Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Lolo Houbein draws on her twenty-five years of Buddhist practice to explore how Mahāyāna principles shape creative work and everyday labour. Beginning with her conference paper comparing the “great vehicle” of Buddhism to Commonwealth literature, she traces how Buddhist ethics and worldview have infused her fiction writing and work experience. She addresses the power of words—arguing that language is energy that materializes into reality, and therefore demands ethical responsibility and precision. She reflects on maintaining a personal shrine through work, marriage, and family life; navigating disclosure of Buddhist identity in secular workplaces; her experience working with intellectually disabled people through a karmic lens; and raising children in Buddhist morality while leaving them free to choose their own faith. The talk concludes with discussion of children’s spirituality, honest agnosticism versus doctrine, and the primacy of ethical action over belief.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 B in W no date.mp3
UUID: 7f5a3b88-6e6e-4150-823d-1866af045d45
Teacher: Lolo Houbein
Collection: Buddha in One's Work (Lolo Houbein)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,613
Conference paper that had to be given at a conference in Queensland, and I knew that most of the people there were involved in Commonwealth literature, which is an interesting subject because it gathers together people from Africa, India, the West Indies, totally opposed and different societies, some of the Pacific Islands, Australia, Canada, and so on, and really is representative of the world almost. And then then I thought how global that subject was. I could see quite easily that a comparison could be made with Buddhism. And I decided to start my conference paper with an introduction to Mahāyāna Buddhism more or and this is what I I wrote. I’ll read you just this little paragraph.
Not having been nurtured in the embrace of the commonwealth, I tend to grope for comparative concepts. And the one I like best is that of the great vehicle, as in Mahāyāna Buddhism, in contrast to the small vehicle, which speeds the individual to nirvana along the quickest possible route, the great vehicle picks up passengers all along the way. And when it manages to reach the portals of nirvana, those who are eligible to enter look back at the road and cry out, some have been left behind. Let’s go and get them. And that really came off well.
I was very nervous about that. I really admit it. I was nervous about professing in that way that I was a Mahāyāna Buddhist, I think, because in those years it wasn’t easy to be as deviant as that. But it was taken up and and received with with quite a lot of appreciation. So I became more bold after that.
And then I started to write short stories. I actually did write some short one of the short stories in my short story book is a straight out Buddhist story. And some of my other stories, some one in particular that I read on on on radio has to do with karma, and another one that I also read on radio has to do with the nonexistence of self. And and these things are terribly important to me, and therefore, they have to come into my stories because if I am going to cut off everything that is Buddhist, then there’s very very little left for me to write about because my entire outlook on life and on situations and on people and on events is is colored and and directed by my my Buddhist background, which I have lived out for more than twenty five years. So more and more in writing in writing fiction, I have come to appreciate that we are living in a time that people are being overdosed on words to the extent that they can’t take in the meaning of the words anymore.
I think it’s a great sickness of this latter part of our century. Because of that, there is a great responsibility on anybody who uses words a lot in their work, whether it is in writing or in speaking, a great responsibility to know when to use words and when not to use them and how to use them and to let every word be a meaningful one. And there you are already, I’m using the word meaningful which has also been overused to such an extent that it isn’t meaningful anymore. But what I mean by it is that if you use words, take responsibility for them so that whatever is invested in that word, if it would materialize, then you would take responsibility for the materialisation of the meanings of the words that you have spoken. And I think I’ll end on that note as far as my talk is concerned, but I hope you all open up because you’re all bursting with work experience.
And I I I haven’t got all the answers. I just have one life that I lived working. Bookmarks in your other book? Well, that was if there were only three or four people, you know, and I could fill in a lot of time and give other little examples. But I think the examples are sitting out here.
So Would you read us something out of your other book? Of your own book? Well, if there’s time, but but I really want to see people reacting. And, Harlow, what did you mean when you got home, you sat in front of your shrine and you recharged and unloaded? What did you do in there?
