Tuwhiri—past, present and future
Tēnā koutou katoa,
Welcome to the second Tuwhiri newsletter. It’s in three parts, though you’ll doubtless discern some overlap.
PAST
‘Winton,’ I said somewhat casually, ‘the talks you gave to introduce After Buddhism to your sangha are really good. Why don’t you put them all together and make a book out of them?’ ‘Ramsey,’ he said, ‘go ahead.’
So, how did we arrive at the name ‘The Tuwhiri Project’?
Around the beginning of 2017, I had worked through the process of helping Leon Frampton look for a name for a counselling endeavour he was wanting to set up. Leon is a registered nurse and secular Buddhist practitioner in Invercargill at the cold southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. With Viktor Frankl’s notion of discovering meaning at the centre of what he was wanting to offer, I suggested that a word in te reo Maori – ‘tuwhiri’ – might work well for him. In English translation, we understand the word tuwhiri as:
a verb meaning to disclose, reveal, divulge, make known; and
a noun meaning a clue, means of discovering or disclosing something lost or hidden, hint, tip, pointer.
The suggested name for his enterprise was ‘The Tuwhiri Centre’, and he loved it. However, after he took a full-time role running a health centre, Leon understandably dropped the idea. Early this year when the conversation around what to call a publishing imprint that would serve as an educational resource for secular Buddhists was taking place and as an early participant in the process, Leon very generously gifted the name ‘Tuwhiri’ to our nascent endeavour.
In this way, The Tuwhiri Project was born in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, which by the way can be see bottom right in the map below.
On June 6th 2018, the crowdfunding appeal went live on Kickstarter in which we sought financial support to:
Set up The Tuwhiri Project as an entity, with all that entails nowadays, including as a limited liability company with bank and PayPal accounts, a web domain, website, email, Twitter, and Vimeo and Youtube channels; and to
Help us produce our first book – After Buddhism: a workbook.
However success might be measured, our Kickstarter was successful way beyond our expectations with close to 100 individuals and sanghas in 15 countries pledging NZD $11,717, nearly three times the amount we had asked for.
But how would you measure a Kickstarter’s success? What metric(s), what number(s) do you consider significant? I’ve had this conversation with more than a few people and would be interested in your views – click Reply to this email, please, to respond.
If you’d like to see our video again and comment on it, the Kickstarter video is also on Vimeo here.
PRESENT
Our intention in putting out After Buddhism: a workbook is to help individuals and communities grow in their understanding of what they’re doing when they have a secular Buddhist practice in a difficult world, and become independent of others in their practice and their understanding of the dharma.
The Tuwhiri Project is 100 percent owned by a New Zealand charitable trust, Aotearoa Buddhist Education Trust. We did this to ensure that it would receive no pressure from owners of the enterprise to produce and distribute profits, enabling Tuwhiri to easily able to focus on its purpose: help people find meaning in a difficult world.
Running The Tuwhiri Project now are Pete Cowley (as director) and myself, Ramsey Margolis, both from Wellington’s One Mindful Breath with Margaret Tung and Winton Higgins from Sydney, Australia’s recently-formed secular Buddhist Kookaburra Sangha (as the editorial board) along with Rebecca Maresca in Wellington as our administrator.
If you know us, you may be aware that The Tuwhiri Project is governed by four volunteers who range from being in our early ’60s to mid ’70s, supported by a (very) part-time administrator. With an eye to the future, we are looking for more people to become involved in the project, preferably younger. Right now we need:
Someone with experience of the publishing industry, or marketing in general;
Someone who is keen to help us transform After Buddhism: a workbook into an online course that’s not only free to all to use but inventive, exciting and challenging; and
Someone who can take charge of fundraising future projects, books and online courses
And it doesn’t matter where in the world you are. Click Reply to this email if you’d like know more, or have a question.
FUTURE
As close to Monday August 6th as we can do it, each of our Kickstarter backers will be receiving the book in digital formats (as a PDF, an ePub and for Kindle). A week later, we will be putting around 350 books into the post (‘the mail’ in US English) which will enable some people to run courses and others to study Stephen Batchelor’s After Buddhism on their own. And the book will be available on www.tuwhiri.nz as well as on Book Depository, Amazon, and from bookstores worldwide through Ingram.
In a future newsletter, we will announce the dates on which the book launch will be taking place. At these events in Sydney and Wellington, we will also formally launch The Tuwhiri Project as an educational resource for secular Buddhists.
Encouraged by the success of our first book, the Tuwhiri editorial board now have a wish list of books we’d also like to publish. I’d dearly love to let you know what they all are, but suspect that if I did let too many cats out of the bag they’d scatter to the four winds. Let’s just say, for now, that we’re scheduled to have conversations with people in the UK and the USA who are involved with long-established Buddhist centres about two of the potential books on our list, each of which will most definitely encourage thought and, we expect, discussion around a secular dharma.
But wait – before signing off here’s an idea for another book. Here in Wellington, creating community has been an important element of my practice for almost 20 years, and the community I’m involved in now, One Mindful Breath, is a joy to be part of. How can I most easily share what I’ve learned over the past two decades with others who are wanting to create a secular dharma practice community, a secular Buddhist sangha?
Around the world, people are coming together and developing new Buddhist practices and communities in one format or another, that might be considered secular Buddhist, whether they use that label or not. What works, and why? What can we learn from each other? What didn’t work? Why did a particular sangha to fail to develop deep roots in its community? What’s your story?
Again, please click Reply to this newsletter if you have something to offer to this conversation, or perhaps contribute your story to this yet-to-be-published book.
Finally, as ever, if you like what we’re doing please share this newsletter with a friend or three.
Kati ake nei, ka kite ano,
Ramsey Margolis, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand • www.tuwhiri.nz