[Buddha-l] FPMT

[Sally McAra]

Hi Joanna et al

2009/7/25 jkirk <jkirk at spro.net>:
> Have you noticed that the FPMT is circulating so-called relics of
> the Buddha, all over the world, it seems.

yes, they're for the Maitreya project in India, the project that Jess
Falcone has been studying. I gather there are two relic tours for the
Maitreya statue, one that mostly tours North America and the other
more in Europe. And presumably other northern hemisphere countries.

My research has been about the Great Stupa of Universal Compassion, a
smaller project in Australia. (www.stupa.org.au). The Aussie group has
also circulated a relic tour with part of their own collection. And
via google news alerts I get to see a bit about the Maitreya relic
tours. The latest I've heard about the GSUC is that they completed a
large Jade Buddha statue which they've taken on tour in Vietnam and
more recently to Vietnamese and other temples around Australia. It's
also going to the USA I gather. It has its own website with the
schedules, you can see the link on the stupa website I think. Anyway,
I have heard indirectly that the statue has raised/is raising generous
donations for the stupa project.

Right now the "show"
> (or one of them?) is at the local Unitarian Universalist
> Fellowship here--why they agreed to take them on beats me because
> they also had it last year. It's obviously a fund raiser for the
> India caper.
> I wonder if the farmers who lost their land to the FTMP project
> in India were ever compensated? Do you know?

Haven't heard much about this lately - Jess probably knows more, if
she's on this list. It certainly didn't sound too good a while back.
The Aus project is far less controversial because the FPMT already
owned the land - it had been donated by a local landowner whose son
had become a student of the FPMT lamas.
(Although, of course, Australia's overall history regarding land
ownership is pretty dark, as with other places that Europe colonised,
but the whole colonisation thing is another story --- there was some
intriguing overlap, though, which I wrote about for the Journal of
Global Buddhism)....