For the last several weeks, the beautiful teak Buddha that sits just above the Amitabha Stupa in Sedona has undergone a much needed stripping and cleaning to prepare for a new oil finish.  Many layers of old, dried finish have been successfully removed.

Using green, non-toxic stripping agents, several treatments were applied, allowed to dry, then brushed off.  It was taking a long time!

Then the call went out for a power washer to accelerate the process. Within two hours, Don Williams, owner of a power washer, just happened to show up at the Stupa.  (They call it Sedona Synchronicity out here!)

Don is a highly skilled guy with many talents who worked long hours helping to build the Amitabha Stupa several years ago.

After three new coats of finish, the Buddha looks simply radiant! Three more coats will be applied this Thursday on Chokhor Duchen.

Special thanks to Dave Carrol, who is heading up the project, Shawn Emory, who worked on sanding and refinishing, Carol Phelps, who allowed us to hook up to her water supply, and donors Robert Abrahamson and Ananda Robie, who funded supplies.

• To promote Jetsunma’s health and long life, and to encourage her to remain, he has advised the Medicine Buddha Mantra:  Tayatha Om Bekadze Bekadze Maha Bekadze Radza Samungate Swaha.
• To remove obstacles for KPC and to pacify negativity, he has advised the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita) Mantra: Om Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha, and the recitation of the sutra itself.

Here is the text of the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita):

THE SUTRA OF THE HEART OF TRANSCENDENT KNOWLEDGE
(Prajnaparamita)

Thus have I heard.
Once the Blessed One was dwelling in Rajagriha at Vulture Peak mountain, together with a great gathering of the sangha of monks and a great gathering of the sangha of bodhisattvas. At that time the Blessed One entered the samadhi that expresses the dharma called “profound illumination,” and at the same time noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, while practicing the profound prajñaparamita, saw in this way: he saw the five
skandhas to be empty of nature. Then, through the power of the Buddha, venerable Shariputra said to noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, “How should a son or daughter of noble family train, who wishes
to practice the profound prajñaparamita?”
Addressed in this way, noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, said to venerable Shariputra, “O Shariputra, a son or daughter of noble family who wishes to practice the profound prajñaparamita should see in this way: seeing the five skandhas to be empty of nature. Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling perception, formation, and consciousness are emptiness. Thus, Shariputra, all dharmas are emptiness. There are no characteristics. There is no birth and no cessation. There is no impurity and no purity. There is no decrease and no increase. Therefore, Shariputra, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no
mind; no appearance, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no dharmas; no eye dhatu up to no mind dhatu, no dhatu of dharmas, no mind consciousness dhatu; no ignorance, no end of ignorance up to no old age and death; no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, no path, no wisdom, no attainment, and no nonattainment. Therefore, Shariputra, since the bodhisattvas have no attainment, they abide by means of prajñaparamita. Since there is no obscuration of mind, there is no fear. They transcend falsity and attain complete nirvana. All the buddhas of the three times, by means of prajñaparamita, fully awaken to unsurpassable, true, complete enlightenment. Therefore, the great mantra of prajñaparamita, the mantra of great insight, the unsurpassed mantra, the unequaled mantra, the mantra that calms all suffering should be known as truth, since there is no deception. The prajñaparamita mantra is said in this way:
OM GATE GATE PARAGATE PARASAMGATE BODHI SVAHA
Thus, Shariputra, the bodhisattva mahasattva should train in the profound prajñaparamita.”

Then the Blessed One arose from that samadhi and praised noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, saying, “Good, good, O son of noble family; thus it is, O son of noble family, thus it is. One should practice the profound prajñaparamita just as you have taught and all the Tathagatas will rejoice.” When the Blessed One had said this, venerable Shariputra and noble Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva mahasattva, that whole assembly and the world with its gods, humans, asuras and gandharvas rejoiced and praised the words of the Blessed One.

KPC is in a thank you mode! In a posture of giving back to the community, we will hold a “Walk for Those Who Can’t” on Saturday, June 12, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Members (and friends) of the KPC community will spend four hours in continuous relays of prayer around the Enlightenment Stupa (the one closest to the temple). The idea is to walk for those who can’t circumambulate–either because of distance, health, or ignorance of the opportunity.

