{"id":1646,"date":"2009-03-24T02:38:04","date_gmt":"2009-03-23T18:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/?p=1646"},"modified":"2009-03-24T02:38:04","modified_gmt":"2009-03-23T18:38:04","slug":"only-say-what-you-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/2009\/03\/only-say-what-you-know\/","title":{"rendered":"Only Say What You Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Last Saturday, I conducted what was almost a full-day class (from 9am to 4pm) for a group of thirty-plus Singapore Tourism Board certified guides. It was held in Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery, with free vegetarian lunch and introductory Dharma materials (books, notes and DVDs). The syllabus included classroom lessons on basic Buddhism, aided by Powerpoint slideshows, video screenings, Q&A sessions… followed by a guided tour of the temple itself, on how to properly guide tourists around the temple. At the end of the course, a quiz of 25 multiple-choice questions was given to them to measure their understanding. No penalties or prizes though.<\/p>\n

At the last stop, seated on the floor of the Hall of No Form, I told the class while they were adding up their scores – ‘Multiply your score by 4 to get your score percentage. If it’s less than 50%, you can consider coming back for a recourse!’ I said that jovially of course, not intimidatingly. Earlier, I had admitted honestly to the class that one of the key reasons the temple offers such courses is because staff, like me, had come across tour guides who explain the sights in the temple erroneously, and in some cases, nonsensically! Since I had briefly covered the teaching of karma, I told them this, ‘If you are not sure (when asked a question by tourists on Buddhist elements in a temple), just say you are not sure. Only say what you know. If not, it’s bad karma (if you cook up some rubbish answer)!’ [Yup, I gave them my email address for any future Dharma enquiries :-]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Saturday, I conducted what was almost a full-day class (from 9am to 4pm) for a group of thirty-plus Singapore…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[139],"class_list":["post-1646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mix","tag-karma","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moonpointer.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}