload its own talks, and have its own pages on the site. We’ve already got quite a few signed up, and the first talks are appearing – in English, French and German! Come and take a look…

What’s very exciting for us is that the amount of material on the website will increase greatly over the next months, and is likely to be much more up-to-date and representative of what’s going on in our international community. It will also allow us at the archives to concentrate on getting a lot more of the older talks and special recordings online.

Watch this space for more news of new features as we roll them out in the coming months. And if your centre or Fwbo project would like to get involved, we’d be delighted if you get in touch!

One other piece of news: in April, Free Buddhist Audio had its first 20,000 visitor month! We’ve come a long way since the days of selling scratchy old cassette tapes to about 200 people a year… Thank you to everyone for their tremendous support!

If you’ve searched for our site in Google you may have seen a message saying ‘this site may harm your computer’… So what happened?

Well, a hacker managed to modify one of the posts on our blog in such a way as to force the installation of some malware onto your computer when you viewed the blog page containing that post. You’ll be glad to know we fixed the problem as soon as it was brought to our attention, but unfortunately it may take Google some weeks to remove the warning from their search results. Please be assured that only the blog was involved – the rest of the site was unaffected and remains secure.

UPDATE: Google has now officially removed us from their blacklist. Hurrah!