Holiday Giving & Supporting Winter Retreat
Dhammadharini Support Foundation
Ornaments of kindness, generosity and gratitude
Dear friends in Dhamma, benefactors and supporters of our Bhikkhuni Sangha,
Seasons Greetings! May this note find you well, and safe in this holiday season, gladdened and supported by the Buddha-Dhamma and Sangha.
All of us with Dhammadharini Support Foundation, together with our Bhikkhuni Sangha, would like to express our great appreciation for all your support, generosity and kindness this past year.
Some of the joys of this past year at Dhammadharini Monastery: new Buddha and arahant Therī images, Bhikkhuni sangha in the new Sala offering full ordination,and gathering together in person as sangha with the beauty of everyone’s exceptional generosity
Dhammadharini Support Foundation (DD SF) is a group of lay friends of the Sangha serving as the non-profit steward of our Dhammadharini Bhikkhuni Sangha - we are a registered 501(c)(3) in good standing, with Federal and State tax-exempt status, stewarding your support for our Bhikkhunis since 2005.
Over the past seventeen years, we have been blessed to have Bhikkhunis as part of our lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. They have also benefited people around the world. Increasingly, Bhikkhunis have the opportunities and support that the Buddha envisioned for them, as we work towards the revival and restoration of our Fourfold Sangha in Buddhism. Thank you very much and “Anumodana!” for this great gift to them, to ourselves, to our whole Sangha, and to our world.
Holiday Giving & Supporting Winter Retreat
With this letter, we hope to give you a helpful update about what would be most useful and supportive for your Holiday Giving, and how you can support our Dhammadharini monastic community’s upcoming yearly Winter Retreat (January thru March).
Many types of Giving.
First, we would like to recognize and appreciate there are many types of Giving: the gift of mental and moral support, words of support, physical acts of support– all are valid, important and blessed forms of Generosity. We are supported by all of these!
No gift is too small.
The Buddha told an old story of a child making sand cakes on the roadside, seeing an ancient Buddha walking for alms on pindapāt (pindacāriya), and with great delight and devotion, offering one of their precious sand cakes. Even though the sand cakes could not be eaten, that act, that beautiful responsive generosity arising in the heart, proved to be greatly meritorious. Our current Buddha said that child long ago was once him. And yet, he said, it is still greater to give wisely, as well as kindly, those gifts that are timely, well-considered, useful and supportive – those cakes that can be eaten. These are the foods, the lodgings, the robes, the medicine, the supportive requisites that will be truly supportive and well used.
This info from DD SF is meant to support not only the heart, but skillful giving.
HOLIDAY GIVING
Gifts to the General Fund & Gifts of Special Projects
We know that some of our friends wish to make general donations, and some are most inspired to give for special projects. We offer supportive information for both here:
General Fund
This is a good year for General Fund Holiday Giving. Our support foundation always greatly appreciates general donations because they can be used for whatever is most needed. However this is especially true now, at the end of 2022. 2022 has been a financially challenging year for Dhammadharini. Our support foundation is currently running with a $34K operating deficit for 2022. This is due in large part to a $14K increase in insurance costs this year, and $20K cost for much-needed fire abatement work. Fortunately, several supporters' exceptional generosity in 2021 contributed greatly towards our having enough savings to be able to cover this deficit. Although the Support Foundation was not able to further pay down the monastery mortgage as hoped, DD SF is still OK.
Any gifts to the General Fund, or for these specific categories of expenses would be enormously appreciated and greatly supportive:
Balancing out Year 2022 | Insurance Costs | Fire Abatement
If there are donations above and beyond these 2022 costs – we will gladly apply them to the cost of insurance and fire abatement work in 2023. And as always, gifts to the general fund can be applied to whatever is most needed.
Special Projects
First we would like to express our big appreciation for everyone’s donations towards our new Dāna Sālā and Sīmā at Dhammadharini Monastery, which we were able to construct, offer, and very well use this year. “Sādhu! x 3” We’d also like to express our appreciation for all the donations towards the HVAC (Heating and Ventilation) Project at Dhammadharini Monastery over the past several years, and especially during the 2022 Kathina Giving. During the winter retreat our DD SF Facilities team is aiming to finalize design and obtain permits, and then we hope to go ahead with installing the HVAC system at our monastery in 2023. Anumodana!
We have three special projects as opportunities for support, upcoming in 2023 at our hermitage:
Fire abatement work, road repair work, and teacher’s mini office-studio:
$30K. Fire abatement work will be focused on completing the shaded fuel break on our Aranya Bodhi hermitage access roads, to provide safe exit of residents, visitors and retreatants, and safe entry for fire safety personnel, in case of wildfire (estimate $25K). Fire safety signage (estimate $5K). Note: we intend to apply for grants (and have an experienced volunteer offer to do so) which, if successful, can potentially cover up to 90% of these costs. These two items above are the top priorities recommended by our local CalFire chief upon site inspection. If we receive grants, additional donations would be applied to the next priority on the list: water tanks.
