FBA Volunteers In Search of Dharma

This summer, Mary Salome and a group of volunteers from the San Francisco Buddhist Center started up a DIY fundraiser with a dual purpose: raising funds is one, the other is to make more talks from the FBA archives available online.

As an avid user of Free Buddhist Audio Mary once inquired as to why there weren’t more talks by women available online. She expressed an interest in wanting to help with this, and a project was born. We selected a handful of cassette tapes and MiniDiscs from our archive and sent them along to Mary.

She shared with us, “Originally we thought we would not be able to restore the audio to broadcast quality and so wanted to provide transcripts alongside the audio.  I knew that it would not be possible for me to do this all on my own so I saw it as an opportunity to engage with other people around the work.”

Mary enthusiastically organized the tapes and put a call out for more volunteers from the San Francisco Buddhist Center sangha, naming the project: “Dharma Tape History Detectives.”

“The process itself has been meaningful as a way to make what could be very solitary work into community work. Just speaking for myself, I find it inspiring that people are spending time writing out the words to a talk with a very dedicated and committed practice of mindfulness”

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Check out the list of talks they are preparing:

Six Part Series on the Five Buddha Mandala, given on a women’s summer retreat, August 1985 (location as yet unknown – may be revealed on the tapes)

Transformation: Creating the Mandala of the Five Buddhas, Vidyasri
Akshobya, Vimala
Amitabha: The Buddha of Infinite Light, Padmasuri
Amogasiddhi: The Lord of the Dance, Sridevi
Ratnasambhava, Parami
Vairocana: The Illuminator, Anoma

The Four Right Efforts – four talks by Sridevi, Vimala, Sanghadevi and Ashokasri (on two cassettes)

Buddhist Revival in India, Padmasuri

Coursing Through the Worldly Winds, Dayanandi 1999

On Atisha: A Life in the Service of Compassion, Dayanandi 1999

A Future in the Dharma: Enjoying Meditation, Dayanandi 1999

Order Puja, Led by Bhante Sangharakshita, Sangharakshita 1983

Open Up The Thatched, Dayanandi

Standing Steady as a Mountain, Mahamati

Chapters: Principles, Practice and Potential, Ratnadharani 2007

One Great Glorious Mistake, Vajradharshini 2005

In Harmony with Friends and Brethren, Srivati 2002

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You can make a donation to the Dharma Tape History Detectives fundraiser on First Giving or Just Giving. If you see a talk in our archive list that you’d like to sponsor, email Mary@freebuddhistaudio.com when you make your donation. Each audio recording undergoes a process of digitizing, transcribing, & copy editing that will take about ten hours per talk. They suggest a donation of $50 (that’s $5 an hour — quite a bargain!) but any amount will start the process. You’re also welcome to sponsor the general effort rather than a specific talk.

The Free Buddhist Audio Team would like to thank the San Francisco Buddhist Center Volunteer Detectives for taking on this project. We are looking forward to discovering and sharing what’s on they discover and to increasing the number of talks in our archive by women. Many Sadhus to all of you!

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!

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!

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