“We are not born equal, are not created equal. We are born different, and live different, and die different, because of our different karma. But there are certain areas where things become equal. There is no difference in the attainment of enlightenment. When we attain nirvana, we all are equal.”
– Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Going Upstream”
Read related article at Tricycle.com through Wed., July 24
“Contemplate the inconceivably vast oceans of good actions by conscious beings since beginningless time.”
~ https://twitter.com/Buddhism_Now
“The key to development along the Buddhist path is repetitive routine guided by inspirational vision. It is the insight into final freedom—the peace and purity of a liberated mind—that uplifts us and impels us to overcome our limits. But it is by repetition—the methodical cultivation of wholesome practices—that we cover the distance separating us from the goal and draw ever closer to awakening.”
~ Bhikkhu Bodhi
“Vision and Routine” from Tricycle.com
“Laziness will stop your progress in your spiritual practice. One can be deceived by three types of laziness: the laziness of indolence, which is the wish to procrastinate; the laziness of inferiority, which is doubting your capabilities; and the laziness that is attached to negative actions, or putting great effort into nonvirtue.”
~ H.H. The Dalai Lama
Check out this Tricycle article on the much misunderstood Buddhist concept of karma. It’s an interview with Matthieu Ricard, born in France in 1946, and who trained as a molecular biologist at the Institute Pasteur before taking up robes as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in 1972. Note: the article is live to non-members of Tricycle.com only through Sunday, June 2. Some highlights:
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RICARD: At each point in our lives, we are at a crossroads. We are the fruit of our past and we are the architects of our future. When we ask, “Why did this happen to me?” it is because of our limited view. If we throw a stone up in the air and forget about it, when it falls down on our heads, we shouldn’t complain, although we usually do. We have this notion that what happens to us is somehow independent of our own actions. We can ask, why did this happen? but the more important question is, what we are going to do about it?
If you want to know your past, look at your present circumstances. If you want to know your future, look at what is in your mind. If we know that our fate is in our hands, then the quality of our actions becomes a central issue. The whole point of karma is to recognize how our actions determine our future, so that we can begin to act properly. It’s not just a cosmological or philosophical matter. It’s entirely practical. The main point is not to get in trouble again.
THE LAWS OF KARMA
1. Karma is definite: An action will definitely bring its specific results unless it meets an obstacle. A positive action will result in happiness. A negative action will ultimately produce suffering.
2. Karma increases: Just as a small seed gives rise to a towering tree, the seeds of both positive and negative karma increase in potency unless they are obstructed. Positive results can be obstructed by expressions of anger and other negative actions. Negative results can be obstructed through purification.
3. Karma is specific: Karmic results are experienced only by one who created the cause for that experience.
4. Karma is never lost: The karmic seeds do not lose their potency of their own accord. Without purification and the cessation of negative actions, those karmic seeds will never lose their potential. They will continue to have the power to bring us suffering when the proper conditions arise. -Mark Magill
“Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies. Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it.”
~ Gary Snyder from “Just One Breath”
Read the entire article in the Tricycle Wisdom Collection through May 28, 2013
Vesak is being celebrated today at the Bhavana Society Buddhist Monastery and retreat center in Hampshire County, West Virginia. The exact date of Vesak Day varies according to the various lunar calendars used in different countries and traditions. In Theravada countries following the Buddhist calendar, it falls on the full moon Uposatha day (typically the 5th or 6th lunar month), as this website explains: “Commonly called ‘Buddha’s Birthday’, Vesak is actually the celebration of the birth, enlightenment and death of Buddha and, unlike the birth and death of Christ, is celebrated as one occasion.
Below are some images sent out as Vesak greetings from Bhante Seelananda, a monk at the Bhavana Society. Click the images large. They’re pretty cool.
Why do people
Lavish decoration
On this set of bones,
Destined to disappear
Without a trace?
~ Ikkyu (1394-1481)
Quote courtesy DailyZen.com
“The best way to deal with excessive thinking is to just listen to it, to listen to the mind. Listening is much more effective than trying to stop thought or cut it off.”
~ Ajahn Amaro, from “Thought Like Dreams” at Tricycle.com
Read the entire article in the Wisdom Collection through May 18, 2013 For full access at any time, become a Tricycle Community Supporting or Sustaining Member
“Buddhanature and the natural state are not just made up of happy, sweet emotions; buddhanature includes everything. It’s the calm, and the disturbed, and the roiled up, and the still; it’s the bitter and the sweet, the comfortable and the uncomfortable. Buddhanature includes opening to all of these things, and it’s found in the midst of all of them.”
~ Pema Chödrön, “Meditating with Emotions”
Read related article at Tricycle.com through May 14, 2013
Sitting Quietly
This is the most important meditation practice.
It is the classroom for living
a wise and kind life.
Sit anywhere and be quiet:
On a couch, a bed, a bench, inside, outside,
Leaning against a tree, by a lake, at the ocean,
In a garden, on an airplane, in your office chair,
on the floor, in your car.
Meditation cushions are okay too.
Sit at any time: morning, night,
One minute, three years.
Wear what you’ve got on.
Loosen your waist so that
Your belly can move with your breath.
Sit as relaxed as possible.
Relax your muscles
When starting and during sitting.
Sit with your back straight but not stiff.
Keep your head upright with your ears level.
Respect all medical conditions.
Only take a posture you can.
All postures are okay.
Do what you can do.
Keep your eyes slightly opened and out of focus.
Closing them will make you sleepy and sometimes
busy.
Opening them wide will keep you busy.
Breathe naturally through your nose.
Enjoy breathing.
Feel your breath.
Watch your breath.
Become your breath.
Be like a cat purring.
Follow your breath like ocean waves
coming in and out.
