Destination Saigon at Cabramatta Library

The really lovely people at the Whitlam Library in Cabramatta are holding a very special meet-the-author evening on Wednesday night the 9th of June at 6.30pm.
I will be talking about Vietnam, writing, and some of the special and funny stories that form the backbone of "Destination Saigon."
I am so privileged to be speaking at my own local library, so please come along if you can to hear an author on his home turf.

Details:

Whitlam Library
Wednesday, 9th June, 6.30pm
9725 0360 to RSVP

Everyone is welcome to this free event.

Thank you to Anne and Andrew at the library for their wonderful support, the posters look fantastic!!

Plastic Chairs

One of the simple, easily missed but distinctive elements of life in Vietnam is the ubiquity of fragile plastic furniture.
I’m a great breaker of these flimsy plastic stools designed to hold the weight of the slender Vietnamese. At restaurants where I am known the owners make a great charade of stacking 3 or 4 stools one on top of the other in order to take my weight. I frequent a Benedictine monastery on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, and when I share the monks’ lunch in the refectory, they go to hunt down a truly massive mahogany chair, intended for the hallowed buttocks of visiting Bishops, and drag it into the communal eating hall for my benefit. Once, having suffered the indignity of breaking a chair at a bbq rabbit restaurant, a mother pointed me out to her child and said, “See that fat foreigner over there, the one who broke the chair? If you’re not good he’ll eat you up.”

Dia Tang Vuong Bo Tat

Dia Tang is the Vietnamese name for Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva (Di Zhang Ch., Jizo Jp.).
He is the protector of the dead, and is the deity that is revered during memorial services for deceased relatives.
As such, he is a very important part of Vietnamese Buddhist ritual life.
His special celebration is during the festival of Vu Lan, where his legend has become enmeshed with that of Mahamoggallāna, who is said to have seen his mother in the realms of hell and to have petitioned the Buddha to take pity on the dead.

Walter Mason Speaking at the Cafe Church, Chapel by the Sea, Bondi Beach,

7pm Sunday APRIL 11
@Chapel by the Sea, Bondi Beach

Address: 95 Roscoe Street, Bondi Beach NSW

Phone: 02 9130 3445

Walter will be talking about spiritual life in contemporary Vietnam, and will lead an exercise in prayer and meditation on the prayer bells.

Walter is an academic and writer with a long-standing interest in meditation, prayer and other contemplative practices.

Walter has travelled extensively throughout Asia, and has spent long periods studying Buddhism and meditation in Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan and Cambodia.

These days Walter is firmly committed to the idea of Interfaith spirituality, and is convinced of the possibility of meaningful exploration of plural spiritual paths. At present Walter's spiritual journey could be defined as Buddhist-Christian, with input from the ideas of Christian mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and inspired by the example of the Hindu mystic Ramakrishna.

Committed to the practice of meditation as an effective tool for spiritual exploration, Walter's approach is gentle and focused on individual needs. Rejecting the idea that 3 hours a day squatting on the floor is essential, Walter teaches that even 5 minutes a day of mindful sitting or movement can have a positive effect on people's lives.

Walter is the author of a spiritual travel book called Destination Saigon, recently released by Allen & Unwin. www.destination-saigon.com

One Pillar Pagoda

Along with the Dong Son drums and the conical hat, the One Pillar Pagoda in Hanoi (Chua Mot Cot) is one of the most common symbols of the Vietnamese nation.
These days it occupies prime nationalist real-estate, occupying as it does a corner of the massive Ho Chi Minh mausoleum park. Indeed on special commemorative days (and there is at least one a week) the Pagoda is closed to the public because it sits so close to the mausoleum.
And while the site and probably the general shape of the Pagoda are ancient, the structure itself is relatively recent, having been bombed by the French in an act of singular nastiness in 1954.
These days it's quite a nice place to hang out and do some people watching. Though the coconut-juice sellers and other touts are particularly avaricious here, they'll normally leave you alone if you ignore them for a minute or two.
The attached temple is quite an oddity. It seems to be staffed by a single monk, and it keeps extremely eccentric opening hours. If you can get in there, it is well worth visiting. I have no idea if the Temple was destroyed in the bombing, but the design and structure seem to me to be authentic, so the re-construction must have been exactly along the lines of an older temple structure. The statues inside seem quite authentically antique, and are beautiful examples of Northern Vietnamese Buddhist art - well worth spending some time with.

Old Warehouses - Cholon

One of my dreams was always to buy one of the old French-era warehouses that ran along the river from Cholon all the way into Saigon. They were the places in which much of the action in Graham Greene's The Quiet American took place.
These buildings were just exquisite - spacious and derelict, they were ripe for renovation, and would have made spectacular houses - even boutique hotels.
Unfortunately, in recent years most have them have been destroyed, in one of the most criminal efforts at "beautification" ever undertaken by an inept local government.
These picture was taken approx. 2003 - just before the bulldozers went through to create wider streets and a "more beautiful" riverside district.
Sigh...

Meditating on Bells

Bells are a big part of Buddhist culture in all countries, and in Vietnam the temples pride themselves on both the big bronze bells that call the faithful to prayer from the bell tower and the smaller but more finely tuned bowl-bells that are used during chanting in the prayer hall itself.
For the past few months I have been using bells a lot in my meditation teaching, and I am going to be really exploring this theme when I do the Cafe Church at The Chapel by the Sea in Bondi on April 11 at 7pm. Do come along and share the experience/experiment with me.
Speaking of bells, I have recently heard a really fascinating documentary on the BBC World Service on the significance of temple bells in Japan, and I can't recommend it enough - a really fascinating radio documentary.