- Delaney

Know Yourself, Change Yourself, Liberate Yourself

       The music blared, children ran and screamed, and the invigorating smell of Gyros and funnel cakes swept through the air. The annual Solstice Festival of Fairbanks, Alaska was underway beneath a sky flooded with sun and sprinkled with occasional raindrops. Paul Kendall set up his white tent just outside his office next to the dance stage. Lucky for him, I was more interested in his beads than the local school of dance.

 “Wisdom is something that nobody gives you, you have to realize it yourself,” said Kendall. Paul works for the Diamond Wisdom Meditation Center, home of the Chinese esoteric school. He gives free class sessions teaching people Hanmi Buddhism. The beads that he was selling are made of bode seed from the Bode Tree of Asia, and is believed to be the tree that Buddha sat under to meditate. The beads have been blessed by his Buddha Master to protect people surrounding them.

“They are emitting light all the time. It’s called an enlightening ceremony. Whatever the object is, it changes it and brings a higher conscience into that object so it’s emitting light and changing the environment around them. You want to help people you have a relationship with, even people standing in the crowd, you are having a relationship with them because you are standing next to them. It purifies the environment surrounding them, ” said Kendall.

The beads can be blessed in the palm of a master’s hands for a few seconds, but some of the beads at his table have been blessed for over 1000 days in a monastery. In his temple, Paul does a lot of healing work and gives free classes on patience. He preaches his three main points: Know Yourself, Change Yourself, Liberate Yourself. However, Paul wasn’t always as patient.

Paul was actually raised a Mormon; “I was a very bad teenager. I was very anti-religion. I started to have suffering because I was selfish and just wanted to have fun. Then I started martial arts to find discipline and I realized that religion is discipline. It’s for everyone’s benefit. Now I respect all religions.”