Limited "Seats" Available

Due to my lack of knowledge in words, I have to use the above word, Limited "Seats" Available, to convey the message that things would be handle differently this year.

For one, we would be limiting the number of participants for the KCBA English Dhamma Youth Camp to 80 person only. Furthermore, this would be done on a first come first serve basis as our all year round's preparation is done with this in mind.

So, if you are interested in joining our youth camp, please register early to avoid disappointment.

For your information, we have already received 12 participants, which means, there are only 68 "seats" left up for grab...

Jet Li: Real-life Hero

By WONG KIM HOH, The Straits Times/ ANN, Oct 15, 2008

Singapore -- As many a journalist who has met him will attest, Jet Li in the past was no easy interviewee. Although pleasant, the martial arts superstar was a man of few words, deftly sidestepping questions either with cryptic answers, stony silence or an enigmatic smile.

But the Jet Li now ensconced in an armchair at the Shangri-La Hotel is very different: garrulous, expressive, volleying questions with witty anecdotes and analogies.

"Okay, I'll tell you," he says, explaining his previous reticence in a mix of English and Mandarin. "I hated promoting movies. It was like cheating."

Li, 45, a guest at the recent Forbes Global CEO conference here, says he detested ploys by movie companies to exaggerate everything--from on-set stories to production costs--just to create media hype and buzz.

And then the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami happened. He and his two younger daughters--then aged four and two --were nearly swept away by the waves at the Four Seasons Resort in the Maldives.

"One of the first things I learnt in life was not to do anything which would upset my mother."

"One moment we were on the beach, the next the water was up to my chin," he says. He gripped one child, while several hotel guests dragged the other to safety.

It was the proverbial wake-up call for the star who has portrayed several Chinese folk heroes on screen.

"There is no guarantee when you will finish your life. You may not live until 60. When you die, all your dreams will die with you," says Li, who has been married to former actress Nina Li Chi since 1999. He has two older daughters, aged 19 and 20, from an earlier marriage to actress Huang Qiuyan.

The tsunami experience made him act on what he had been mulling over for 10 years--how to use his life and knowledge to give back to the world.

"Before that, everything was about me, Jet Li," he says. "After that, I told myself I have to do things for society."

First, he spent two years in India, Europe and the United States visiting major agencies and non-governmental organisations including the World Health Organisation and the Rockefeller Foundation "to learn how to do NGO".

Then, last year, he set up the China Jet Li One Foundation, which has four pillars of focus: education, health, environment and poverty.

Its tenet is 'one person + one dollar/yuan + one month = one big family'.

What it means is that if each person donates at least one dollar/yuan or an hour of time each month, the individual donations can be transformed into a powerful source of help for the world's needy.

This philanthropic model was put to the test when a massive earthquake devastated Wenchuan county in China's Sichuan Province in May, leaving about 70,000 dead and thousands homeless.

One text message from Li set the wheels of One Foundation in motion. Within a week, it raised more than 50 million yuan (US$7.3 million) via the Internet and SMS.

The screen hero became a real-life hero.

He admits candidly that he has not always been so selfless. Born in Beijing, he is the youngest of five children and was two years old when his engineer father died.

"We were very poor. One of the first things I learnt in life was not to do anything which would upset my mother."

He also became extremely pragmatic and money-minded. Talent-spotted for his agility, he was enrolled in the Beijing Wushu Academy at a very young age.

"At eight, I didn't know what I was learning. I only knew that being at the academy meant having food to eat," he says.

From the age of 11 until 16, he won 15 gold medals in national wushu competitions and travelled the world to demonstrate Chinese pugilistic arts.Former US president Richard Nixon apparently was so impressed when he saw Li performing on the White House lawn that he asked the 11-year-old to be his bodyguard when he grew up.

Li had retorted: "No. I want to protect my one billion countrymen."

His star shone even brighter when he was cast in Shaolin Temple (1979), a gongfu movie which spawned two sequels. He has gone on to conquer not just Hong Kong and Asia but also Hollywood.

Last year, he made headlines for pocketing 100 million yuan (US$14.64) for his role in director Peter Chan's The Warlords.

His latest Tinseltown outing is Mummy 3: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor, released last month, co-starring Brendan Fraser and Michelle Yeoh.

But despite the fame and fortune, something gnawed at him.

"I was like most people. Over 24 hours, I would sleep 10 hours. I might be happy three hours, eating, talking and spending time with friends and family," he says.

"But I would also spend five hours thinking how I could get more and make more, and I would spend the rest of the time feeling disappointed."

He became a Buddhist and decided that if he wanted to extend his hours of happiness, he would have to give and help others.

From the outset, Li wanted his One Foundation to be built on a solid business model, and he looked to Western philanthropic organisations run with transparency and proper governance guidelines.