We will do a continuous reading of the names given us to pray for, including those already in our prayer book, and each one of the donors who gave in our recent appeal to save the tempe. We invite you to submit names as well (no intentions, please, as they can increase the length of an already lengthy process). You can submit names by writing to kpcprayerwalk@gmail.com.

Lunch will be available for a nominal fee at the end of the event, courtesy of the Burmese American Collective. The Burmese-American community will be featured this year in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and members are raising money to support the performers. KPC is delighted to support this community, who have supported us in many ways, especially during our recent emergency appeal!

Not all the generosity we’ve experienced in the last month has come in the form of money!  We want to acknowledge the volunteers who have helped us improve the state of our Peace Park.

After last winter’s storms, the Peace Park looks like, well . . . like a hurricane hit it.  It is full of downed trees, mostly juniper and white pine, the shallow-rooted softwoods that were bent by the weight of the snow and uprooted by the high winds of several severe storms.  Frankly, we’ve never seen anything like it!

Here our grounds manager, John Pelletier, takes a volunteer on a tour of one such damaged area.  The volunteer was one of several trained by the Sierra Club who called and offered help.  We love it when that happens!  Particularly when the help shows up with his own chain saw and the expertise to use it!

John and the volunteer conferred, then the volunteer used John’s back to sign a volunteer waiver.  Then he got down to work, making his chain saw sing its industrious song!

It was a great party—and we’d like to share it!  At least the entertainment part:  you can see select performances here.

Before the performances, the audience joined in Amitaba Practice together.  (Yep!  It was 7 p.m.:  time for worldwide prayer.)

Then KPC member Anne Kanengeiser, an actress and singer who has appeared in numerous Broadway shows, performed several songs a capella.  In this picture, she’s showing that she downloaded the words to “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” by Rogers and Hammerstein, to sing by special request.

Anne was not the only professional:  singer/songwriter Tara Middleton, an alumna of the KPC Children’s Program, performed a number of songs.  Here she accompanies herself on the guitar.

And, in her debut at KPC, an amateur violinist surprised us all with a deft rendering of a Hungarian Dance by Bela Bartok. Keep practicing, Elizabeth!  We’ll be depending on you for future performances!

Other performances were more spontaneous.  Here young Siddhartha demonstrates the full-length prostration, then monitors a newcomer’s attempt at a five-point touchdown.

We enjoyed seeing old friends again, and new ones too—one man who had followed the webathons with friends in Pennsylvania, disappointed when they decided not to drive down for the party, came by himself, his first visit to KPC!  Others, not Buddhists, came because they make use of the Peace Park or the Mani Jewel Giftstore.  All enjoyed mingling and sharing stories.

And Leslie Mulvilhill’s cakes, of course!

We’ve told the story of the donor, Ven. Lama Dondrup Dorje, who made up the all-important difference!  But we feel that, no matter the amount of the individual donation, what really counts is the motivating energy behind it!  For instance, we know of a $50 donation that came from someone who had been laid off, and had returned to school full time.  The $50 represented a week’s worth of groceries.  (Not a small offering!)

So we’d like to tell some stories about donors. (No names, of course!)

Some of the donation energy was generated by family groups:  Buddhists who are not members of our sangha, but who make regular pilgrimages to KPC to walk the stupas and make offerings at the altars.  We know of several such groups, Vietnamese and Burmese, who notified their networks and bundled their contributions together, in several cases bringing actual bundles of checks in white envelopes to the temple.

One such offering came after a family (father, mother, and pre-teen son) happened to visit during the first night of the telethon.  They were drawn in and sat in the audience.  After a while, they sent their young son forward with the cash that they had on hand.  (We invited him to ring the gong, which we did every time a donation came in,)

The second night, the father returned, this time with an envelope full of checks from his family and members of his own sangha.  We invited him to speak on camera, and his loving, spontaneous, and natural speech about the joy of offering brought tears to our eyes—something that couldn’t be scripted!  Simply the output of a life as a practitioner.