Literally, I had my little shrine, which I’ve had I’ve had a little shrine on and off since I was a child. But during my adult life, it it was much more pertinent. It was a Buddhist little shrine. And my little shrine would have a Buddhist statue on it and pictures of Tārā and candles, and incense, and flowers in bowls with water, on a very nice cloth. Anything else special that came my way dried up leaf or a dead beetle that I would find in the garden or anything like that.
I still do that. That little shrine would be usually on a wall where the shrine would be facing east. I’m not sure how much it matters, but everybody works out his or her own preference for these things. If there had been a window in the house that I’d lived in where I had them facing east, then the sun would have shone on the Buddha statue in the morning, but usually there was a blind wall, but it doesn’t matter. I would usually have it in the bedroom at the foot end of my bed so that I would also face it first thing in the morning, which would tie me to my evening meditation.
But the evening meditation would be to sit in front of my shrine, to light the candles, light some incense, put a fresh flower there, and then to start recite the four noble truths, the Eightfold Noble Path, the five precepts. And then I would do Tantra Mantra, and then anything else that came out of my reading that I wanted to repeat for some time to come. Then I would sit still and communicate with the Bodhisattvas about the problems that I’d had that day. And in the light of that little shrine and what was on it, those problems then would start to take a different get different perspectives. And I would start to remember all the things that I just said to you.
Nothing is permanent. I am not perfect. All those people out there are not only the sentient beings that the bodhisattvas will have to rescue, but in time they will be bodhisattvas themselves, even if you don’t see it now. And all these things I would reinforce in my thinking. There were times that it didn’t quite come off, that it didn’t quite work, but I think it is the most important thing to me to to have that.
And the charging up would come from the very fact that the bodhisattvas are there to take the load away somehow from you. Their energy is so enormous that when you tap into it, there is quite enough to wipe out the problems of your small day and to recharge on it for the next day. In practical terms, you got home from work. Did you have children and things to Children and animals. So then what time of the day would you have done it and helped?
Late at night, sometimes midnight, sometimes even after midnight. There were years that I worked eighteen hours on all my different jobs and slept for six hours, went on autopilot in the morning, got through everything, and couldn’t sit down until midnight or one o’clock. It didn’t have to be long. A quarter of an hour was quite sufficient for the whole day to just fall away. But I think the spot is important.
That particular little spot is like a temple which, because of much usage, becomes sacred. When I go to Asia, I go to some temples, and some temples are so well used that the moment you’re over the doorstep, just you’re a changed person, whereas other temples do not necessarily have that. It just depends how well used they have been. If people have used their temples, have come in there to pray to the bodhisattvas, to to worship, to offer, and have gone out of that place feeling better, then the same will happen to you. So a place can get a certain sacredness, and I think that’s what happened with the little shrine wherever it was.
We carried around from house to house whenever I moved, of course. Excuse me. I was just gonna say, I was just curious. When you first started being interested in interested in Buddhism, did you feel that when you did your practices that somehow you weren’t doing the right, you didn’t have a a guru? Now how did you feel?
How now when you got married Mhmm. Was your husband interested in Buddhism? No. How did he feel about having a shrine in the room, and how did he feel regarding your practices? It wasn’t a full shrine then yet.
It was rather a covered up shrine, a secret service shrine. You know, in order to keep peace in the family, that had to be the case. So there was something with a nice cloth over it and a Buddha statue which was very aesthetic looking. And I’d slip a little bowl of flowers every so often and have a candle which I might not necessarily light. But the time came that I started to burn incense, and then the trouble, the writing was on the wall.
The marriage didn’t last, I’m afraid. No. Why are people freaked out by that? I don’t know. Like, you’re married to the other opposite partners can’t accept that.
No. Yes. I know. It is I I think it probably is in the first place because there’s something wrong with the marriage that was wrong in the beginning. Looking back at my life, I think that that is the first thing I would say.
