From Venerable Ajahn Khemadhammo

Ron Maddox of the Buddhist Society, a delegate to the Collective Worship Reviewed conferences, asked me recently for my views on collective worship in schools. There seem to be three main options being considered: to retain the current unsatisfactory and unpopular legal requirement for a daily, collective act of worship by all pupils that is wholly or mainly or broadly of a Christian character; to have no requirement at all for any form of collective worship; and a new approach that would retain a requirement for regular gatherings with a moral and spiritual dimension but with a more flexible approach to their content. You might be surprised to hear that in my opinion collective worship or any similar meetings in the schools should be scrapped, lock, stock and barrel. And I say this even as I sit rather uneasily on the local SACRE which is supposed to enforce the current stupid law that requires of schools a daily act of collective worship. I do not support what almost inevitably becomes a religious bias in education - I think education ought to be entirely secular apart from RE being taught as an academic subject in which as dispassionately as possible the tenets and customs of the principal religions are examined, together with the reasons, needs and aspirations that underlie and inform religion and spirituality in general. I am not in favour of Christian or Muslim or even Buddhist schools. School is where there should be the freedom, leisure and opportunity for young minds to develop, investigate and explore and I am certain that a wise and dispassionate approach to RE has a vital part to play in that process.

Religious Education has come a long way and I am tremendously excited and full of admiration for what I have seen and been involved with around here. I've also had a lot to learn and I have to confess that there have been several SACRE meetings when I've hardly been able to follow what was going on. I just so wish that we could be developing similar things in that other institutionalised realm where I spend so much time - the prisons. It is part of my vision for a revitalised and interfaith Prison Chaplaincy that it should promote RE in the prisons.

As I write this schools are celebrating RE with the National Religious Education Festival and my involvement in that will have included a presentation at a conference on Spirituality at Elm Bank Teachers' Centre in Coventry, an evening for parents at the Warriner School at Bloxham and a party of pupils here from another school in Coventry.

My presentation at the Elmbank conference on Spirituality began with mention of a conversation I had the other day with the chapel orderly in the prison I was visiting. He had been discussing Buddhism with another prisoner, a Buddhist, who had insisted apparently that Buddhism was not spiritual. And I had to explain that the reason we Buddhists have a problem with this word 'spiritual' is because Buddhism does not accept that there is any substance to the notion that what there is about us that is not of the material is in any way tied up with a self, spirit or soul. In fact Buddhism states quite categorically that everything, including the Unconditioned, is anatta, without self, spirit, soul or substance. Admittedly Buddhist theory does analyse phenomena as being a combination of the material and that which is other than the material, or in some cases, one or the other. The human being is such a combination and what is other than the material is usually referred to as being of the mind, or consciousness and that which accompanies and colours one's experience. Unfortunately the English language has until fairly recently developed without much need to express Buddhist concepts and so in English we just don't have the appropriate terminology. In any case words can never be much more than metaphors for aspects of truth. So we have little alternative but to use these terms, but we must be aware that the language we use can and does reinforce misunderstanding - including our own misunderstanding of the way things are. Nonetheless, rather than spend acres of time with tiresome circumlocutions just to avoid simple but ultimately unsatisfactory terms - I remember some people I knew once who used to bat on about 'this that you see before you' to avoid saying 'I' - I have to concede that probably in certain contexts we can do no better than to make do with words like 'spiritual' and 'spirituality'. But let us be clear that for Buddhists these are not terms of vague meanings and nebulous connotations. We use them having in mind our commitment to refine and purify the quality of our being until all suffering and unsatisfactoriness has been stilled by the realisation of Nibbana. That noble aspiration and the path or way of life and practice that focuses on it is what spirituality means to a Buddhist.

Here at the Forest Hermitage we are now preparing ourselves for the end of the Vassa and the Celebration & Almsgiving that will follow on Sunday, November 9th. We're also keen to clear up and have done those things that need to be done before the bad weather really sets in. Your help with and participation in all this is as ever welcomed.

I'm sure you will wish to join in the offering of merit and condolences following the sudden and unexpected death of Samanera Jotiyo's father. Life is uncertain, death is certain. May Roger be happy and at peace.

The weekend of September 13th - 14th and the days leading up to it was a pretty hectic time for me and certain Angulimala supporters for on the Saturday we had one of our quarterly workshops and on the Sunday the annual Springhill Buddha Grove Celebration. Both occasions went off very well indeed and I am very grateful to John Court of Lifer Management who addressed the workshop, to Lord Avebury and Tim Newell (Governor of Grendon & Springhill) who both spoke at the Springhill Celebration, to all the monks who attended, to Khun Oot and Khun Saang who organised for Springhill, as well as all the ladies who cooked and everyone who gave their time, money, energy, food or did whatever they did to make that weekend the huge success it was. ANUMODANA!

My own contribution to the speeches at Springhill focused on the story of Angulimala and the lessons we have to learn from it. There are elements in that story that some people find improbable and hard to accept: why he did what he did and that he made such a sudden and radical change. I am not one of those people. I do not know if it's true that his teacher, his mind poisoned against him, demanded an honorarium of a thousand little fingers which he then set out to acquire through violence and killing but I do know that you only have to pick up a newspaper or read an Amnesty International report to be aghast at man's inhumanity to man. Experience too teaches us that we all have the potential to act skilfully and kindly and also to be destructive and harmful and that people do change. 'They never change', is an old refrain that you hear sometimes of prisoners and criminals. But it's not true, people do change and prisoners are people too and surely it's in everyone's interest that they have at least the chance to change. The Angulimala story reminds us that even the most extreme and dangerous individuals can and do change, especially when they have the benefit of the Buddha's teaching.

Continuing with my policy of improving Buddhist chaplains' understanding of prison ways, the December workshop will be addressed by Graham Clark, until recently Governor of HMP Wandsworth. That's on December 13th.

Take care and stay happy!

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