Many of the donor stories involve response during the webathon. With a live pledge appeal, inevitably there are those moments when no one is calling, and the goal thermometer is hovering at a standstill.  We tend to remember those donations that broke through when we were stalled.  One such breakthrough came on the first night, when a fifth-grader wrote in that she had broken into her piggy bank, and was donating the entire contents:  $48.  (We were not only grateful, but impressed at her savings! )

The first evening of the telethon ended with pledges for a total of $108,000.  Impressive, but not enough.  Our supporters on line, however, were growing in number as the evening went on, and people on the West Coast came home from work.  They were urging us to continue!  So we did, for a second night.

It was on the second night that we were able to announce the challenge grant made by Lama Dondrup:  to double all proceeds from the second night.  Our adrenalin was high!

The challenge grant made for an exciting second night, as the challenge in turn inspired a number of such grants:  four each for $1000. (One of them, late in the evening, offered to double any $50 donation, up to 20 donations.)  All of them were met.

Then came what seemed to be the breakthrough challenge:  a woman in Australia let us know that she had persuaded her partner (not a Buddhist!) to take out an equity loan on their house for $10,000.  He agreed–on the condition that it be offered as a challenge grant. They were willing to accept two $5000 donations to meet the challenge.  The staff on camera were feeling the clock . . . tick, tick, tick . . . .  It was by this time late in the campaign; wouldn’t anyone who had that much available have offered it by now?

No, as it happened!  Someone in fact HAD been working to scrape together a donation of that size, and, upon succeeding, called it in:  $10,000.

At that point in the telethon, the anchor was on camera, reciting the calculation:  the $10,000 donation, plus $10,000 in matching funds, in turn doubled at the end of the evening by the overall matching grant.  She announced that the $10,000 had now turned into $40,000, and remembers looking at the Ani who was working the camera.  She reports that they locked eyes, both of them realizing that a miracle was about to take place!

In fact, the evening ended with $205,000 pledged, once the matching grant was calculated in.  Still not enough, but there were 24 hours to go . . . .

And then Ven. Lama Dondrup Dorje notified us of his intention to make up the difference.  The miracle was in place!

The first sign of a groundswell was the $60,000:  that is the amount that came in within 24 hours.  When we received word that we needed to meet the payment on our $250,000 note with M & T bank, we  first notified our close group of practitioners, immediately followed by our worldwide newsletter community.

The heartening initial response made the goal seem possible to make, but the next 48 hours would tell the tale.

We decided to do a webathon, a telethon on the web, broadcasting via streaming video (UStream.tv). It was a fund-raising medium we had experimented with once before—on a much smaller scale!

Other organizations have since asked us for advice, and here’s how we did it.

We assembled a system:  a gmail address for communicating pledges, a spreadsheet for recording them, a skype number for call-ins.  We assembled a team:  anchor, co-anchor, gmail responder, Skype call taker, UStream chat monitor, and—all important!—a dedicated spreadsheet scribe.  We assembled a simple set:  a couple of tables, curtained room screens for backdrops, and a whiteboard on an easel for showing results.  (The picture above shows what viewers saw on their computer screens.)

Some technical issues were more challenging.  With a T-1 line already in place, we could broadcast streaming video via a dedicated computer.  But that’s not like having a television studio, folks!  We had one camera that was cabled to the computer, so we could show only what the camera saw.  When we wanted to broadcast YouTube clips, we had to set up a television monitor, and film the screen.  Similarly, to show slides, we set up a screen and projector, and turned the camera to that screen.

With all these items in place, the rest was a matter of people:  talking, interacting, responding.  Some people were with us for the broadcast in the Dharma Room at KPC.  Others were on line, chatting, writing, calling:  encouraging us, cheering results, and, of course, donating.

We are happy to announce that we have now completed the transaction with M & T Bank.  The payout on our line of credit was $243,042.38, representing approximately $238,000 in principle, plus interest and fees.

We thank attorney James Wawrzyniak of Covington and Burling for legal counsel, provided pro bono. We deeply appreciate his efforts on our behalf in concluding the negotiations.

As we continue to receive occasional questions about this financial situation, we thought it would be good to review, once again, the events that led up to this happy conclusion.

