The End of Blog Vacation

I will resume my weekly series of Uposatha Day posts next week, for the First Quarter Moon on November 3.

I have used my little vacation to put some ideas into order, to visit family and the attend the Seventeenth Annual Western Buddhist Monastic Conference in Sacramento, CA. In the meantime the weather here in Austin, Texas has turned from bake to chill very quickly.

A lot of construction is disrupting the accustomed stillness at the Sitagu Buddhist Vihara where I live, which will produce a pagoda, a Dhamma hall, many more cottages, and, my particular interest, a dedicated brick library building! There are some sketches HERE. I have for a few months undertaken to catalog our books and implement a check-out system, and growing out library. We will soon be a fully functional retreat center, for both meditation and retreat. Then the peace will return. The plan is that a very eminent Burmese meditation teacher will lead a long retreat here next May after the opening of the new pagoda. More about that later.

My new Uposatha series will be entitled “Buddha’s Meditation and its Variants.”