"That's why the Rockefeller and Ford foundations have lasted so long," he says.

The same cannot be said of many Asian charities run like family businesses, without a strategic vision or strict governance guidelines.

"In the West, it is also very common to see people like Warren Buffet giving away their wealth," he says, referring to the world's second-richest man who pledged about US$40 billion two years ago to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"A foundation can invest the money and get even more. It's like a very nice chicken which will lay all these eggs."

But he wanted to do things differently.

"I want a system where we will get eggs every day but without a chicken," he says, looking pleased at his own witty analogy.

"I could be like everyone else, and just ask this film director or tycoon to donate one million. You can do that one year, but nobody will take your call the next year," he says.

Instead, he is seeking small pledges donors will not find daunting. This way, more will donate, and small sums can snowball, as his Sichuan earthquake fund-raiser proved.

He has roped in some of China's biggest telcos and Internet companies to help process SMS or Internet donations as small as one yuan.

"There are so many foundations out there, but what makes Jet Li's special?"

He also has other corporate partners in on the act, and is taking the lead himself.

"I have just signed a contract with a movie production company in China. In the next 10 years, they will donate just 10 cents from every ticket sold for every movie they make. And every theatre just needs to give one cent from every ticket sold."

He smiles and taps his right temple: "Think about it. You're not just watching a movie, you are also helping out and donating."

Li may lack a formal education but his business savvy and eloquence are impressive and infectious.

"Even if you are donating just one dollar, you have to feel comfortable. And no matter how little you donate, you have the right to check how much we are collecting, what we are doing," he explains.

He has drawn a formidable army of partners and volunteers, comprising MNCs, listed companies, celebrities, think-tanks and other NGOs.

For instance, Deloitte handles the audits. International ad agency BBDO helps with the advertising and Ogilvy with the PR and marketing.

His media partners include more than 20 of the biggest names in broadcasting and publishing including Disney, NBA and the Shanghai Media Group.

His board of directors is a veritable Who's Who in China, while his celebrity volunteers run into the hundreds and include stars Jackie Chan, Andy Lau and Michelle Yeoh, rapper Jay Chou and Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang.

One Foundation has also attracted some of the top NGO brains from Peking and Tsinghua universities, and has also struck up a strategic partnership with The Red Cross.

And that, he stresses, is his unique Asian software: everything is transparent, and the levels of checks by the big One Foundation family are too formidable for misuse of funds and other inappropriate behaviour.

"There are so many foundations out there, but what makes Jet Li's special?" he asks rhetorically.

"People are not stupid. They will work it out. Why does One Foundation have all these people in their family? Why are corporations like Microsoft and Starbucks also on board? They must be doing something right."

Which is why he says a system--with a set of attendant values and beliefs--is imperative.

"When Jet Li is not here, the foundation will continue because the values are there, the system is there."

Meanwhile, he has taken a year off work to sell the beliefs and make the system more foolproof.

Currently, One Foundation is concentrating its energies in China where almost 200 million people are affected by disasters and nearly 60 million need help each year.

But it intends to spread its wings globally. Already there are plans to set up foundations in India and Singapore.

"I have already been to talking to various partners in Singapore for the past eight months," says Li, whose two younger daughters attend the Singapore American School.

He sees Singapore becoming the base for training and grooming future leaders as he believes many NGOs will be set up Asia in the next five to 10 years.

"We don't have enough leaders. It's very hard to find people who have a good heart as well as a business mind," he says.

Singapore is a good base because of its infrastructure as well as its experience in solving health-care and environmental issues.

The interview hour is up, but the cheerful star wants to relate a little anecdote on why everyone should give.

"Just imagine someone gave you a watch for your birthday five years ago. When you look at it, you'll be reminded of the person who gave it to you. In your mind, the watch will always be his."

He gets more animated as he elaborates: "If you keep everything in a box at home, nobody will know that it's yours except you. So the more you give away, the more you have."

He cocks his head conspiratorially. "Now that's my secret to being happy."

Think on This: Meditation May Protect Your Brain

By Michael Haederle, miller-McCune, October 08, 2008

Research is confirming the medicinal effects that advocates have long claimed for meditation

Emory, Georgia (USA) -- For thousands of years, Buddhist meditators have claimed that the simple act of sitting down and following their breath while letting go of intrusive thoughts can free one from the entanglements of neurotic suffering.

Now, scientists are using cutting-edge scanning technology to watch the meditating mind at work. They are finding that regular meditation has a measurable effect on a variety of brain structures related to attention — an example of what is known as neuroplasticity, where the brain physically changes in response to an intentional exercise.

