Jill Rees: Welcome Press

Today I found my sister here in Vienna at a Soka Gakkai Buddhist meeting. I got the phone number of the centre from the Internet and sent an email. The Women’s leader contacted me at once and when we spoke, she told me about a meeting in my district Vienna 4. Unfortunately in my arrogance I thought I could find the street easily, and left it much too late before I realised I couldn’t find it. Luckily the hotel chap had an A-Z and helped. It isn’t very far, although I had to walk across the Naschmarkt and over Karlsplatz, the park that the kids at school told me was the place to buy hard drugs. I didn’t see any dealers, although there were a lot of bobbies about, swinging their truncheons and chatting as they walked around in male/female pairs, quite like the UK and nothing like Germany! The SGI Director General for all of Austria was present at the meeting, as well as a Japanese lady who had been practising for nearly 50 years! The DG translated for her into Japanese and a local woman did the same for me into English, so it had a very international feel. There was a study of a Gosho Letter to Sairon-Bo which followed on from their Study lecture, to kick off the meeting. It turned out that Sylvia, my translator, started practising on exactly the same day as me! Same year! The Japanese lady agreed we must be sisters. After the meeting they brought out a huge platter of food, sushi made by the Japanese lady, tuna and pasta salad, Austrian brown breads and juice. We all exchanged emails and SMS, and Sylvia invited me to the centre tomorrow to do some chanting.

They were talking about the desolation of youth, which is practically the only experience I’ve had in Vienna after teaching for a week. Two of the women were teachers of English! And one was saying her class expected another war to start. She spoke to them about hope. And tried to make them understand that these things aren’t foregone conclusions, the people aren’t powerless in these matters. Wars are the extremes of the devilish functions of greed, foolishness and anger. Those warmongers feed off these negative feelings in all of us. If we don’t feel them, but instead feel hope and courage, and determine to take actions continually to make friendships and links between ourselves and other people, we can block the negativity and make the world how we want it. This is the Buddhist ideal of Kosen Rufu, of creating world peace through one-to-one communication between people.

Another first today was my first cake and coffee in a Vienna coffee house with Martin after classes. The decor was Imperial, carvings on the beautiful old wooden panels and velour wall coverings. We’re still getting on although I lost him in the toilets at the Naschmarkt (long story), which is just as well as we’re together for four weeks.

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Tags: Art, Evil, Exchange, Friend, Friendship, Leader, Mail, Peace, SGI, Soka, Story, War