When you get distracted,
Come back to the simplest
And most basic experience of being alive,
your breathing.
That’s it.
No belief.
No program.
No dogma.
You do not have to be a Buddhist.
You can be of any faith, religion,
race, nationality, gender,
relationship status, or capacity.
Just sit quietly,
connect with your breath,
and pay attention
to what happens.
You will learn things.
Do it when you want.
You decide how much is enough for you.
If you do it daily, it will get into your bones.
Please enjoy sitting quietly!
The only way to learn sitting quietly is to do it.
~ byTai Sheridan
Reprinted from
“Buddha in Blue Jeans: An Extremely Short Simple Zen Guide to Sitting Quietly and Being Buddha,”
by Tai Sheridan
“Now if the practice is so good for us, why is it so difficult to maintain a steady practice? It may be that the notion that practice is ‘good for us’ is the very impediment—we all know how we can resist what is good for us at the table, at the gym, and on the Internet. This mechanical notion of practice, ‘if I practice, then I will be (fill in the blank),’ leads to discouragement because it is not true that practice inevitably leads to happiness or anything that we can imagine. …
How, then, to put our minds in a space where practice is always there, whether tumultuous or in the doldrums? It requires a completely radical view of practice: practice is not something we do; it is something we are. We are not separate from our practice, and so no matter what, our practice is present. An ocean swimmer is loose and flows with the current and moves through the tide. When tossed upside-down in the surf, unable to discern which way is up and which is down, the natural swimmer just lets go, breathing out, and follows the bubbles to the surface.
And so it can be with our practice. Seeing our practice as our life, we just let go and do it. We just practice a steadiness in our daily meditation. Without expectations of any kind, we just practice, day in and day out, through the high points and the low. “I really doubt this practice is helping me. Okay, still, it is time to sit, right through this doubt.” Or, “Oh, I didn’t sit all week! Okay, right now I’ll sit for twenty minutes.” And each time we come back to our practice, we experience it as more inherent to our life. Maezumi Roshi, based in Los Angeles, would often use the Spanish expression for “little by little” to indicate this patient quality of practice: “Being one with the practice, you are transformed, poco a poco.”
This understanding of our practice is expressed by the great thirteenth-century Japanese Zen teacher Dogen, when he says that our meditation practice “is not step-by-step meditation; it is simply the dharma gate of peace and joy. It is the practice-enlightenment of the Ultimate Way….When you grasp this, you are like a dragon in water, or a tiger in the mountains.”
~ Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, “Like a Dragon in Water”
Read entire article at Tricycle.com through May 10, 2013
Pema Chodron, as useful and plain speaking a Western Buddhist teacher as you could hope to find, has a new book out called “How To Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind” Below is an excerpt.
By Pema Chodron | Meditation teaches us how to let go. It’s actually a very important aspect of friendliness, which is that you train again and again in not making things such a big deal.
When you have pain in your body, when all sorts of thoughts are going through your mind, you train again and again in acknowledging them openheartedly and open-mindedly, but not making them such a big deal.
Generally speaking, the human species does make things a very big deal. Our problems are a big deal for us. So we need to make space for an attitude of honoring things completely and at the same time not making them a big deal.
It’s a paradoxical idea, but holding these two attitudes simultaneously is the source of enormous joy: we hold a sense of respect toward all things, along with the ability to let go. So it’s about not belittling things, but on the other hand not fanning the fire until you have your own private World War III.
Keeping these ideas in balance allows us to feel less crowded and claustrophobic. In Buddhist terms, the space that opens here is referred to as shunyata, or “emptiness.”
But there’s nothing nihilistic about this emptiness. It’s basically just a feeling of lightness. There is movie entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but I prefer to see life from the view of the Bearable Lightness of Being.
When you begin to see life from the point of view that everything is spontaneously arising and that things aren’t “coming at you” or “trying to attack you,” in any given moment, you will likely experience more space and more room to relax into.
Your stomach, which is in a knot, can just relax. The back of your neck, which is all tensed up, can just relax. Your mind, which is spinning and spinning like one of those little bears that you wind up so it walks across the floor, can just relax. So shunyata refers to the fact that we actually have a seed of spaciousness, of freshness, openness, relaxation, in us.
Sometimes the word shunyata has been translated as the “open dimension of our being.” The most popular definition is “emptiness,” which sounds like a big hole that somebody pushes you into, kicking and screaming: “No, no! Not emptiness!”
Sometimes people experience this openness as boredom. Sometimes it’s experienced as stillness. Sometimes it’s experienced as a gap in your thinking and your worrying and your all-caught-up-ness.
I experiment with shunyata a lot. When I’m by myself and no one’s talking to me, when I’m simply going for a walk or looking out the window or meditating, I experiment with letting the thoughts go and just seeing what’s there when they go.
This is actually the essence of mindfulness practice. You keep coming back to the immediacy of your experience, and then when the thoughts start coming up, thoughts like, bad, good, should, shouldn’t, me, jerk, you, jerk, you let those thoughts go, and you come back again to the immediacy of your experience.
This is how we can experiment with shunyata, how we can experiment with the open, boundless dimension of being.”
“For zazen, a quiet room is appropriate. Drink and eat in moderation. Let go of all involvements and let myriad things rest. Do not think good or bad. Do not judge right or wrong. Stop conscious endeavor and analytic introspection. Do not try to become a buddha. How could being a buddha be limited to sitting or not sitting?”
(quote courtesy of DailyZen.com)
“Most of our suffering comes from habitual thinking. If we try to stop it out of aversion to thinking, we can’t; we just go on and on and on. So the important thing is not to get rid of thought, but to understand it. And we do this by concentrating on the space in the mind, rather than on the thought.”
~ Ajahn Sumedho, “Noticing Space”
Read related article at Tricycle.com through April 3
