September 2021 Newsletter
Welcoming visitors back to the temple
After being closed for nearly eighteen months, we will be welcoming visitors back to the temple from the start of September. However, we will be starting off cautiously, with events being initially just for existing Lay Sangha members, and with a limit on the number of people who can come to each event, as cases of coronavirus are still quite high.
It’s good that there wasn’t a big explosion in cases after the restrictions were eased in late July. However, as well as case numbers remaining high the healthcare figures have risen again, and are now similar to the recent peak in mid-July, so it seems good to still be cautious.
So for now we will have a limit of four on the number of people who can come to each event, and existing Lay Sangha members can contact the temple by email, text or phone to book for events. If we reach the limit of four, we will give preference initially to people who haven’t been able to join via zoom, and for weekend visits to people from outside Leicester. There won’t be any requirements regarding vaccinations, and people will not be required to wear a mask, although they are welcome to if they would like to. We will aim to keep the rooms well ventilated. All of the events will still be accessible via zoom as before.
We won’t be starting to have introductory events just yet, although hopefully we will be able to start those again before too long. For now we haven’t put the events on the temple website, but we will do once we are properly up and running, and once we are holding introductory events again.
We look forward to welcoming visitors to the temple again after such a long break.
Forthcoming Events: The Festival of Avalokiteshwara Bodhisattva
On Saturday the 4th of September we will be celebrating the Festival of Avalokiteshwara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. The name Avalokiteshwara is Sanskrit (Japanese: Kanzeon, Chinese: Kwan Yin, Tibetan: Chenrezig), and means “The one who hears the cries of the world”. To live with compassion is to hear the cries of suffering within ourselves and within all beings, and to be willing to respond, and the festival will focus on this centrally important aspect of Buddhist practice.
During the festival a wide variety of different images of Avalokiteshwara are placed around the walls of the meditation hall, and we circumambulate the hall and bow to each image as we pass it. This symbolises the fact that compassion can appear in many different forms, sometimes in a way that we least expect, and that if we want to know stability and contentment in our lives we must accept, and bow to, all these different appearances of the nature of reality. This is one way in which we ourselves express compassion for all living things.
In addition to welcoming a small number of visitors to the temple for the festival, we will also be holding the festival over zoom so that Lay Sangha members can join in from where they are. I hope you will be able to join us, and full details will be sent out by email prior to the festival.
Completing the redecoration of our main rooms
Once our Meditation Hall and Common Room had been completed, the only other room which is used for all events, and was still in need of decoration, was the new entryway which leads to these rooms. This has been completed over the last few weeks, and the picture below shows the entryway before and after the redecoration.
We now have coat hooks up too, all ready for visitors to return at the beginning of September, and the new entry way is probably five times the size of the space we had before the building work was done. This will make things a lot easier for everyone when people are arriving and departing.
Unfortunately we don’t have the carpet for the entrance yet, as the carpet company haven’t yet been able to get it from their suppliers. We will check with them again next week, but we may need to choose a different carpet if they still can’t get it. That should be fine as there are other suitable options available, and hopefully it won’t be more than a couple of weeks before they can come and fit it. In the meantime we have plenty of mats and rugs that we can put down to cover the area.
In addition to working on the entryway, we have also been able to set up the Common Room properly again for Dharma talks and meetings, as we are no longer using it as a temporary Meditation Hall. We have recently been donated some very nice chairs which we are now using in the Common Room; they are the blue and gold ones and purple ones in the picture below.
It’s very nice to be able to get the temple’s rooms back functioning again after all of the disruption of the building work, and we hope it won’t be too long before we can ease the restrictions on the number of visitors, so that anyone who would like to come and practise here will be able to.
Donations
The temple is dependent on donations for its continued existence, and any financial support you are able to offer is greatly appreciated. Details of how to offer support can be found on the Donations page of the website.
All donations are received with gratitude