Category: Misc.

Anyone who could meet me the 2nd through 4th Tuesday of every month from about 2-4:30 pm, we could try to put a dent in the weeds! Even one day would help. It looks a little overwhelming, but many hands make it much easier. Just call Mary ahead of time in case I can’t make it.  Bring your “implements of dandy destruction.” Or I have extra tools that I’ll bring. Mary 509-570-6876 or email me at peacenik_49@msn.com

Intro to Buddhism Class with Reverend Opel on Saturday 4/24/21 10 am-12 pm Via Zoom

Email SpokaneBuddhistTemple@gmail.com to get the zoom link

Do you have questions about Buddhism? Are you new to the Spokane Buddhist Temple? Join Reverend Melissa Opel for a brief introductory lecture about Buddhism and specifically Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, followed by an opportunity for discussion with questions and answers. All Are Welcome!

Spokane Buddhist Temple’s 31^st annual TERIYAKI FEST  –  Spring Food Festival Fundraiser, April 18th  –  11 am-3 pm (or when we sell out). Spokane Buddhist Temple, 927 S. Perry, Spokane. Featuring Chicken or Tofu Teriyaki Bowls ($10), and assorted Mochi Desserts ($5). Support the Temple plus 10% is going to Jewels Helping Hands. ALL TAKE-OUT  –  NO PRE-ORDERS.

Bowls include Chicken or Tofu Teriyaki over rice with veggie stir fry (contains wheat & soy). Various Dessert Mochi including butter, peanut butter & honey, and red bean paste filled mochi. 

A fundraiser within a fundraiser! The Spokane Buddhist Temple is gearing up to make our famous Teriyaki Bowls for take-out. 10% of the proceeds will go to Jewels Helping Hands, who is housing and supporting so many of our homeless population. Grab a bite and head to the park.  

All Outside  –  Masks required, social distancing rules apply

On Sunday (4/11), we will have an OUTSIDE SERVICE at NOON, also live streamed on Zoom. Bring your own chair – masks required. Note different time: ***NOON*** in person & on zoom.

Sunday — April 4th —10:00 am
******NOTE TIME CHANGE: 10 AM******
Joint Zoom service with the Yakima Buddhist Church

Hanamatsuri, literally flower festival, is celebrated in April, commemorating the birth of Siddhartha Gautama, who became enlightened and is known as Buddha.

According to our tradition, the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, was born in Nepal on April 8, 566 B.C. He was born the son of King Suddohana and Queen Maya. There are many flowery descriptions of the scene at his birth, including celestial birds singing beautiful songs, beautiful flowers, and a sweet gentle rain bathing the baby Buddha. It is not necessarily the beauty of the flowers, the sounds of the celestial birds, nor the sweet gentle rain that fell, but the vibrant fact that on this day was born the greatest of sentient beings who became the Enlightened One, the Buddha.

A special altar—the Hanamido—is erected and decorated with flowers representing the garden in Lumbini, southern Nepal, where it is said that Queen Maya went into labor. A statue of the infant Buddha is placed in a pan and, in a ritual known as kanbutsu, water or sweet tea is poured over it in remembrance of the “sweet rain” that descended from heaven at the moment of the birth.

We will have a different Zoom link for this service. Email the Temple for that link at SpokaneBuddhistTemple@gmail.com.

Good news about our fundraising for the Homeless Center run by Jewels Helping Hands – – Not only have our donations helped Jewels with January and February electric bills – – we also have enough to help with the March electric bill.

We hope that everyone continues to donate so our Temple can continue to help past March.

Jewels has relocated the Homeless Center to the Women’s Club on 9^th Ave.  On Friday, representing our Welfare Committee, Celeste Sterrett, Tricia Ohashi and I visited the new site.  It is amazing – – beautifully run and focused on empowering people out of homelessness into jobs, apartments and economic independence – – full lives.

For our Temple to become more involved at a personal level, we are trying out making sandwiches to deliver to the Center.  Jewels needs 100 sandwiches a day.  We’ve made sandwiches twice now and we are hopeful that we can soon have larger sandwich making get togethers. This is a pilot project. We’ll be figuring out where is the least expensive bread, jam, etc., how long it takes, and just how to do it.

We invited Julie Garcia, the head of Jewels Helping Hands to speak at our service on March 28^th. You can view her talk on our Facebook page or on YouTube on our channel:

(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRmfShWxEWIWFztK80Uy55Q) under “Videos”.

Social Welfare Committee

For more about Jewels Helping Hands, see https://jewelshelpinghands.org, or join them on Facebook.

Message from Bishop Marvin Harada

We have all been concerned about recent events in the news about the rise of hate crimes and violence against Asians.

It feels like as human beings, we are going backwards in time to the era of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, many of whom lived through prejudice and discrimination against Asians. Some of you today lived through that era firsthand, being incarcerated in the internment camps. My mother, who is 92, was one such person. She also faced discrimination growing up in Hood River, Oregon. But you wouldn’t know it now. She has friends of all ethnicities.

The other day, she received a phone call from a Hispanic woman whose family worked on our farm. This woman called to thank my mom for taking her and her sister to elementary school when she was a young girl to get an education. Because she got an education, she had a wonderful life. Fifty years later, she called to express her gratitude.

Buddhism teaches us to see our true essence that is beyond race, gender, social economic background, sexual orientation, gender expression, religious faith, physical disability, and so on. Why can’t the rest of the world see the world of oneness that we are taught in Buddhism?

Thich Nhat Hanh, the wonderful Vietnamese Buddhist master, uses a wonderful metaphor of chocolate chip cookies to illustrate what happens when we fail to see our true essence.

He says, when you make cookies, you put all the ingredients in the bowl and mix them together. You know they all have the same ingredients, but what if after you put them on the cookie sheet, some cookies think, “I am the perfect cookie. I am the perfect color. That cookie is too dark. That cookie is too light.”

Isn’t that absurd? The cookies are of the same essence, and so are we. How can we single out ourselves as superior or inferior by the color of our skin or by any kind of distinction? But yet, isn’t that what is occurring in the world today, and has been occurring for eons?

I think our greatest response to a world that is tending towards hatred and violence is to share our view of the world as Buddhists, to see our true essence and essential oneness of all beings, of all of life. As Shinran Shonin so eloquently expresses in his words, “May the Buddha-Dharma spread and may the world be at peace.”

Namuamidabutsu,
Rev. Marvin Harada, Bishop
Buddhist Churches of America