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October
2007
2550 Number 81 Welcome to the Forest Sangha Newsletter online. This issue can be found in several places. You can download the whole newsletter as it was printed and distributed, or you can browse this website to find the individual articles and bits of news. Click "download pdf" for a PDF of the newsletter as it was printed. If the PDF is too large for you to download, the entire newsletter (absent a few photographs) is available on the pages of this website. Be sure to check the sidebars (FSN notices, Grapevine, etc.) for current announcements and Sangha news, which change with each issue. For more from the sisters about this issue of the FSN please click:
What have you found brings you alive in the monastic life?
Thanissara considers her experience entering the robes and leaving them in her continuing commitment to a Buddhist path
Taking a retrospective look at the nuns’ community at Cittaviveka and my time here isn’t easy. As with anything, what you see depends on the time and place you look from – a different mood equals a different reality, different people means different realities. And, even if there is some consensus on ‘what happened’...
When I came to the monastery I had a sense of urgency because my sister, just one year younger than me, had died. I cared for her through that process. She showed me that I had work to do, this was her gift. I didn’t want to die the way she died, with terror and fear. In the end …
In October 2005 I departed for Thailand, planning to spend eight months away. As it turned out I extended
I have spent all but a year or so of my 32 years of monastic life living in monasteries with nuns. Actually it all depends what is meant by living with, and what is meant by nuns. In Thailand the monastery I was living in had many maechees, that is shaven-headed women keeping the Eight Precepts, practising meditation, virtue and renunciation, and often making commitments of many years. Yet the culture then as now, to a large extent, did not regard them as a female equivalent to the monks – the bhikkhus.
From July 18–21 the first International Congress on Buddhist Women’s Role in the Sangha: Bhikshuni Vinaya and Ordination Lineages was held in Hamburg, Germany. The congress was initiated by HH the Dalai Lama, and attracted a gathering of senior Sangha members from …
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The first siladhara: Thanissara