A team of Emory University scientists reported in early September that experienced Zen meditators were much better than control subjects at dropping extraneous thoughts and returning to the breath. The study, "'Thinking about Not-Thinking:' Neural Correlates of Conceptual Processing During Zen Meditation," published by the online research journal PLoS ONE, found that "meditative training may foster the ability to control the automatic cascade of semantic associations triggered by a stimulus and, by extension, to voluntarily regulate the flow of spontaneous mentation."

The same researchers reported last year that longtime meditators don't lose gray matter in their brains with age the way most people do, suggesting that meditation may have a neuro-protective effect. A rash of other studies in recent years meanwhile have found, for example, that practitioners of insight meditation have noticeably thicker tissue in the prefrontal cortex (the region responsible for attention and control), and that experienced Tibetan monks practicing compassion meditation generate unusually strong and coherent gamma waves in their brains.

"There are a lot of potential applications for this," said Milos Cekic, a member of the Emory research team and himself a longtime meditator. He suspects the simple practice of focusing attention on the breath could help patients suffering from depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and other conditions characterized by excessive rumination.

Meanwhile, a meditation-derived program developed at the University of Massachusetts called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is gaining popularity for treatment of anxiety and chronic illnesses at medical centers around the U.S.

As far back as the 1960s, Japanese scientists who used electroencephalograms (EEG) to measure the brain waves of Zen monks found characteristic patterns of activity. But the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the 1990s gave researchers a chance to see brains functioning in real time. Functional MRIs measure the blood flow in different parts of the brain, which correlates with how active they are.

The Emory team, which also included Giuseppe Pagnoni and Ying Guo, wanted to see whether Zen meditators were indeed better than novices at controlling the flow of thought, as meditators themselves report. Cekic and Pagnoni asked a dozen seasoned Zen meditators — including several monks — and a dozen control subjects to perform a simple cognitive task while undergoing an fMRI scan. The Zen practitioners all had at least three years of daily practice experience, while the control group members had none.

Inside the scanner, the subjects were all asked to follow their breathing while looking at a screen on which words or word-like combinations of letters were flashed at irregular intervals. Students had to decide whether they were seeing a real word or a made-up word and signal by pressing a button, then return to focusing on their breathing.

The random word or letter combinations engaged what is sometimes called the "default semantic network," a resting state in which words and thoughts arise spontaneously — what we experience as mind wandering, Cekic said. Practitioners of zazen (seated Zen meditation) are taught to notice when the mind has started to wander and quickly return attention to the breath.

When the word or letter combinations flashed on the screen, the experienced meditators were quickly able to leave the default state and return to their breathing, Cekic says. "You have these extended reverberations in the semantic network after you give people a word," Cekic said. "The meditators pretty much turn it off as soon as it's physiologically possible, while the non-meditators don't."

This is the second set of findings to have come from the fMRI experiments, Cekic said. Although people lose neurons — gray matter — and have more trouble concentrating as they age, the study published last year by the Emory team found this wasn't true of the Zen practitioners.

"What we saw in the meditators was pretty much a straight line," Cekic said. "There was no decrease with age in their gray-matter volume." There was also no decline in attention — in fact, the effect of meditation on gray matter was most pronounced in the putamen, a brain structure linked to attention. "We can't say causally that meditation prevents cell death, but we did see in our sample that the meditators did not see a gray matter loss with age," Cekic said.

Meanwhile, Harvard University researcher Sara Lazar made headlines in 2005 when she reported that Western practitioners of insight meditation — a non-judgmental awareness of present-moment experience that resembles zazen — had significantly thicker tissue in their prefrontal cortex and insula than non-meditators.

Lazar, who practices insight meditation and yoga, performed fMRI scans on 20 experienced meditators and 15 controls with no meditation experience. Lazar said that because earlier research had mostly been conducted on monks, she wanted to see whether the once-a-day meditation sessions typical of most American meditators might affect brain structures.

Unlike earlier research, which had focused on brain waves or measured neural blood flow, Lazar's experiment yielded the first concrete evidence linking meditation practice to changed brain structure. "The nice thing about (studying) the structure is it's something solid," she said. "It's not performance on a task. It's your brain."

Lazar says it's too soon to tell whether meditation causes new gray matter to form, or whether it protects against the normal decline of brain volume. The greatest contrasts were seen between the cortical tissue of meditators and control subjects who were in their 40s and 50s, she says, while the insula, which integrates sensory processing, was thicker in meditators of all ages.

Future research will require longitudinal studies — following subjects through time — to see whether or not meditation is causing the neural changes. "Maybe meditators are weird," Lazar said, suggesting that perhaps people with unusual brains are especially drawn to meditation.

Where does all this lead?

