Projects
FPMT maintains a number of charitable projects, including funds to build holy objects; translate Tibetan texts; support monks and nuns (both Tibetan and non-Tibetan); offer medical care, food and other assistance in impoverished regions of Asia; re-establish Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia; and protect animals. See the FPMT website for more information.
Perhaps the highest-profile FPMT project to date is the Maitreya Project, a planned 152-meter statue of Maitreya to be built in Kushinagar, India.
Also to note is the Sera Je Food Fund http://www.fpmt.org/projects/seraje/ offering 3 meals a day to the 2600 monks who are studying at Sera Je Monastery since 1991.
Jeffrey Paine, commenting glowingly on the FPMT's various projects, writes:
- "The FPMT, nonprofit, staffed by individual volunteers, oversees activities from publishing books to feeding three thousand monks at the new Sera monastery in India. The FPMT's 'Mongolia Project' has revived Buddhism in that country. The FPMT now plans to build near Bodhgaya the largest Buddha statue in the world, which will house whole temples inside of it. If built, it will dwarf the Statue of Liberty. It may eventually even dwarf the legend of Yeshe, the little lama who fled Tibet never having met a Westerner, knowing no European language, and then..."
Peter Moran, less sanguine, reports controversy over the appropriateness of the statue, as well as other aspects of fund-raising and expenditure, which he attributes to the differing cultural expectations of Westerners, Tibetans, and ethnic Chinese (who apparently contribute the majority of funds).
Read more about this topic: Foundation For The Preservation Of The Mahayana Tradition
Famous quotes containing the word projects:
“But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)