Dear fellow cultivators,

First of all, a big thankyou for all who turned up for the first official ACMMS Translation Group meeting held this year. I believe we had all benefited from the meeting. Many ideas were exchanged and most important of all, we had decided on the direction to go for the next half year or so.

Below is a brief summary of the meeting:

a) Objectives:
- To make ancient eastern text of wisdom easily accessible for the english educated.
- Prevent the lost of Tao heritage and to raise the moral values of the society.
- Provide interpolation/explaination to the original text to help people with no spiritual background to understand the context easily.
- To publish the translation for free distribution.

b) Translation Process:
We will do 2 articles of text per session and depending on the number of turn ups, we may split up into 2 groups.

1030am - 11pm: Bernard P. will do the raw translation from chinese to english and there will be general discussions on the sutras or text.

11pm - 12pm: the groups will discuss on the meanings and fix the sentence structure. Each group will also come up with an interpolation summary for the paragraph. Focus will be on how to make use of the ideas in the sutra in daily life.

12pm - 1230pm: Each group will present the final translated paragraphs to everyone. Once everyone agrees to the translation, the translated text will be published in ACMMS website.

c) Texts to Translate:
We had decided on the different texts to translate. Some of them are available in the market but because we want to make them freely available, we decided to re-translate them again as we will all benefit from the translation process as well. We are aiming for short term goals, so all the texts chosen are reasonably short and achievable within a short period of time. For longer texts, we decided to focus on certain chapters instead of the whole book.

Taoism: Tao Te Chin, Chuang Tzu, Calming Sutra.

Buddhism: Heart Sutra, 42 Chapters Sutra, Zen Sutra of Hui Neng.

Confucianism: Great Learning, Middle Path, The Analects.

I Kuan Tao: Admonishment of Ji Gong, Matrieya Sutra, Principle of I Kuan Tao.

Others: Quotations from famous saints, any other spiritual text from Bagavad Gita, Bible, Koran..etc

* We will start with "Chuang Tzu" and "Principles of I Kuan Tao" on the 6 Nov 2005.

d) Final Output:
Every texts that are translated will be published in the acmms.org website. After every 3 or 6 months, once we have enough translated text, we may publish a magazine for free distribution. If there is any chance that the published text becomes commercial, all earnings will go back to the temple.