Hello, Bill, and thanks for the welcome.
> Where did you live while studying and practicing in Asia? > I live in Thailand and am surrounded by Theravada Buddhism > which is not appealing to me at all. I stayed at Wat Ram Poeng while in Thailand, up near Chiang Mai ( http://www.palikanon.com/vipassana/tapotaram/tapotaram.htm ). It was a hard, deep, mainly psychological experience in vipassana and I'm not the least bit interested in doing it again. Before that I'd spent several months on two different trips in Sri Lanka, at a meditation center in the tea highlands near Kandy. It's a good, rather laid-back place for practice - though now it's become sort of famous and there are too many guests, even during the summer monsoon when the place is crawling with leeches and other beings (a traveler's description, with photos, is at http://sophia.smith.edu/~jhubbard/2001/Nilambe.htm ). I've stayed four times at Bodhi Zendo in the mountains of Tamil Nadu in south India ( http://www.bodhizendo.org ). This is an unusual center started by a Jesuit Priest, and the practice is a bit soft and eclectic but you can make of it what you want, with extra sittings, work, etc. There's a terrific library with Buddhist, Hindu and Christian works. Also, as I mentioned in the last post, I stayed for a while (in '92) at Sogen-Ji Zen Monastery in Okayama, Japan. It's Rinzai. The roshi (first rate!) is Shodo-Harada. In 2001 I went up to Ladakh, in the western Himalayas, to find out what Tibetan Buddhism was about, studied for a brief period under a lama and came away changed. I guess the moral to all this is that there's plenty of Dharma out there, and the different traditions are NEVER what thought they were - via prejudgment - before looking deeper and in fair-mindedness. Not that everyone needs to do this - but I did and my Zen practice was enriched by it. Where are you in Thailand, and for how long? Please say more. Is there Zen practice where you are? Best Regards, ~ Frank . ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Great things are happening at Yahoo! Groups. See the new email design. http://us.click.yahoo.com/iDk17A/hOaOAA/i1hLAA/S27xlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Current Book Discussion: any Zen book that you recently have read or are reading! Talk about it today! Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Zen_Forum/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