The second thing I would say is that because there’s probably something amiss, the fact that one partner is going religious is taken as an affront by the other person. This is in the nature of human relationships. And thirdly, if the partner happens to be mainstream and slightly conservative, then of course going off into Buddhism is just not on. You know, this this is a problem. The thing with marriage is it’s so much we have conditions so much to think that marriage is two people coming together to make one whole.
I think Buddhism is is finding your own salvation, and and you can’t really do that, is it? Unless you’re both onto the same And if you’re both looking at life in that way, then it’s quite possible to do different things. Bur Bur, for instance, with whom I’ve happily lived for nine years, is we we frequently have Buddhist blow ups because he’s a Zen man, and I think some of the things are ridiculous. And and I’m Mahāyāna, Tibetan tantric stuff. And, you know, it’s totally different.
But we we agree in all the main things, so it’s fine. We we both understand the Buddha each in our own way, and there’s no problem. We both know that life is suffering. We know the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Noble Paths, and we we know what Buddhist morality more or less should be. So then there’s no problem.
But as you said earlier on, how do you have a shrine if the partner doesn’t agree? Have a covered up job. It’s still going to work because although you will not sit cross legged in front of it, you will put it in a place where you can sit opposite it fairly easily without being detected. And you will do your concentration and meditation there, and that little place will get that sacredness. And the beauty of it could be that although you’re doing it covered up, eventually it will build you up and therefore the situation will improve.
So, you know, it’s worth trying. Was it? Holy His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, at the age of four, introduced me to Buddhism by appearing as a newspaper photograph in the paper. And I happened to be four as well. And I put a query to my mother.
Some people have heard this story. I have told it to a few people. I said to my mother, I just was interested in this kid sitting on these cushions with this pit cap. And I said, read what’s underneath. I couldn’t read yet.
So she read the caption, which said, amongst other things, that he was a god and a king. So I had a query. Why is he a god and a king if he is four and I am four? And my mother couldn’t answer that question. So that was my beginning, the beginning of my interest in Buddhism, which was not in a very, very altruistic interest, but mean, that was the beginning.
But it took a while before I could pick it up again. Did that originate in Holland? Yes, that was in Holland, yeah. And it must have been just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, because after that I don’t think, you know, the papers were used for other propaganda stuff. So it was pre nineteen forty when that photograph appeared.
Probably by that time he was five and I was five because it would have taken some time to get out of Tibet. But it was when he was installed in Lhasa, I think he was about four and a half, I’m not quite sure. And that official picture, which I later found back in many other books of course, was what set off the interest, yes. Yeah. Are there are there some people who who have something constructive to offer on handling yourself in the workplace or in your work as a or as a Buddhist or or who have some interesting experiences?
I think I tend to agree with you when you say that if you disclose that you’re a Buddhist, people immediately imagine some kind of saint. Yes. Absolutely. Halo. And they say to you, you know, do you eat or have sex or and just do all the everyday things that everybody loves to do.
Yes. And they imagine somehow that that’s conflicting with Buddhism. Yes. And it’s very hard to tell them that you can do that, but with a sense of detachment Yes. Seeing it for what it is.
Yes. But they immediately expect a sort of Mother Teresa then? Absolutely. And they’re quite disappointing sometimes? Absolutely, yes.
We disappoint them all the time. I remember a marvelous Buddhist lady who had an even lonelier Buddhist life as a Buddhist in Adelaide than I had because I was moving into the time that Buddhism became popular, where she died before it really became popular. She was a self confessed Buddhist who had reached that stage by strenuous study through all sorts of channels. It was very hard to get literature in those days, but she did somehow. And somehow we got in contact with each other, and she was so excited finding another Buddhist.
You can imagine she was already in her sixties then. And she came and visited me. She had a car, and I didn’t. And she posed a similar question to or not question, problem as to what you just raised. She said she walked into my room and she was a neat little Adelaide lady.
