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A letter addressed to the secretary came in the other day from someone – I suddenly realised – who has been taking my newsletter for twenty years! Yes, what an amazing thought! I've been writing an almost monthly newsletter ever since setting up a small vihaara at Little Duxmore on the Isle of Wight in March 1979. Since then, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge. We moved from there to Pan Mills on the edge of Newport, then up to Kenilworth and eventually here. And each spring, as the trees and vegetation wakes up and bursts into life, when I see the cow parsley flowering I remember that it was this time of the year – fourteen years ago now – that we first came looking at Lower Fulbrook. And throughout all these years, wherever I've been, the newsletters have gone out more or less monthly. Obviously the format has steadily changed and improved and I hope the content may have got a bit better as well. The first one I remember was stencilled and duplicated, but we soon moved on to having a printer reproduce them from an original that I used to knock out on a variety of borrowed typewriters until we managed to find the cash to purchase a little portable of our own. I've never been much of a typist and I remember the acres of time I used to spend pasting repairs over the mistakes I'd made, sometimes having to find shorter alternative words for others that I'd left letters out of. It's all so much easier now with the luxury of modern technology. But they still haven't come up with a machine that can quite do it all and often the problem now is to find an uninterrupted clear day or two to spend on bringing the latest edition to completion.
This year the actual day when Buddhists in many parts of the world will be remembering Vesaakha Puujaa, or Wesak or Buddha Day, or whatever you want to call it, arguably the most important of all Buddhist festivals, is May 29th
It will focus on a little girl called Theodora and how she and her mum who is from Thailand and her English dad practise Buddhism at home and at the wat and what they do to celebrate this important festival. I hope many of you will be with us then to honour the Birth, Enlightenment and Passing of the Lord Buddha and to support Theodora on her big day.
Prince Siddhattha Gotama was born according to traditional reckoning in 623 BCE, or perhaps, if you listen to the scholars, in 563 BCE, or at least somewhere thereabouts, in the Lumbini Garden just inside modern Nepal on a full moon of the ancient lunar month of Vesaakha. Thirty-five years later, on another Vesaakha full moon he achieved Enlightenment and became the Buddha. And on another Vesaakha full moon forty-five years further on, at the age of eighty, he passed into Parinibbaana. We celebrate these three events at Vesaakha Puujaa.
I hope that you will already have noticed something different about the spellings of most of the Buddhist terms and names so far in this newsletter. I'm hoping it might make a bit more sense to you than the usual method with its funny dots and dashes that only the deeply initiated seem able to comprehend. I know we English ought to be used to illogical spellings but these are Paali terms that many of you will seldom hear spoken anything like correctly and so you need to be able to work out for yourselves a reasonable approximation of how they're pronounced. In this system, the Paali diacritical marks are represented using plain ASCII characters in a way similar to a convention widely used on the Internet by Paali students and scholars. Long vowels (those usually typeset with a bar above them) are doubled: aa ii uu. For consonants, I've decided to ignore more or less the retroflex (cerebral) consonants (usually typeset with a dot underneath), as these are not sounds familiar or easily distinguishable to us English speakers. The guttural nasals (usually m or n with a dot above) are both represented by ng, which is how they should be sounded. The palatal nasal is represented here as ñ. I know these changes might disturb some of the purists amongst you and upset others who are attached to the established way of doing things but the old system is one that doesn't work very well. If I can still hear people who have been around Buddhism for years mispronouncing well-known Paali terms, what chance do newcomers have of getting them right? I will be revising our chanting book and precept card using this system and I shall be interested to hear any feedback.
There is a well-known Thai saying that I've attempted to render into acceptable English and which you'll find on the heading of this newsletter just under the date. A more literal translation than that would be, 'Without Maara your paarami won't strengthen'. By 'Maara' is meant your troubles, imperfections and difficulties. In Buddhist scripture, Maara is a deity, an embodiment of evil, who is occasionally portrayed trying to tempt the Buddha. This word may also refer to the attitudes and thoughts that can spoil minds and lives, like the greed and anger that almost everyone experiences. And it can include anything dependent on something else and therefore unstable and vulnerable; as well as our mental formations and the reality that all that is born is going to die – including each one of us. However they're tricked out or disguised we would probably rather not have any of these troubles and shortcomings but we do and we have to cope somehow. The Paarami are qualities known in English as Perfections. They can be remedies for these troubles. They include giving, morality, renunciation, wisdom, energy, patience, truth, determination, loving-kindness and equanimity. They are qualities that lead to Enlightenment. And they are qualities that we might not bother much about were it not for our troubles. The greater our troubles, the more we are driven to develop these Perfections. Hence, this saying that if we don't have any troubles our perfections don't strengthen. It's a bit like 'No pain, no gain!'. Let me just add that you don't have to look for troubles, you don't need to inflict more suffering on yourself - you probably have more than enough without that. Just use what you've got, try to do things better and turn those troubles to your advantage.
We sometimes forget that not everyone liked the Buddha. Some people went out of their way to cause him grief. Being the Buddha, he could remain unperturbed by these assaults on his person or reputation and turn them into lessons for his assailants and others. When the brahmin Akkosaka insulted the Buddha, the Buddha asked him what had happened to the delicacies he'd offered his guests who had refused them. And the brahmin agreed that whatever he had handed out and hadn't been accepted had returned to him, the original owner. And so the Buddha told him that he would not accept his insults and they would have to return to him too. That encounter like so many similar ones ended with the brahmin so impressed by the Buddha's wisdom that he asked to join the Sangha. This is a reminder for us to be careful about what we hand out, in case it comes back.
In June, as well as my usual round of prison visits I shall be going to Scotland, the Isle of Wight and Thailand.
During the past month or so we've had some enjoyable occasions with new visitors to nearly all our functions. 
At Songkran a young man received the Going Forth and was ordained a saamanera or novice. Parties of prison officers on the Race Relations Liaison Officers courses at the nearby Prison Service Training College continued to come to hear about Buddhism. And a group of Christian prison chaplains on a World Religions course at the same college has also been in for a session with me on Buddhism.
Following me back from Bangkok will be a party of senior Wat Pah Pong monks. They are coming to the U.K. for the opening of the new temple building at Amaravati in July and are taking the opportunity to visit other monasteries associated with Wat Pah Pong. They will be coming here for the day on June 22nd and you are invited to meet them. Ajahn Brahmavamso from Western Australia will also be staying for a few days that week.
May I just remind Angulimala people of the next workshop and AGM on June 19th? That's the day when I'll be returning from Thailand, so I hope I will make it in time.