1. A group of Buddhists acquired the temple property (seven acres) in 1985, with a mortgage held by Riggs Bank.  That mortgage was re-financed in 1994 to make KPC the borrower.
2. KPC acquired the 65 acre Peace Park in 1989, with a separate mortgage, held by the seller.
3. KPC paid off the Riggs Bank mortgage on the temple property in 1998.
4. In 2005, KPC opened a $250,000 line of credit with Provident Bank  and used the entire amount to pay off the privately-held mortgage on the Peace Park.  The temple property (the seven acres) was used as security.  Provident also asked us to put up a Certificate of Deposit in the amount of $25,000, as security against falling in arrears.
5. In late spring of 2009, Provident Bank was acquired by M & T Bank.
6. As of April 2010, with the economic downturn, KPC was $13,000 in arrears on the loan.  We did have fund-raising efforts in place (“The Rainbow Initiative”) and assumed that the Certificate of Deposit gave us a cushion of several months in which to raise the funds needed.
7. In a letter dated April 22, 2010 from their law firm, M & T called the note, giving KPC until April 30 to pay it off completely.  Although the letter text refers to it as a “certified letter,” it did in fact arrive by regular daily postal delivery on April 23, and was opened by a member of the board the next day.
8. We are not aware of any previous attempts by M & T to solicit the funds.

For those who are interested, we have included a copy of the letter from the law firm representing M & T Bank.

Ven. Lama Dondrup Dorje

We can tell the story now:  KPC thanks Ven. Lama Dondrup Dorje (Peter Yeung) of the Pathgate Institute in the United Kingdom for the generous donation that enabled us to meet the challenge of our recent financial crisis.

Lama Dondrup Dorje is the Principal of the Pathgate Institute of Buddhist Studies and the Founder of the Palyul Nyingma Buddhist Association in the United Kingdom, Greece, and Australia.  He was the donor who offered the challenge grant that doubled the proceeds of our second evening webathon on April 28, then made up the difference between our fund-raising results and our goal.

For those who just came in, KPC had a surprise at the end of April:  the note on our mortgage-backed line of credit was called by the bank—with five days notice.  (You can catch up on that story here.)

Lama Dondrup’s generous response to the plight of KPC was rooted in his devotion to the late Holiness Penor Rinpoche, 11^th Throne Holder of the Palyul Lineage, by whom he was entrusted with the charge of the largest Palyul ordained sangha in Europe.  He has always maintained his only mission in life is to promote and preserve the Dharma activities of his Root Guru, Penor Rinpoche.  For more information about the donation, click here.

Penor Rinpoche is also the Root Guru of KPC Spiritual Director Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo; he enthroned her as a Lineage Holder in 1988 and consecrated the center she had established as the first seat of Palyul in the Western Hemisphere.  She has gathered the largest Palyul ordained sangha in the Western Hemisphere.

Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo and the sangha at KPC are indebted to Lama Dondrup Dorje.  May he see the fruit of his generosity in this very life!

It’s time to party, and you are SO INVITED!

You know who you are! You made it possible to keep the temple doors open (along with the anonymous donor who completed the job)!

Approximately 650 donations, from around the world, helped KPC meet the sudden calling of the note on the temple property. Some people donated multiple times, and we are still matching the records, but at least 500 individuals contributed to the “Save the Temple” appeal.

So we are celebrating with an Indian dinner at the temple in Poolesville on Saturday, May 8, from 6 – 8:30 p.m.

And a professional entertainer or two will be stopping by:  Tara Middleton, whose voice is heard in duet with Jetsunma in many of Jetsunma’s recorded songs, and Anne Kanengeiser, actress and singer, who has appeared in numerous Broadway productions. (The picture at left is “Adalia Tara,” Tara Middleton’s stage name.)

And we’re planning a SimulFest! In case a trip out to Poolesville would involve plane tickets, we are planning to webcast during the party.  Wherever you are, we hope you will gather with friends and family who supported KPC along with you–and party at the same time!

We want our webcast to provide a suitable backdrop for your party, and maybe some inspiration!

We’d like to share communication during the celebration, so we’ll be available for messages on chat at UStream.tv (palyulmedia) and at kpctelethon@gmail.com.