She didn’t have a hat on, had permed hair, she wore lipstick, powdered handbag gloves. After we sort of talked around the subject a bit, she said, What do you think? She said, People say because I’m a Buddhist, I shouldn’t wear lipstick. And she she sort of looked at me as if to say, now how will you react to that? She was a very clever lady.
And, you know, that’s the sort of situation. And I said, well, I can’t see what it matters. And then we sort of opened up to each other and started to talk about a lot of other things that we thought didn’t matter at all, but which the world was constantly pinning on us because we had confessed to be Buddhists. And that’s a great problem. It it really is.
And, of course, the thing is that you are human, and there are times that you blow up. I can I can remember times in my working life over the decades that I have blown up over work situations, over bosses, over well, whatever conditions, whatever it might have been, and behaved not very Buddhistic, because I lost my limited amount of tolerance over certain situations sometimes? But also looking back over decades, I think that if I hadn’t been a Buddhist, my working life would have been hell at times. And and it it didn’t become hell. It always stopped short of that because because of being a Buddhist, because of having these particular principles, and because of believing that whatever I was doing had to be done in such a way that it was going to be beneficial to other people.
Now, if you are not perfect, if you’re only, you know, on the road to enlightenment because you happen to want to, but you aren’t there by a long shot, then you’ve got to have something to hang on to when you are serving other people, and and by having the Buddhist principles, you can draw yourself up all the time. It just makes life so much more pleasant. Any more work situations that you can help other people with, things that you’ve done that you have found that worked as a Buddhist or that didn’t work that we might be able to glean some wisdom from. Let me just ask you another question about the intellectually disabled, and I know that they’re very special people. Oh, they are.
I had three months with them. And how they’re seen and come, it turns. Oh. Can I tell you about that? Yes.
Yes. My perceptions were? I worked with them for three months, and it was an eye opener. I’ve never been close to people who were what are they called now? Differently disabled.
Right, okay. They used to be called retarded people then. This is another way we work with words, we change it around. I hope it helps, but I don’t know that it matters, but anyway. And I was working in a sheltered workshop, and the same query occurred to me, how do you see this in a in a karmic sense?’ And I, after some time, noticed that there were two types of retarded people.
They fell in two groups. And the only way I can say it is that the one group was coming up, and that the other group had slipped back. What I mean by that, and you’ve got to understand that for both, I was trying to feel the same amount of compassion for both, but I was seeing it this way, that the one group was just simply life coming up from the beginnings, from the one’s self beings to wherever science is, that life started and how it all developed I can’t explain that, I’m not scientific that there was primitive human life just working its way up. Now these people that I classified in that group were the people who had the tremendous innocence, the gentleness, the generosity, the love, they were absolutely wonderful. They were fantastic.
They would walk up to you the first day I came, when I came for the interview, they walked up to me, about a group of six, and came right close-up to my body and sniffed me. They sniffed me like my dog does. And then one of them who could speak, because most of those couldn’t speak or they could say a few words, but one of them who could speak said, we like you. Mhmm. And that was it.
They knew. They had knowledge. They worked on intuition, and there was no evil in them at all. And then there was the other group which was tainted with the same evils that I was tainted with, but because they were intellectually retarded, they coped much less well with it than I could do because they couldn’t control themselves. So they’d fly off the handle.
They’d be violent. They’d be belligerent and all that sort of thing. The way I saw it was that for some karmic reason, they had slid into that life, but they had a knowledge of sophisticated life which was uncanny and disturbing and which they used in a way which unsettled me very much because I feared for their own safety and for the safety of their siblings or friends and so on, and for their future life. And that’s the way I experience them. I’m really not talking here about me forming an intellectual opinion about these people, but by working with them day after day in this very close situation, they just seem to naturally fall in these two groups.
How does that Yes, very good. Yeah? Yes. And then when you come to that conclusion, then you start to work with each group in a different way, according to their needs. But I didn’t last long enough because of the salary of twenty seven dollars a week.
