Another round of meetings

Okay peeps this will be a summary of four meetings: (1) with Billy, on the subject of the Poly Buddhist Societies; (2) with Tionghan; (3) with Meihui; (4) with the Provost of NUS Prof Tan Eng Chye. As usual, since this public domain I shall water down many things.

(1) Billy

Billy is the Chairperson of the United Polytechnic’s Buddhist Council. So I looked for him to try and get an idea of how the Poly BSs operate. The picture he painted was quite bad.

The strongest by opinion is NYPBS. Much of this can be attributed to the strong presence of their alumni. NYPBS is the only Poly BS that is registered under ROS, and their alumni are the ones handling all the administrative matters. As such, the alumni has a lot of say in what activities the NYPBS committee can or cannot implement. The juniors have felt that they are quite restricted by the alumni. While on one hand the alumni offers protection for the society, on the other hand the burden on the alumni is heavy as they feel they have to answer to ROS. This year’s committee has clashed quite badly with the alumni and there have been fall-outs over this.

The alumni influence of SPBS has waned over the years, as the seniors have gone their separate ways.

The weakest currently is NPBS. This year, NPBS’s president is from Myanmar, bringing from the country its conservative approach will cannot fit in with the Singapore situation. Obviously this has repercussions on the whole flavor of the society, and Billy’s description is that nobody really knows what the society is doing anymore, or perhaps it’s not even doing anything.

There are many similarities between the challenges that the Poly and Uni BSs are facing. Increased foreigner proportions and declining local interest is a major problem. Academics are placed first, as the best students are fighting for those limited places in the universities. As such, the BS has become a place to earn CCA points to bump up their resume for university entry. Billy’s opinion is that since Religious Knowledge was abolished in secondary schools, everything slid downhill.

The most shocking contrast that I learnt about the Poly BSs with the two Uni BSs was that there was absolutely no framework of activities to pass down from one generation to the next. It is totally up to the new committee to think about what activities to organize. In the case of NYPBS, of course, this was usually met with scrutiny from the alumni. Whereas for us, we might feel that the suite of weekly and yearly activities handed down to us are a burden because we feel obliged to offer the full spectrum of services as our predecessors did, their incoming committees have totally no framework to work within, which leaves the possibility of an empty shell with no activities going on.

Most activities in the past are jumping on to ongoing external activities, or speakers are invited once in a while for talks. Some of them also used to conduct their weekly pujas, but this was dependent on the ‘flavour’ of the current committee. The senior-organise-for-junior PBS camp ended in 2006 and has not been continued since.

(2) Tionghan

1. He felt that his committee was very loose, unbonded. He compared it to the 28th MC, where he felt that we were more fun. I reminded him that much of the 28th continued on from the 27th, so we were already familiar with each other. However, the make-up of his committee really leaves much to be desired, especially on the level of commitment that they gave.

One of the main problems of this committee was their lack of willingness to express their opinion or voice out their concerns against others. Despite having told him to be ‘frank but tactful’ during handover last year, they have not managed to come to the required level of maturity or trust with each other to voice out their unhappiness, their criticism or their problems with certain ideas or initiatives that others were coming out with. Primarily this is a communication problem.

2. He felt that the deputy secretary was a redundant post. Kok Seong was absent or uncontactable much of the time, doing only minimal work which was not really done well. Yuven, however, could cope on her own. Having said that, Yuven herself seemed to be much committed to her studies and outside events, in contrast with our interview with her before their AGM, when she assured that she had only BS as an activity.

Hidayat and I have discussed in the past about the requirement for a dedicated post to deal with public relations. We had suggested this to be the Fellowship Director. Unfortunately, David has not taken up this role. Given the perceived redundancy of the deputy secretary by Tionghan, the often unclear role of a Fellowship director and the need for a PR liaison, perhaps it is really time to review the portfolios in the MC positions.

3. Tionghan’s observation was that they had organized more activities, but there was an obvious drop in the number of people coming to activities. This is despite an overall larger membership than the 28th. His original aim for the year was for more diversified forms of activities and more collaboration with outside organizations. He felt that this was achieved. However, I pointed out to him that this may have been at the expense of the health of the committee and the turnout for each activity. At 7 days a week, both psychologically and temporally we only have a limited ‘budget’ to offer activities. Hence diversification is sometimes not as all beneficial as it seems. My conclusion is that the new committees, especially the President, must be impressed upon of this rule: if you are bent on introducing a new activity, be prepared to scrap an old activity to free up people, time and mental stress. There is no such thing as keeping your old cake and eating a new one.

Comments on DC:
-He brought up the very valid point that some of the alumni speakers were not steady enough. The problem was not a lack of Dharma knowledge on the speaker’s side. The problem was the inability to speak convincingly or charismatically such that the audience is satisfied. Leaving some questions open ended is inevitable in Buddhism, but it has to be done in a way that does not increase the audiences’ skepticism of the Dharma, or make the audience feel that the speaker actually does not know. So, skill in leaving questions open is needed. As such, it made the committee feel that perhaps calling Venerables in would offer more authority.

-On the side of the Dharma Friends, he feels that their interest is already there, i.e. they are already ‘Dharmic’. However, they were not inspired as a group. There was a lacking of spiritual fellowship among the Dharma Friends. There was also a lack of facilitation experience. Somehow, it was felt that the discussions in DC just did not reach the depth and breadth of the informal ‘dinner Dharma’ discussions that we have with one another, which I suppose is the actual idea that Dharma Circle is formulated on.

