My name was then Carol Baillie and I attended a weekend meditation course led by Buddhadasa at the house where he lived in suburban Melbourne, well before there was a Melbourne Buddhist Centre. I think it 1991 but am not sure.

 

On the last day of the weekend course I went up to Buddhadasa and said, ”I have to stay in touch with what I have heard this weekend but I am a single parent with 3 children and live over an hour away. I can’t come to Melbourne for classes. What will I do?”

 

He looked at me and said, “Well if you can get together a few people in your lounge room then I will come up to teach on a fortnightly basis.”

 

This was a complete stranger’s open, generous response to my immediate heart connection to the dharma. I put an advertisement in my local paper and within a few weeks had about 15 people in my lounge room listening to Buddhadasa teach meditation and share the Dharma. Most of the people were strangers to me however some were close friends who lived in Emerald, a small town nestled in the forest of the Dandenong Ranges. Out of that original group there are some still attending classes regularly, some are mitras and one is in the Ordination process.

 

Buddhadasa was driven in the car by a young man called Peter, through peak hour city traffic, up the mountain on a trip that took one and a half hours one way. That young man became Manjusiddha.

 

Buddhadasa shook many feathers of the fledglings who came to hear the Dharma. Some didn’t stay on but many of us survived the process of having many of our fixed views challenged as Buddhadasa delivered the uncompromising Buddhist truths to us in skilful and often humorous ways.

 

At some point Buddhadasa had to go on a long trip and he told me he had confidence that I could keep the classes going. I didn’t have the same confidence in myself. Just before I had to lead the first class after school term break, a small package arrived from USA. It was a beautiful, small Tibetan singing bowl complete with its own cushion. No note, no written message… but I knew immediately it was Buddhadasa’s gift to me and it represented the transference of his confidence to my own heart. It is the most precious gift I have ever received.

 

The first night I had to use it in the class (we had only about 5 regulars by then) I rang the bell to start the first stage of meditation and then kept breaking into blurting laughter. This went on many times before eventually we all settled down and got on with the practice.

 

On his return to Australia, Buddhadasa and Manjusiddha continued their fortnightly journey to my house to teach the Dharma for many years. My gratitude for their generosity is endless. I was Ordained into the WBO in 1999 and given the name Maitripala. There is a Dandenong Ranges Buddhist Community still meeting for classes in a shrineroom on the same property that Buddhadasa came to all those years ago. Perhaps that is a story someone else can tell.