This was a while ago, but even then it was low. I worked as a cook in an institution in Sydney for the severely mentally disabled. When Kylie was Down syndrome, gave me an enormous hug the first time she saw me. And they had self portraits of themselves all around the wall. And her self portrait was almost an exact replica of eastern representations of Buddha.
Yes. How wonderful. Oh, how old was she in in in in physical age? From. Yeah.
Physical age. Twenty six. Twenty six. Yeah. Yeah.
That reminds me of a person who was not a retarded person, but this is one of the stickers that’s sticking out here. One person that I wrote a story about, she was she was a little student at a university in Papua New Guinea where I studied in the year that I was there, and she had several mental breakdowns. She was carted off to hospital, to the psychiatric ward, for these breakdowns. She had a boyfriend whose name was Joseph, and she was a Christian, and her name was Maria. And she later said to me, his real name wasn’t really Joseph, but I called him Joseph because I am Maria.
And she was living I’m not going to say a fantasy, she was living a reality of Maria who had met Joseph, and she was waiting for the time that she was going to give birth to a savior. And she was the most beautiful person inside and out. And Joseph was just careering around the campus, having it off with others. So, I mean, everybody knew this, but there was this beautiful Maria, and Maria was getting meant to break down. And I eventually made a story of her, and I’ll read you this little bit.
There’s a preamble. I wonder where I’ll pick it up. I’ll pick it up here, and you just have to fantasize what you don’t understand. For myself, I would have wanted to become dishonest in a solidly moral sense. So sweetly terrible is reality that I would have liked to beli it forever.
I was prepared to continue lip service to any interpretation of the law of karma to evade the issues revealed and suffer the consequences in lives to come. But for Maria, beautiful, black eyed, innocent Maria, who told me of Joseph and her own dream of life’s reality. It was Maria who reawakened my dented compassion for humanity when she sat on my bed and told me of her two days’ imprisonment in a psychiatric ward where white doctors tried to cure her of her dream. She lived through it as if it was two thousand years. She said to me, ‘I thought of all the people all over the world who were put in prison for knowing what they knew.
The manner in which her compassion will be cruelly rewarded for ever hereafter will be by hearing of thousands and thousands committed to similar fates, for she will suffer it by proxy over and over again. There were terrible paintings on the walls, she remembered, still shuddering as if it was cold. I told the doctors I hated them and I didn’t want to look at them all day. The doctors were kind and explained to me there was no need to be afraid. They were paintings of the things other patients had seen in their minds.
But I told them that my mind had no such things in it, and to show it, I drew them a little flower. And that your story reminded me of Maria. Yeah. We can’t be finished on this topic. I’m back to the thing about words.
Yeah. For example, seems to me some words take for example, the word religion or things like some words to each individual have such different connotations that they almost cease to function as a word. I was wondering if you’d say more about what you’re saying about the power of speech. Yes. The word religion, I think people accept that it means something different to every person, depending on what the religion is that they believe in.
Also people that are afraid of the word, I remember being taken on for a job at WEA once to teach some class, and the boss of WEA at that time came in. Then I was just finished with my discussion with the group leaders, and he said, well, he said, is it all fixed? What what will your approach be to this discussion group? And I said, well, one of the first things I will probably say is that anybody who hasn’t sorted out their religious attitudes by the age of forty, it’s time that they start doing it. And he took three steps back and bolted out the door.
And I said to the others, what have I done? Because the nature of the discussion group that I was going to lead was such that it was perfectly normal to talk about religion. But anyway, I know what you mean by people, You know, it’s a word that is so loaded. But when I talk about the power of words, I mean something much more concrete than swaying people with the meaning of the words that you are saying. I look at the universe as being assembled entirely from energy, and words being an end product of a series of events that take place in the mind, starting with a stimulant, an original stimulant, becomes a perception, which turns into a concept, which narrows down to a thought, which then has to be put into what I call the straight jacket of words in order to be communicated to other beings.