Andrew Newberg, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who has written popular books, like Why We Believe What We Believe and who has conducted brain scans of meditating Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns engaged in contemplative prayer, believes the science shows meditation works.

"The overwhelming evidence is that meditation has benefits," he said. "If it makes your mind clearer and helps you focus your attention better, it should help people."

For more than a decade, Newberg has plumbed spiritual mysteries, using fMRI and SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) to measure blood flow in the brains of not only meditators but people in the throes of other religious experiences, including speaking in tongues.

"The fascinating thing to me is that when people have these mystical experiences, they not only describe it as real, but they describe it as more real than our everyday experience," he said. It raises the question of just what is real.

"I recognize that studying some of the things I study may get me to an answer," he added. "A lot of this has been my own spiritual journey, which has become a lot more meditative and contemplative."

In a rush to get life over and done with?

By JOAN LAU, The New Straits Times, Oct 5, 2008

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- ARE you one of those people who is always in a hurry? Think about it: do you get impatient when the person in front of you at the parking lot is taking a while to park his car?

And are you annoyed when there is a long queue at the supermarket check-out counter?

I plead guilty to all the above but I have come to realise that despite all this hurrying about and doing things quickly, not a lot gets done. Or at least, not a lot of what matters. I call it busy work. It's true. A lot of the things we do during our day is stuff we want to get rid of... to cross out on our "To Do" list.

You know what I mean, right? Pick up the dry cleaning, pay bills, finish project report, return call to client, speak to the cleaning lady about vacuuming under the beds, etc.

Very often, we fall into the trap of treating the day-to-dayness of our lives as chores.

We just want to get it over and done with so we can do something else we enjoy. But what is that something else exactly?

We look forward to the weekends but when they come around, we just squander them. We don't really do very much, or do we? One of my friends says her weekends are for running errands she couldn't get to during the week: grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry, etc.

She resents all this busy work and goes back to work on Monday feeling grumpy and "not rested". So what is the solution? Maybe it is as simple as this: slow down and enjoy what you are doing. Be conscious.

At my yoga class, the teacher constantly reminds us to do the warm-up exercises slowly. "If you do them quickly, you will not get the full benefit of the exercise. It is harder when you do them slowly."

The same thing applies to the asanas or poses. If we rush through them, we not only do not get the benefits... there is the danger of injury. The idea is to take your time, be conscious of what you are doing and really... to enjoy the moment.

Take something as boring as shopping for groceries: I like to look at and think of what I am buying. No, I don't take hours but I don't just rush in and out of the supermarket either. Even when I am standing in line, I remind myself not to be impatient.

Instead, I look at the people in front of me and try to piece together what they are like from their shopping baskets!

It is very easy to be infected by this hurry-hurry-be-the-first attitude all around us. But what is the rush really? Do you get a medal or something for driving like a maniac in a parking lot? And is it really necessary to wear a scowl in the post office or bank while you are waiting in line?

When I am preoccupied -- thinking of the next item on my "To Do" list or worrying about tomorrow -- I am more likely to make a mistake. At my old office, I scraped the side of my car badly coming down the elevated parking lot. Both times, I hit the same spot. And both times, my mind was a thousand kilometres away.

Being in the here and now doesn't sound like such a difficult thing to do but you know what, it takes practice. It's so easy to let your mind wander instead of focusing on the task at hand.

How often have you eaten a meal without really tasting it? Probably too many to count, right? I look around me at the lunch crowd and I see people wolfing down their meals. Sure, the food court is not a place to linger but there is really no need to speed eat.

That is why I appreciate my lunch gang. The four of us enjoy our lunches -- doesn't matter if we are at the food court across the road or at the banana leaf place round the corner from our office -- and we enjoy each other's company.

The food nourishes us and the conversation destresses. And laughter, there is always laughter. Lunch is usually just 30 minutes but we are aware and conscious of what we are eating and saying to each other. And that is what counts.

We often come back from lunch feeling happier about the day. I very often notice that we are a little less impatient on the way back from lunch! So what if the elevator is taking forever to come? Or if that group of people ahead of us is taking up the whole walkway?

Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh often writes about mindfulness and shared the story of his friend eating a tangerine in one of his books. His friend Jim was eating a tangerine and engrossed in talk about some future plans.

"He popped a section of tangerine in his mouth, and before he had begun chewing it, had another slice ready to pop into his mouth again. He was hardly aware he was eating a tangerine...

"It was as if he hadn't been eating the tangerine at all. If he had been eating anything, he was 'eating' his future plans."

So maybe doing the laundry or washing the dishes is a chore. But they are important chores, right? So when we do them, we should be fully aware of what we are doing. The miracle here is not that the laundry is done or the dishes washed... it is that we are alive to do them.

And isn't that worth savouring?