$20K. Road Repair is normally done every year at Aranya Bodhi, but was skipped in 2021, so the access road repair work needed in 2022 is now a little more. Plus it is time to maintain the Ridge Road, which we haven’t done in 10 years. This road is strategically highly important for fire safety, and our local fire chief requested we keep it up.
Mini office-studio. $4K in donations have already been given. In traditional Buddhist style, we plan to start construction, and then do whatever we can whenever further donations come in for this project.
Thank you very much and anumodana to everyone for your donations for these special projects as we enter 2023. And thank you for all your support for all the special projects that your donations have made possible in 2022 and will make possible in 2023 at Dhammadharini Monastery, especially the Dana Sala (completed in 2022) and HVAC system (for 2023).
SUPPORTING WINTER RETREAT
How can you support our monastics’ winter retreat?
We are just two weeks away now from our monastic community’s entering our annual three month-long winter retreat (this year from January 8th thru March 25th). We want to encourage all to join in dāna, sīlā, and bhāvana together during the winter retreat time. Dāna means giving generously, sīlā our precepts, ethics and moral virtue, bhāvana our mindfulness, meditation, Dhamma study and contemplation.
Four Requisites Dana includes: food, lodgings, medicine and robes.
To focus here: our monastics report having enough robes and warm wear for the winter. And the Monastic Medical Fund, while not enormous, is fortunately adequate for now.
The areas where we would like to focus our support are the Lodgings Dana and Grocery Dana initiatives. When we reviewed the financials to date for 2022, we saw in fact that, if recurring donations of Lodgings Dana were brought up to the 2022 costs for lodgings (including the insurance increase), and Grocery Dana donations were brought up to the 2022 cost for groceries (see charts below); there would actually be no operating deficit! This was exciting news for us, and we would like to encourage your one-time gifts or regular weekly or monthly support for these categories.
We’d also like to let you know that, although the cost of food went up as much as 40% locally in 2022, our monastic community’s grocery costs, amazingly, actually went down, compared to 2021. In part this is due to our monastics beginning limited local alms rounds again during Vassa. It is also due to our Dana coordinator Lal’s “Hot Meal Dana & A Week of Groceries Dana” initiative, and all the friends who participated in this. Thank you Lal & Co! Regularly during the whole year, and especially faithfully every week during the Vassa, friends and supporters came in person to offer hot meals and groceries. Thank you Shari and Shirley for your support through the whole Vassa. Local friends also dropped by offering cooked and pickled foods and fresh produce as well. A friend from afar sometimes offered Safeway and Whole Foods gift cards. Thank you very much with a great shout out of “anumodana!” to everyone for this initiative. We would really like to encourage this and see it continue and develop further.
For the New Year, and for Winter Retreat coming up, we would like to put these numbers out there, and welcome your support. The orange is what is already pledged. The green is available for your support. Filling in the green with orange would give us a solid financial footing for winter retreat time.
In the old traditions in Buddhism, and still in places in Theravada Buddhism in Asia, we see people out on the roadside in front of their homes early in the morning, patiently waiting, prepared to offer one spoonful of rice, one little pack of curry, one piece of fruit, into the bhikkhus and bhikkhunīs’ alms bowls. They want to start their day off right with giving, with seeing the bhikkhu/nis, with hearing a few words of Dhamma offered as blessings. Some will have gone to their home shrine and chanted the Refuges & Precepts before doing so, or sat quietly in meditation or listening to a Dhamma talk beforehand or afterwards, so that their day is imbued with dāna, sīlā, and bhāvana.
We would like to strongly encourage regular giving, both in person, and from afar, from both our local and global village - the size of the gift is no matter. Even $5 or $10 a week or month is a valuable dāna offering of support. As long ago, and also today, all those small gifts of support from the community add up - this is how Buddhism has worked on the grass roots level for millennia. Drop by drop is the water pot filled.
Combined with medium and larger gifts from those who are able, according to their means - the whole community joins in supporting the Sangha, and all its treasures, together. This generates and supports a great field of merit and virtue for the world for our generation, and ensures it is passed on to the next generation. We bow in gratitude to all who came before us who have offered us this great gift, and to all this year who join us in continuing that great tradition.
With mettā,
Dom McCarty
Treasurer, Dhammadharini Support Foundation
On behalf of and in consultation with the Dhammadharini monastic community
and Dhammadharini Support Foundation Board of Directors