For what it’s worth, the Deputy Women, Family and Community Development Minister deserves a pat on her back for voicing her thoughts on inter-faith relations. Read her comments in the Star here.

I just hope that what she says extends to all religions in the broadest sense possible, including atheism and agnosticism. Sometimes what people believe in may be exactly the same thing and the differences are just due to terminology.

Whatever it is, the recognition of the freedom of religion would be a step in the right direction towards national unity for Malaysia. Happy Vesak and salam.

Another “glimpse” from Sogyal Rinpoche’s book:

Wrong views and wrong convictions can be the most devastating of all our delusions. Surely Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot must have been convinced that they were right, too? And yet each and every one of us has that same dangerous tendency as they had: to form convictions, believe them without question, and act on them, so bringing down suffering not only on ourselves but on all those around us.

On the other hand, the heart of Buddha’s teaching is to see “the actual state of things, as they are,” and this is called the true View. It is a view that is all embracing, as the role of spiritual teachings is precisely to give us a complete perspective on the nature of mind and reality.

* See previous “glimpse” here.

Before you get the wrong idea, this post is not about the “political tsunami” that hit Malaysia on 8 March 2008. It is an extract from the book Glimpse After Glimpse – Daily Reflections on Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche, which happens to fall on March 8.

I find some of the “glimpses” particularly insightful and simply would like to share them here. Here’s the first:

In his very first teaching, Buddha explained that the root cause of suffering is ignorance. But where exactly is this ignorance? And how does it display itself? Let’s take an everyday example. Think about those people—we all know some—who are gifted with a remarkably powerful and sophisticated intelligence. Isn’t it puzzling how, instead of helping them, as you might expect, it seems only to make them suffer more? It is almost as if their brilliance is directly responsible for their pain.

What is happening is quite clear: This intelligence of ours is captured and held hostage by ignorance, which then makes use of it freely for its own ends. This is how we can be extraordinarily intelligent and yet absolutely wrong, at one and the same time.

As the people of Burma rise up again, we have had a rare sighting of Aung San Suu Kyi. There she stood, at the back gate of her lakeside home in Rangoon, where she is under house arrest. She looked very thin. For years, people would brave the roadblocks just to pass by her house and be reassured by the sound of her playing the piano. She told me she would lie awake listening for voices outside and to the thumping of her heart. “I found it difficult to breathe lying on my back after I became ill, she said.”

That was a decade ago. Stealing into her house, as I did then, required all the ingenuity of the Burmese underground. My film-making partner David Munro and I were greeted by her assistant, Win Htein, who had spent six years in prison, five of them in solitary confinement. Yet his face was open and his handshake warm. He led us into the house, a stately pile fallen on hard times. The garden with its ragged palms falls down to Inya Lake and to a trip wire, a reminder that this was the prison of a woman elected by a landslide in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by generals in ludicrous uniforms.
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This morning, on a whim, I checked out our Opposition Leader’s website, and chanced upon a hot-off-the-press posting by Dr. Chen Man Hin. In his posting, Dr. Chen suggested that the Prime Minister invite Raja Nazrin Shah, the Crown Prince of Perak, to be his personal adviser, in light of the latter’s speech at the first Malaysian Student Leaders Summit 2007.

For what it’s worth, I must say that that’s an ingenius and interesting idea from Dr. Chen. I wonder what Raja Nazrin thinks. (By the way, Raja Nazrin’s credentials are quite impressive. Check out the link to his entry in Wikipedia above.)
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I was just at a DAP forum on the Lina Joy case. I must say that I am both disappointed and encouraged by what I saw and heard.

On the one hand, some of the speakers were terribly disappointing. To be fair, I shall not point them out. On the other hand, the turn out, which could have been anywhere between 700 to 1,000 people, shows that many Malaysians still care and dare to speak their minds.

Well, considering there were so many lawyers, politicians and Islamic scholars at the “dialogue”, I just had to say my two sens’ worth and ask the panel a few questions.
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