He suggests a ratio of 10 discussion style DCs for every 6 talk-styled. This is close to Angita’s suggestion. The following four topics were suggested (note the similarity to Angita’s):
-Dealing with school life and its challenges
-Buddhism and happiness for YOUNG people: how to find happiness?
-Friendship and fellowship: how to make friends.
-That calmness factor in Buddhism.

(3) Meihui
There was some difficulty trying to dig things out of her, probably in retrospect because she was sort of (consciously or unconsciously) on a defensive psychological posture against me because she thought that she would quarrel with me. We did explore some interesting points though.
1. She has tried to bring more Dharma among the MC by making it mandatory for them to attend the two-session Basic Buddhism Course and the Eight Precepts Day. Whether or not they have benefitted from it, she would not want to comment. I made it clear to her that I felt BBC and 8 precepts are wonderful ideas, but would they be adding burden to the already taxed committee? Her defence was that they agreed (or did not object?) to these and she even felt that they were quite enthusiastic on it initially. And they did cut the BBC to 2 sessions from 4 or 6 originally planned.

2. She admits a breakdown of communication with her deputy.

3. Finally, something interesting. She blurted out that she got quite ‘pek cek’ over time as she could not feel the reciprocation of the MC over her efforts, and a lack of bonding. Gradually it felt to her that she was begging people to come. This led to tiredness and eroded motivation by the end of the first semester. The same feeling that she had with the 28th was just not there. This is how I analysed it with her: her teammates’ lack of commitment led to a chronic stress situation. In semester two, with her academic and other mixed stresses coming in as an acute source of stress, she snapped. Luckily this occurred when only 2 or 3 more DCs were left.

I told frankly that I had expected Dharma to perform much better than average for the 29th given herself, Tionghan and Angita. However, in my opinion, they had only just done average: enough to get by. So the overall verdict by me is that they could have done so much better, so it was a disappointing year on the Dharma side.

-On Dharma Friends, she felt that there were too little DF workshops. While they did try to do some trial run DCs before the actual day among the 3 or 4 DFs that turned up for the DF meetings, nobody was there to feedback or to improve their facilitation skills, i.e. they were just playing lego by themselves.

She also suggests the ratio of 3 discussion styles to 1 talk. Her suggestions for the next 4 topics:
-Buddhist Youth-fulness: What makes a Buddhist youth different from other youths? To get an inspirational speaker to fire up the audience about the idea of being a youth equipped with Buddhism.
-Transitions in life: How Buddhism can help in such situations, especially when mindset changes are needed.
-Magnanimity of the heart: spreading kindness and maintaining that equanimity of caring for others for all situations and people.
- Strengthening our fragile heart.

(4) Provost

We paid a visit to the Provost’s office today at 4.45pm. As expected, he’s a busy man with back-to-back meetings, so seeing that he looked at his watch, me and Tionghan decided to cut it short.

There are 2 open motives to meet with the Provost: 1) For him to know us better; 2) For us to know him better. There is one covert motive: to drop hints for him to be one of our staff patrons in the future.

The takeaway from the meet up was that he doesn’t really know much about the Buddhist world outside. He doesn’t know of the organizations Palelai, Wat Ananda or Buddhist Fellowship. The most likely reason is that he’s too busy with his other portfolios to devote extensive energies into any Dharma work.

He has been the Chairman of Sattha Puchaniyaram Buddhist Temple in Bukit Batok since the 90’s. His link to the temple began since his childhood days as part of his family activities. The Venerable of the temple is already in his 90s, very old, and very conservative, not interested in succession. For himself, he has tried to float the idea of injecting some youth and reversing the decline of the temple in recent years, but has met with lukewarm response or even some tension.

He asked us if we knew of Bro. Kwek Soon Han. He had met Bro. Kwek and is thinking of trying to get in touch of similar experienced people or groups that can advise him of how to move forward in his scenario. But our assessment is that he is likely to take it slowly, especially with his commitments, his lack of familiarity with the Buddhist world outside and his unwillingness to antagonize a Venerable that he has respected from young.

We introduced some of the activities and the state of our membership. He seems to think that our current performance is considered pretty good. He also asked with a smile how the Christian groups in NUS are performing. We told him of BF@NUS and the existence of Tzu Ching. However, due to his lack of time we could not get too far before we had to end the meet up.

We passed him the past 2 years’ LOW as a souvenir and used it as an excuse to bring future elected Presidents to him to present coming LOWs. I’ve also passed him the bookmark from the Buddhist Youth Conference that we are organizing in August, and let him know the objectives of this conference. He asked to be updated about the schedule of the conference. We also offered our help if he needed advice or contacts with the rejuvenation of his temple in the future.

Takeback: currently he’s not in any state to render us much support. More rather, he might even need our help, except that he probably doesn’t know how much we can help him. However, we should definitely keep in touch with him, invite him for Buddhist Society Night (which means that the benchmark has really got to be raised!!! for our performances) and slowly get him more familiar with us through successive meetings.

Would be meeting up with SIMBS and NTUBS if I can, so would post further thoughts after my meeting with them.