about

Aloha Sangha is the name of a weekly group that has been meeting since February 1998 in my home in Honolulu. We usually have from 14 to 24 people show up on any given week. On special occasions perhaps 35 folks will show up. We have some regulars, and some folks who participate when they can, and others who stay in touch occasionally and keep up a regular practice on their own.

My background is in Theravada Buddhism. My first exposure to Buddhism was with Maezumi Roshi at the Los Angeles Zen Center (ZCLA) in 1980. I moved into a local Buddhist center within walking distance to ZCLA in 1981–the International Buddhist Meditation Center, founded in 1970 by  Ven. Dr. Thich Thien-An, a Buddhist scholar and zen master from Vietnam.  It was there, in 1981, that I met my second teacher, an American using his given Buddhist name, Shinzen Young.

In Shinzen I found a brilliant combination of Buddhist erudition and brass-tacks meditation know how. It was cut to the chase dharma–Shinzen could calrify the heaps of intentional confusion set up by the zen training at ZCLA in a single, efforless phrase. He had done hard time in Buddhist monasteries in Japan.  He possessed the keen ability to shift through the non-essential aspects of traditional zen training and present gems of insight that would leave me stunned. He also introduced me what was to become the all consuming passion for the following 25 years–vipassana meditation and the teachings of the historical Buddha preserved in the suttas of the Pali Canon.

After attending some 20 or so vipassana retreats of varying lengths (from 10 days to the 3 month retreat in Barre, Massachusetts in 1984) I left the USA to study and practice in Sri Lanka. I was ordained as a Theravada monk in February of 1985 in Sri Lanka, where I spent a year training in anapanasati (mindfulness of breathing) meditation.

I explored further meditation training for two more years in Burma and Thailand before giving back my robes December of 1987 and returning to live at the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles.

Over the years I have also trained as a yoga teacher in the Shivananda tradition, and have done independent studies in Advaita-Vedanta and Ch’an Buddhism.

In 1990 I moved to Hawaii, where I met my wife Katina, the following year. I also went to nursing school here, at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I served as the coodinator of a local chapter of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship here on O’ahu from 2000 to 2002. We have two children: Uila, our daughter is 9 and Kupai, our son, is 5.

This blog serves two main purposes: it allows me to conveniently store ideas and  excerpts from notes I have prepared from talks given over the years,  allowing me to organize my thinking on important topics, concerns and challenges facing contemporary Dharma practitioners; it also is meant as an eventual replacement for our website http://home.earthlink.net/~alohasatsang/. The dynamic features of the bogging environment coupled with WordPress.com’s ability to allow static pages makes working on a blog like this irresistible. Thanks for checking in with this effort.