What Hans Jongsma says:
I have shortly browsed your site and am pretty impressed. In general the site is neatly designed easy to navigate and I like the owls! I find the topics rather "heavy" for me to just jump in and vent my opinions.
Nevertheless I am interested and a big admirer of the Buddhist ways. Nowadays I am also involved in the catholic doctrines and try to look at it with the Buddhist eyes. There are a lot of things they have in common but can be miles apart too. Most of my experience with Buddhism is through martial arts. I was involved with Taoism and also Buddhism over the years.
This was just a bit about me in connection with your website. I will visit it more in the future and maybe will participate more. Hope you have good feedback and wish you lots of luck with it.
Finally, another mail from me with a small clarification on the subject of Buddhism and martial arts.
I trained in several martial arts and one was kung-fu, with a teacher who also followed Daoisme. But kung-fu would not be what we know without the Shaolin (young wood) temples as we know them from the movies.
It was documented that in the northern (Honan area) temples Indian monks would visit and teach and participate. The most famous one was Daruma or Bodhidarma as the Chinese called him.
On Wikipedia you can find his story http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma.
He noticed the bad physical condition of the monks after hours of meditation and started teaching martial arts as a way to keep fit and also as a useful defence against robbers. In those days it would not be uncommon to steal from a monk on his way back to the temple with the day's gifts.
There are nice drawings found on the walls of the Honan temple depicting a hall which show Chinese and Indians in training. If you read the Wikipedia page, you will find a lot more details and nice pictures starring this very colourful person. And he even made his way down to Japan They called him Daruma and founded Zen- Buddhism.
So here is my first tie with Buddhism in combination with martial arts.
There is another involvement in my training of ninjutsu and if you like, I can elaborate more on this matter.
I have not much time to study your web-site but I noticed it has been updated! Feel free to publish my input here.
Kind regards
Hans Jongsma