A letter to the Buddhist community from teacher Sylvia Boorstein, on the campaign to build a permanent Community Meditation Hall and Staff and Teacher Village at Woodacre, California’s Spirit Rock Meditation Center.
August, 2011
Dear friends in the Dharma near and far,
I wish you all could have been able to participate personally in the inaugural event on August 7 that established the Sangha of Thousands of Buddhas as the community of dedicated supporters of Spirit Rock taking on the commitment to share as equal partners in a core piece of funding the completion of our Spirit Rock campus. Our emphasis in describing the project was that it is much more than a Spirit Rock Meditation Center project. We see our center, along with all of the Dharma centers of all of our lineages, as being beacons of the news that “Peace is possible!” We feel passionately that what we all are doing is helping people discover peace in their own minds on behalf of a kinder, more compassionate world.
Had you been with us in person on August 7 you would have experienced California summer its best. I said, as I often do at Spirit Rock, “It is so beautiful here that people could just come here and sit on a bench quietly for a few days and their minds would feel peaceful.”
Board Member and Co-Chair of Capital Campaign, Guy Armstrong; Sylvia; Jack Kornfield
Jack Kornfield and I both told stories about the benefits of meditation, accounts we’ve heard from practitioners of gratitude for clarity and strength and, most of all, peace in their minds and hearts. We spoke, as we often do, about how personal peace of mind translates in to a more peaceful world. The feeling of energy and delight in the room was palpable.
Perhaps the most touching moments were during the scroll signing. Joining the Sangha of Thousands of Buddhas is the pledge to donate $1000 to Spirit Rock for this building project. One thousand dollars is a large enough amount for most people to feel the significance of their commitment and yet, with the option of completing the pledge over three years ($27.70/month automatically, by credit or bank debit card) it feels feasible. As people signed the scroll, we all imagined ways in which this support would ripple out in waves that made a difference in the world now and always. Most people signed their own name, but some signed in honor of someone else. We are delighted to have Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche’s name on our list!
The Sangha of Thousands of Buddhas suits me perfectly. I am pleased to think that this community of people will, communally, raise the money needed to complete this important and much needed project. I believe the Sangha of Thousands of Buddhas is a “grass roots” community, one that most of us can join. My life-long political stance is “of the people,” the belief that enduring, wonderful things happen when many people share equally in resources and energy to bring them about.
The end of the Sunday event was a birthday party celebrating the birth of the Sangha of Thousands of Buddhas, Jack’s sixty-sixth birthday, and my seventy-fifth birthday, all happening in the previous few weeks. We had birthday cake with candles and wish-making. Jack said, “You aren’t supposed to say birthday wishes out loud,” but clearly everyone there was wishing a wonderful future for work of spreading the good news of the liberating Dharma throughout the world.
I wish you all everything good, and hope you’ll join us in our Sangha of Thousands of Buddhas community.
Sylvia Boorstein
Please visit our new website, www.Thousandsofbuddhas.org and follow me as well on Facebook and Twitter.
