Some friends and I from UWest visited The Red Lotus Society on Saturday. Our friend Peter, who used to live at UWest while working for a sutra translation project, has been heavily involved in the project and currently lives with some of the other people involved.
Based in San Diego, the Red Lotus Society is a non-profit that promotes secular meditation in schools and homes and also provides a space where teachers from different traditions can provide access to a wide variety of Buddhist traditions. In fact, they're doing major remodeling on the former Ideal Hotel, a two-story building in the heart of what used to be San Diego's Chinatown. This has meant months of demolition, rewiring, all new plumbing and a whole lot of other back-breaking tasks.
Check out their website (still under construction). If you're in the San Diego area, they can always use volunteers. Otherwise, consider supporting this worthwhile project with a donation.
Here's part of the exterior of the Ideal Hotel. Venerable Kiet is in the doorway.
The roof of the building had cutouts so all the interior rooms on the second floor would have direct sunlight. Ven. Kiet and Shakya went up on the upper most section of the roof and Shakya took this photo of me taking one of him from the lower section. That's Peter holding the ladder and Rev. Bosung is in the brown next to me. The other Korean monk is Ven. Guhwa.
Here Peter is explaining some of the work they've been doing on the building. I used to do some volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, but I can't imagine doing a project this big.
Jeff, one of the guys involved in the project, owns this space they they used for some of the meditation programs for the Dharma Bums center they also run. The painting above the fireplace was done by a Japanese-American woman. It's of an American Avalokiteshvara (bodhisattva of compassion). This space is one-third of a building just behind the Red Lotus Society space.
Here we are in a loft space looking over the living room area in the shot above. It's used for meditation. Here we're settling in for some shots of us pretending to do some meditation as we didn't have time to really sit down for practice.
Here's our whole group, from left to right: Rev. Bosung, Shirleen, Lanny, Ven. Guhwa, me, Peter, Shakya, and Ven. Kiet.
Before leaving town, we ran to the beach to take a few photos. I think this was my second time at the beach in CA...a week before leaving! We'll I'll just have to go to the beach in Korea a lot.
All of these photos are courtesy of Shakya as I haven't downloaded the photos from my camera yet. I'm gonna miss these guys.
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