Public Preceptors' meeting - report now out

The College of Public Preceptors is the body of senior members of the Western Buddhist Order charged with overseeing ordinations into the Order.

It currently has about 30 members, most of whom meet twice a year to discuss everything connected with their work – in practice, a very wide range of topics indeed!

They are keen to communicate what they can of their discussions to a wider audience, and have recently posted an account of November’s meeting on their blog. They say -

"We’d like our thinking to be more widely and easily available in the movement. At present our main way of communicating our thoughts and discussions is through retreats, talks and seminars and we'd like to make some of this material more widely available. For the time being we plan to do this through the college website and blog and will hopefully be adding more material over the coming months".

Among other things, the discussions addressed the appointment of Parami as a second International Order Convenor; Order Members and mitras going to other Buddhist teachers; the structure of the Preceptors’ College; training for Preceptors; fundraising for the College; and issues surrounding the topic of domestic violence. Finally some time was spent with Padmavajra in study of some teachings of Geshe Drom, Atisha's main disciple, from 'The Door of Liberation'.

A major topic, in addition to the above, was coherence in the Order and movement. they say -

"A regular topic of discussion in the College is that of maintaining the balance between diversity and unity in our work together, and how we can help the movement and Order to do likewise. This time we particularly focused on the aspect of coherence and wanted to look at the college's role in contributing to coherence and unity in the movement as a whole. Bhante has said recently that he thinks coherence in the movement is threefold: doctrinal, practice based and social...."

Their main website is at www.preceptorscollege.org , which gives a broad outline to their work - plus a 'who's who' of the College.