When you get to the words and to the choosing of the words, that’s when your problems start because the thought will really have to be trimmed like I can’t say it. I have to say it another way. You let me go back and say that because I am bilingual and because I went through a number of years where I lost my first language because nobody to talk to and I hadn’t achieved my second language, so I couldn’t really talk to anybody very much at all, I lost language as far as any deep thoughts were concerned. I could talk about daily things in English and I never talked Dutch at all, but I had no language to talk about metaphysical things. Now that proved to me quite a few things, but one of them was that thought is not tied to words.
Thought doesn’t need words. Now people who do a lot of meditation know that as well. So concepts can float in your mind, in your awareness, without having the shape of words. It’s when you come to having to communicate them to others that you have to use words if you can’t do it by sending out and having picked up. And after all, that’s a bit hard to do when you want to have precise intellectual discussion about principles or doctrine or whatever.
So it is the going into the words where your thought is going to be cramped for style, and you’ve got to realize that. And because of that, the words that you do choose have to be as exact as you can possibly find them to convey what you really felt inside. And I don’t know how else to say it, because except by pointing at the opposite, where people say, Oh, wow, wasn’t it smashing? Did you? Yeah, yeah.
You know, and presumably they perfectly understand each other, but it doesn’t go for all situations. And I really do believe in being tremendously exact when it is about things which are of a life preserving nature and of a life saving nature, which after all is what Buddhism is about. And I think in Western Buddhism there’s been too much floating about, above the words, not recognizing that most people do need a certain number of exact words in order to get exactly what you’re getting at, and that a lot more meaning could have been passed on if we hadn’t floated about so blissfully. Well, more or less, that’s what I meant. The other thing I believe about words, which I might as well add to it, and I’ve referred to it briefly before, is that I do believe that because words are a sort of end product of energy, and because Einstein proved somehow I don’t understand how, but somehow that energy is matter.
Matter is energy. That words being a product of energy, can turn into matter. By that I mean that the meaning of that word, as it is understood by the speaker and by the receiver, can materialize. Writers, some writers, know about this. They know that if they conceive of an imaginary character that does imaginary things and lives through imaginary events, that in the fullness of time, that imaginary character will materialise and do these things and live that life.
I’ve seen it happen in small ways, and some writers, well known writers, worldwide known writers, have professed that they have seen these things happening. They haven’t given explanations for it. They say, funny things happen with writing. You write a character, you write an event, and the next year you walk straight into that situation and there it is. And you wonder whether you wrote it up because you were looking into the future or what, and I don’t go into further explanations.
My feeling is they weren’t looking into the future, they were making the future. And that is what I mean by the energy of words and why it is so important to have them exact, that if you make words from your energy then you have to take responsibility for those words. You will have to stand by them when they materialise. That means that if you use a word that has a violent meaning then you are creating violence in the future, and therefore you will then have to face up to that as having been the originator of that. And I could go on ad infinitum what I think about media, and you can just guess.
I’m getting occasional opportunities where I can air these thoughts in front of writers, and I take these opportunities and I do that, in the hope that there’s just one soul in a congregation of a hundred that picks it up and starts to realize that there may be something in it. But my feeling is you have to be prepared to eat your words, just to turn an old proverb around. Does that sort of answer Yeah, it feels that a lot. You were asking about the power of words? What about what did you do with regards to children?
If you were a Buddhist, did you bring them up a Buddhist or or what? Brought on the school form, you know, because back in isolation, you had to put religion. For the children, you did. Yes. Not what mother was, but for the children.
I brought my children up with Buddhist morality and Buddhist principles, and I left them free in their choice of religion. One started to go to the Baptist church because her friends went there, and the second one was converted to Christianity in three different ways, usually at summer camps where he went because his friends went there. Consequently, I had pastors trodden to my door by Baptist ministers who wanted to convert the mother as well. Eventually, that brought in the big cannon, was a Baptist preacher from America. I remember it well.
And there was a copy of the Dhammapada lying on the table with the books and the papers and picked it up, he said, Got them, sort of. He didn’t say that. He thought that. He said, look, they have taken this from Christianity. They say Buddha Buddha is the great physician.
