Buddhist Education - "Beyond Belief"

Our Buddhist Education Committee is a relatively large, sprawling committee for our small temple.  We are officially charge “to support dissemination o the Buddha Dharma” as well as work with our ministers to promote and coordinate the temple’s educational activities.

It sounds like a lot of work (it is!), and it sounds important (dissemination of the Buddha Dharma—the Buddha’s teachings—is; the committee is not).  Mostly we are known as “BEC”, and our committee members become visible when we register attendees for our class offerings.

Part of the temple’s vision the next three years includes expanding Buddhist education by offering more classes and more meditation services.   There always seems to be more interest from the community in learning more about Buddhism at the beginning of the year and after exposure to the temple from our annual festivals, so we are starting the year with a new class by Sensei Jim Pollard:  “Beyond Belief:  Finding the Shin Buddhist Path”.

What is the Shin Buddhist path anyway?  Although Shin Buddhism is the largest sect of Buddhism in Japan, it is less well known in this country, and it has some teachings that we think an American population would find very useful and interesting.  Shin Buddhism is the teachings of Shinran Shonin—more accurately, it is the experience of Shinran, as transmitted to him by his teachers. 

First, he became an ambitious person, then a devout person, and finally a foolish , ordinary person.  His experience of finding the path is a universal one.  In other words, what happens to us is the same as what happened to Shinran.  To be a Shin Buddhist is to make his experience our own.