Buddhist Lama Visiting Pittsburgh

The 33rd Menri Trizin, the highest lama of the Tibetan Bon Buddhist tradition will speak and offer blessings Saturday at Mellon Institute from 3 to 5 and then attend a benefit dinner at India Garden in Monroeville.

Tempa Lama, the spiritual director of the Olmo Ling Center in Greenfield, says the Bon tradition pre-dates the arrival of Buddhism in Tibet during the 7th century, making it the oldest of the 5 schools of Buddhism. He says Bon Buddhism holds that any human being can become a Buddha, an awakened being, through unconditional love and compassion for others. Tempa Lama studied in the 80s as a child under the 33rd Menri Trizin at the monastery he built in northern India when clashes with the Chinese forced many Buddhists to flee Tibet in 1959. It now houses nuns, monks and students, which will benefit from the fundraising.

Tempa Lama says the Menri Trizin will bless people with his great power to heal physical and emotional suffering, and even business troubles. He considers him a living Buddha, along with the Dalai Lama. As a world religion, he says Buddhism claims 10% but is the fastest-growing.

one of the two b's in bible is for me

You know the Bible 86%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic! You find this blurb insipid and over the top! Fortunately, you can add a couple snarky sentences to the end of it!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
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Kieran got a 97% on this quiz. I decided to take it also because, in the course of my Lutheran upbringing, I actually read the entire Bible when I was in high school.* Cover-to-cover, alpha-to-omega, Genesis-to-Revelation, In-the-beginning-to-Amen.

The quiz provided some intriguing foggy mental nostalgia: several things I recognized as questions I would have once been able to answer but now the memory was past dim and into just plain dark. And then there was this one question about a donkey that I didn't even recognize as something I would have once recognized, although I'm sure it was something I once knew full well. Anyway, as you can see, my scriptural retention was much worse than Kieran's, and I will not be winning any games of Go To The Head Of The Sunday School Class.

BTW, the two parables of Jesus that still come to mind for me from time to time are that of Workers In the Vineyard and that of the Two Sons. Although, in neither case, do I take away the intended lesson: the former comes to mind as I think about how I should focus on my own rewards and not worry about things relative to the effort/reward of others, and the latter to mind when I think about how it is worse to tell someone you are going to do something and then not follow through than it is just to tell them you aren't going to do it in the first place.

* Granted, it was "The Living Bible," which is an attempted easier-reading translation. It says something about the readability of the Bible that while the most common word in written English is easily "the", and the most common word in spoken English is even more easily "I", the most common word in the Bible is "and."