Special Dinner and Book Signing Session with Venerable Yikong – Initiating a Wave of Reading Enthusiasm
A special dinner and book signing session with Venerable Yikong was held at the temple on 14th June. This event was joined by Venerable Abbess Manshin, other Venerables, BLIA North Island President Dolly Tsai, BLIA South Island President See Shen Lee, BLIA directors and committee members, altogether almost one hundred in attendance.
On behalf of the temple, Abbess Manshin welcomed the arrival of savant Venerable Yikong. Then President Dolly acknowledged New Zealand’s fortune on having the opportunity to receive Venerable Yikong and wished everyone to receive Dharma joy from her upcoming lecture.
From a slide show of Venerable Yikong’s photos during her public lecture trip through Australasia, everyone can feel the Venerable’s wisdom, eloquence, literary prowess, skilful means, compassion and vows to liberate all sentient beings. Other photos and videos clips showing North and South Island Fo Guang Shan’s Dharma Propagation work showed cased the history of the organisation’s hard work.
Later in the evening, Venerable Yikong spoke in a low key and humorous manner about her experiences through literary writing. She also encouraged BLIA members to expand their knowledge, understanding and wisdom through reading. This will allow us to communicate with sages and saints. Continuing with this subject, she shared “3 type of extra time” everyone can use to read books:
• Extra time to read book in winter because it’s too cold to go out
• Extra time to read book at night after we finished the morning’s work
• Extra time to read book when it’s raining outside
• Extra time to read book when we are resting to recover from illness
The main point is that we should grasp every opportunity to read good books.
Finally the Venerable took words from the famous Chinese Scholar Liang Qichao regarding “How to become a good person from reading”, which Emphasised 3 kinds of books we should read in life:
• Books of general knowledge
• Books of technical and professional knowledge
• Books of wisdom, which are Buddhist philosophies
The third kinds of books are especially important because they contain life’s wisdom for enlightenment. Therefore everyone should learn to read and keep good books.
Afterwards, BLIA members brought along their own copies of Venerable Yikong’s works, such as “One word Ch’an”, “The Awakened Life”, “Life’s Similes”, “Commentaries on the Nirvana Sutra” DVD and “Buddhist Literary Scholars” DVD and lined up in a long queue in order to receive the Venerable’s personal signatures. This event signified a wave of reading enthusiasm for these BLIA members.