At The Dharma Primary School our pupils are excited about the festive season and the imminent arrival of Father Christmas, just like children up and down the country. We recognize that although Christmas is a Christian festival, it is also deeply ingrained in secular culture and that despite the commercialism surrounding it, Christmas is a time for offering peace, understanding and compassion – key principles at the heart of Buddhism. We teach our pupils about a wide range of cultural and religious festivals, including Christmas, and our reception class recently performed the nativity at a school puja. They also displayed some wonderful paintings they had created to illustrate other cultural and religious festivals they had been learning about, including Guy Fawkes Night, the Hindu festival of Diwali and Hanukkah from the Jewish tradition.

During Christmas ‘circle times’, teachers in the school have been talking about the birth of Christ as the origin of Christmas, but also emphasizing the true nature of Christmas beyond the materialism and commercialism which is so dominant today. During discussions, our pupils have clearly identified Christmas as a time for families to come together for sharing and giving, for warmth and love, and acknowledged that it may also be a time of loneliness and sadness for those who have lost loved ones or who are without a family.

In his recent blog, Sean Robsville, a practising Buddhist, offers some enlightening insights into the relationship between Buddhism and Christmas:

“In general Buddhists have no hang-ups about hanging up Christmas decorations and enlightening Christmas trees...

Presents under the Bodhi Tree

In the Simpsons episode She of Little Faith, where Lisa converts to Buddhism, Reverend Lovejoy tries to dissuade her by saying that she can’t celebrate Christmas because ‘Santa doesn’t leave presents under the Bodhi tree’. Richard Gere puts things right by explaining that Buddhists believe that those religions that are founded on Love and Compassion are valid spiritual paths…

So you can eat your Christmas cake and still be a Buddhist, though of course you can never finally have the cake whether you eat it or not (all cakes are compound phenomena and thus subject to impermanence). Excessive consumption of Christmas cake may also promote the realisation that there is no inherent difference between an object of attachment and an object of aversion. (“Can’t you manage just one more slice? Look here’s a nice piece with extra thick icing… What’s the matter, aren’t you feeling well?”)…

I was quite pleased when I discovered a Buddha with whom I could easily identify - Buddha Hotei - a manifestation of Buddha Maitreya with an amply proportioned physique (The Wikipedia article rather unkindly calls him ‘fat’). Buddha Hotei is very popular in China and Japan. He’s often portrayed sitting in a semi-reclining posture and laughing uproariously, while distributing presents to children out of an inexhaustible sack. The similarities with Santa are quite intriguing, see Hotei_1, Hotei_2, Hotei 3

Read Sean Robsville’s blog in full here.

Wishing you peace and joy throughout the festive season, from all at The Dharma Primary School.

(Please note that the views expressed in Sean’s blog are not necessarily those of the Dharma Primary School).

 

“The Buddha separated mindfulness (the 7^th factor) and concentration (the 8^th factor) as two aspects of meditation on the Eightfold Path; Right concentration is about focusing your attention on a single object - perhaps your breath, a mantra, sound or the body – the practice varies but natural objects are recommended in that they reduce stimulus and lead to calmness. Right mindfulness can be practised inwardly as a meditation (Vipassana meditation) or outwardly through our actions and interactions with others and the world around us. Mindfulness is to do with insight and observing, it is about reflecting on our thoughts and feelings, our behaviour and attitudes and it can be practised anywhere in any situation. People often think of meditation as sitting still and focusing in silence but mindfulness is on-going and can be practiced at all wakeful times.

I have been practising meditation regularly for 30 years now and I view meditation and mindfulness as a relationship in that the meditative mind helps one to act mindfully. It is difficult to explain the many-sided benefits of a meditation practice as it is so much more than just taking time to ‘chill out’ or calm down. Buddhist monk, Luang Por Sumedho (who has visited our school) once described meditation as “accumulating space” which implies something displaces the fullness of our hectic lives and busy minds. It is often through space or letting go that a deeper intuitive wisdom arises as opposed to endlessly thinking on a problem or situation. In teaching children meditation and mindfulness we aim to instil in them a familiarity with silence and spaciousness that they will be able to return to throughout their lives. There is something powerful and qualitative about the silence children experience together in a group with a teacher.

Often the term ‘mindfulness’ is used in a secular sense to encompass a group of values we think are good for society such as kindness, patience and acceptance, and to avoid being impulsive or reactive. These are important values and are very much integrated into the school’s ethos, but, from a Buddhist perspective, we are also aiming to develop a heightened sense of awareness in the present moment which can in turn lead to wisdom and self-knowledge. This goes beyond simply minding our manners and behaviour in that we are also teaching children to come to terms with difficult emotions such as jealousy, sadness and anger, and to work through them with mindfulness supported by meditation practice. Ultimately we are giving our pupils the tools to come to terms with being human and to manage and embrace the realities and difficulties of life through reflective understanding.”

Peter Murdock

See also Mindfulness, Mindfulness for Children and Mindfulness in Education