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FACE TO FACE | EASTERN HORIZON 27
Celebrating Life and Death
By Dr Diana Cousens
photo credit: Olivier Adam.
Dr Diana Cousens is the Vice-President of the
Buddhist Council of Victoria and the President of
the Federation of Australian Buddhist Councils.
She was appointed by HH the 41st Sakya Trizin,
head of the Sakya lineage of Tibetan Buddhism,
as his representative in Melbourne from 1997 to
2008 and during that time she was the Director
of the Melbourne Sakya Centre. She has a PhD in
Himalayan Studies from Monash University and
wrote a thesis about the folklore of the temple at
Triloknath in Himachal Pradesh, India. She has
represented the Buddhist community in Melbourne
in interfaith dialogue over the past 23 years and
in 2016 was the founding President of Sakyadhita
Australia, a national organisation representing
Buddhist women. She works as a wedding and
funeral celebrant and represents the Buddhist
community on the Victorian State Government’s
Multifaith Advisory Group. In June 2023, she was
awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for
service to the Buddhist community as part of the
King’s Birthday Honours. Benny Liow was in touch
with Diana and decided to ask her about her first
introduction to the Buddha Dharma, her role as
a marriage and funeral celebrant, her approach
towards death and dying as a Buddhist, and inter- to Australia and became a regular visitor to the three
faith dialogues in Australia, a predominantly
Christian country.
Benny: You are today a well-known Buddhist scholar
and leader but can you share what first brought you to
Buddhism, and more importantly, what inspired you to
be so active in the Buddhist community in Australia?
Diana: After I left school, I decided to work for a while
and then go travelling. In those days, which is more
than 40 years ago, it was a common practice for young
Australians to go to Asia for months or years to explore
different kinds of countries and cultures. On my first
trip I visited Pagan in Burma - now Myanmar. It has
5,000 ancient temples in a beautiful landscape. If you go
to the top of one the largest temples, you can see only
temples for kilometres. It was really beautiful and quite
inspiring. The atmosphere inside the temples was also
very tranquil and there was a sacred ambience. One of
the tour guides explained that the Buddha had been an
ordinary person but had become a Buddha as a result of
meditating. I was stunned that he was not born perfect.
He had a journey and as a result of his practices, he
became a Buddha. The tour guide explained that ordinary
people could become Buddhas, even now. I didn’t become
a Buddhist then but this experience left a mark.
Later while staying in a Christian ashram in South
India, Shantivanam, there was an interfaith conference
on religion and science. New scientific ideas were
being promoted that seemed a bit more esoteric.
Rupert Sheldrake was there promoting his theory of
‘morphogenetic fields’, and there was a Tibetan lama.
The lama explained the theories of bodhicitta, which
is the wish for all beings to become enlightened as the
basis for practice, and emptiness and interdependence.
These ideas were clearer and more structured than many
of the ideas I had encountered while travelling around
India visiting sacred places and staying in ashrams. I felt
I needed to follow up on Tibetan Buddhism. I returned
centers that were in Melbourne at that time.