Gary Warth, North Country Times: The San Diego County Planning Commission is scheduled on Friday to hear a proposal to add a meditation center to a Buddhist monastery in Bonsall, and a community group plans on fighting the project with a petition signed by about 400 people.

The Vietnamese Buddhist Meditation Congregation has proposed the expansion of the Dai Dang Monastery off of Camino del Rey, and neighbors have said they fear that the quiet monastery where 10 monks live will become a noisy destination when hundreds of people begin visiting for ceremonies.

The Bonsall Community Sponsor Group, an advisory board to the San Diego …

Read the original article »

Deena DiBacco: Wednesday night, Collingswood [New Jersey] Zoning Board members unanimously denied a borough man’s use variance application, aimed at using his detached garage as a gathering place for group meditation.

Applicant Stephen Tumolo, who owns the said property at the unit block of Coulter Ave., holds a master’s degree in Theology and currently teaches religion at Camden Catholic High School.

Tumolo has lived at the 2-and-a-half story Coulter Ave. property for the past two years, which features a detached garage.

Wednesday night, Tumolo testified that 10 months after purchasing his home, he began making improvements to the garage space without building permits.

“A …

Read the original article »

The local Buddhist community has built a new meditation centre in Brno, the Moravian capital and the Czech Republic’s second largest city with a population of 500,000, Marketa Blazejovska, from the community, has told CTK.

The new building worth 24 million crowns, named the Diamond Path House, has replaced the Buddhist community’s old headquarters, situated elsewhere, that had run out of capacity and could not be extended.

A half of the new building’s costs were financed from a grant, and the rest from an interest-free loan from a private foundation.

The debt has been repaid through donations from the centre members and supporters from the…

Read the rest of this article…
…

Marin County officials continued to wrestle with proposed plans for the Spirit Rock Meditation Center — even though the county staff says doing nothing would be worse for the environment than approving the Buddhist retreat’s newest plan.

County planning commissioners decided Monday they need more time to reflect on a new master plan for the complex and told planning staff to outline specifics of regulations limiting attendance at special events. Another session will be scheduled later.

“I’m wondering if we are moving ahead with this before we have the program written out,” said Commissioner Randy Greenberg of attendance regulations. “We don’t know the magnitude of the issue,” added colleague Wade Holland. …

Here at Wildmind we’ve reported on several Buddhist organizations that have faced strenuous opposition to establishing or expanding Buddhist centers. Usually the objections are supposedly about traffic, noise (meditation being a notoriously noisy activity), and in one case, the perceived nuisance of animal sacrifice.

John Pappas, a blogger at Elephant Journal, has collated a handy list of groups that have faced such planning objections:

…

The public comment period on the re-circulated draft environmental Mitigated Negative Declaration for the proposed Buddhist temple in Bonsall [California] closed Feb. 11, and the county’s Department of Planning and Land Use (DPLU) received 151 comment letters and one petition.

DPLU received 45 public comment letters critical of the project, 106 letters supportive of the project, and a supportive petition with 804 signatures. DPLU staff will review and respond to all comments, although the response to any comments not related to California Environmental Quality Act issues will be that the comments are outside the purview of the environmental statement.

DPLU staff does not currently have an estimate …

OLATHE, KANSAS — A Johnson County Buddhist church has outgrown its building, and they have a new place to worship picked out. But so far they have been denied the right to use it, and a metro Buddhist leader says that zoning isn’t the reason why they can’t move in.

The Lao-Buddhist Association is trying to move its Olathe temple to a location along 119th Street in Olathe. But the Johnson County Board of Commissioners has so far denied the group a conditional use permit. Neighbors say that the area the Buddhists have chosen is zoned residential, but Lama Chuck Stanford …

Proponents of a Buddhist meditation center proposed for Bonsall made one final pitch to a community advisory group Tuesday, but the project still seemed a tough sell to the board members.

“You want to work with the community?” Bonsall Community Sponsor Group member Mark Litner said to Frank Hoang, who represents the project. “I’m not feeling the love here of you trying to work with the community whatsoever.”

The meeting Tuesday was the second time in two weeks that the Sponsor Group, an advisory board to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, listened to public comments about a proposed three-building meditation center planned by the Vietnamese …

The Bonsall [California] Community Sponsor Group delayed its recommendation on the Dai Dang Monastery‘s expansion plans after hearing more than two hours of testimony Tuesday night.

The group serves as an advisory body to the county Board of Supervisors, which will have the final say on the Buddhist monastery’s proposal for a two-story meditation center. The Bonsall advisory group has unanimously opposed expansion plans for the monastery in the past.

Several residents spoke against the planned expansion. Wrightwood Road residents to the north of the monastery expressed concerns, for example, that their street would be used as a new entrance to the center.

The monastery opened at 6326 Camino …

Minh Cong Nguyen has found a home for his displaced Buddhist congregation – this time outside of Rankin County.

Nguyen opened a Zen Center last month on Terry Road, just south of U.S. 80, which will house meditation classes and worship services.

He holds worship services on Sunday for Buddhists as well as meditation classes for everyone.

“Westerners are invited,” the monk said of the free classes he will start holding on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. The first is Saturday.

Americans live a stressed-out lifestyle, and these two-hour sessions give people a mental break, he said.

“Our minds are like a computer,” he said. “You keep putting too much information in it. Meditation is the delete …

A plan to build a Thai Buddhist temple in Columbus, Ohio, is far from dead. In fact, construction on the temple could begin in the spring.

Representatives of the Columbus Buddhism Center have submitted paperwork to the city requesting a lot split for property on Blacks Road.

They also have submitted new paperwork outlining possible plans for the temple.

John Tai, a representative from the Columbus Buddhism Center, could not be reached for comment on the temple project because he is out of the country, but Pataskala Planning Director Diane Harris said she has spoken to Tai and the project is moving forward.

Read the rest of this article…

The temple will be fit for a king.

Area Thai Buddhists celebrated the town’s final blessing of their future home last week, smiling for the cameras before a model of the largest sanctuary of its kind outside of Thailand.

The 109,000-square-foot Theravada Buddhist temple and meditation center on South Street East will serve as a religious and cultural center and home to as many as 16 resident monks.

It will be topped with a 185-foot golden steeple.

“What a magnificent structure,” Zoning Appeals Board Chairman Robert Newton said before his board unanimously approved the spire’s height.

The plan fulfills the long-held dream of Boston-area Thai families to honor their monarch, King Rama IX, Bhumibhol Adulyadej, who was born in Cambridge in 1927.

Project advisor Richard Cook, …

In this short video, Srimati describes the principle of “what we dwell upon, that we become.” Where we place our attention, consciously or unconsciously, shapes the course of our future. By becoming more conscious of our thinking we can take responsibility for how our life unfolds.

The other day I read about a family of six who were wiped out when a truck-driver plowed into their vehicle. He’d allegedly been driving and attempting to look at a laptop screen at the same time.

  To do two things at once is to do neither (Publilius Syrus, an Iraqi enslaved by the Romans. Flourished first century BCE.)

Not all multitasking is that catastrophic, but nevertheless attempting to juggle too many things in a short space of time is causing us stress, reducing our productivity, and making it harder to maintain focus when we need to.

What happens in the long term to an …

A Buddhist from Essex was forced to apply for planning permission to meditate in his own patch of woodland. Read more