They took it from Christianity because that’s what we say about Jesus. And I said, yes, but Buddha was five hundred years before. He didn’t know. So that was that wasn’t too hard. I mean, we were up to that sort of thing, but it wasn’t too hard really because they though it was an unfair fight because I knew much more about Christianity than I knew about Buddhism.
But that enabled me to stand back as far as my children were concerned and say, it is alright. They can go into the Christian church because a lot of good things are being taught there. They are going with their friends. They are going to listen. They are going to be converted.
They’re going to grow up. They’re going to find out whether it works or not, and, you know, one day we shall see. Did you say when they asked you if there was Oh, they knew I was Buddhist. No. When they said, is there a god?
And do you what did you say? It never came out like that. They would come home, like, from school and said, This fantastic story today about the Zulus and South African British or the whites or whoever fought them, I forget. And they all sat around and they prayed to God, and then they went and fought the Zulus and they won. And I said, well I said, you didn’t hear the other half of the story then?
He said, oh, what?’ I said, well, didn’t you hear the other half of the story that while the white soldiers were sitting down praying to their gods, the Zulus were doing a very special dance to their god to help them win that particular fight. And they lost their time. And that was the first time the kid heard that there was a possibility that other people might also pray to God or a God, and we went step by step like that. I never had any one of them ask me, Does God exist? I had one burst into the room once on Sunday morning, which was my sacred period, when I rested for my eighteen hour working days the whole weekend.
I didn’t want to be disturbed until eleven o’clock in the morning, and I was reading a book with a pot of tea. But he burst into the room and said, Mum, what is the meaning of life? I swallowed, and in order to save time for thinking, I said, well, son, the meaning of life is and he hung on my lips, I said, is to find its meaning. And he looked at me and said, that’s brilliant! And ran out of the room, and never asked again, and is still going around finding life’s meaning, and finds it very satisfying, evidently.
He’s not a Buddhist, neither are any of the others. They all have they all come out with things every so often which are entirely Buddhist, and that stands to reason because I brought them up, and I think that’s satisfying enough to me. They have to decide for themselves. I’m just a bit worried about how to handle my situation because for two or three years, I was taking children regularly to church. And and now it’s rather awkward.
Yeah. Sort of twelve. Yeah. I I stopped going to church about eighteen months ago, and I never hammered at home to them, but we just were complaining back about it. Nevertheless, they’re now saying, well, do you still believe in God?
Yeah. Is because their grandmother is a Christian. Yes. And I’ve you know, I feel a bit concerned about them having no sense of I mean, basically, what I try to do is say, all I can say is, look. I don’t really know.
Some people are sure. Yeah. Some people aren’t. Some some people are in the middle. Yeah.
And, basically, I don’t think it matters what you believe. It’s it’s how people treat each other. I was just going to more or less say more than that. To say that. I was just going to say that to you, to say that.
Because say is, look, there have been Christians that have killed Christians, and they’ve been Yeah. You know, it’s you do that counts, not what you believe in. I think you can also be quite honest and say that which has often been said that Buddhists are not atheists who do not believe in God, but agnostics who say we don’t know until we get there, and that Buddhism is a path, and that when you walk that path things become clearer eventually. I think that is much more satisfying for children to understand if they see this progression rather than a set doctrine that you either have to believe in yay or nay, because Buddhism is a path. In that it differs from the other religions.
I was going to say I think you find that most children have a divine spark. Oh yes. They are. Especially when they’re under six, before they get into the system. That will flower anyway because if you leave literature and write your example Yes.
Yeah. It’s going to grant you some kind of religious energy. It may not be necessarily the one that you’ve chosen, but it’s equally good if it’s right for them. Yeah. And it’s also the way you treat them because because being a mother, you’re you’re the person that can harm the most.
You’re the closest student, and you can harm them just by your moods, for instance, and the way you handle their offenses, and the way you explain to them their duties, and all these things that we have