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“Don’t use Buddhism to be Buddhist, use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are”- His Holiness the Dalai Lama If you, like so many of us, live carry the weight of many years of bad karma on your shoulders, the Maitreya Project Relic Tour’s decent on Leeds is an opportunity for enlightenment not to be missed. This unique tour displays sacred relics of Buddhism so rare, ancient and protected that another chance to experience their presence will certainly not arise in our lifetime. Normally, such historical relics are considered so precious that they are kept under government control, with only monitored access being permitted. This is the case in China, Tibet and India, for example, where people may only see the relics after a laborious process of written requests and bureaucracy. A few Monks have however, under the organization of Lama Zopa Rinpoche, been granted permission to go on this tour with a selection of relics, their sole intention being to spread and reawaken the values of happiness, peacefulness and love in people all over the globe. They are true missionaries of these values, charging no fee for visitors and preaching absolutely no religious righteousness upon them either. In fact, the local churches and spiritual groups of each destination are invited to the tour and opening ceremony prayers, an expression of the Buddhists real appeal to all humankind and profound acknowledgement that compassion is in fact the basis of all religions. The tour began in March 2001 and has already visited all five continents and communicated their message to over two million intrigued visitors. The relic tour has even been to prisons in Missouri, Florida and the Netherlands, demonstrating yet again the Buddhists’ non-judgmental ethos, and their not just tolerance but active encouragement of skeptics and even criminals to witness the relics and be enlightened with the basic values for a better world. The relics themselves consist of, among other things; ashes, bones and possessions of spiritual masters, holy beings and the original, historical Buddha himself. He lived from approximately 563 BC to 483 BC, when he gained enlightenment and passed to Nirvana after several years of uninterrupted meditation under a Bodhi tree in Bodgaja, North India. Some of the relics have been granted to the tour by reincarnated Buddhists alive and revered today, so that people can be blessed by them even if they can not physically meet. Visitors who have attended the tour at its other destinations invariably describe a sense of wellbeing and peacefulness during and after experiencing the presence of the relics. Unsurprising, to the Buddhist Monk the Venerable Ribur Rinpoche, who explains that “just seeing the relics of the Buddha purifies an incredible amount of negative karma.” At the event there is even an opportunity for you, and remarkably your pet, to be blessed by a monk and pray. There are other, strangely reoccurring reports of rainbows appearing at the tour’s destinations, and of relics spontaneously illuminating, increasing in size and multiplying. Such phenomena is to be expected, according to Lama Zopa Rinpoche, since the good and pure intentions of the relic tour, and the visitors faith, respect and greater understanding creates the conditions under which relics embodying the Buddhist masters will enhance. Although accounts of this nature may awaken nothing but skepticism in some, the tour is, Buddhism aside, based on the entirely honest message that compassion and love is the formula to a better world; an enlightenment very relevant to modern society, and is therefore worth your visit. The Maitreya Project Relic Tour opens in Leeds at 6pm on Friday the 2nd of November and remains open for that weekend between 10am and 5pm. It can be found at Three Albion Place. Quotations from www.maitreyaproject.org |
