Two questions come into my mind when thinking about the teaching of impermanence in relation to my life. Do we really believe that things are impermanent, that all experience is impermanent, that all arising phenomena will pass? Do we really believe that? The other question that arises from the first reflection is: What is the effect, in our life day to day, of living from that truth? Reflecting upon these questions involves looking through the more refined and subtle levels of … [Read more...]
Breaking Free with Creative Awareness
Meditation is often seen just as a way to relax or to empty one’s mind. Personally I think this is a lost cause, because one can't stop the brain from functioning. This morning I would like to look at creative awareness. You might be more familiar with the word “mindfulness,” but it is the same idea. The common ground is looking at what we do in meditation. Meditation is often seen just as a way to relax or to empty one’s mind. Personally I think this is a lost cause, because one can’t stop the … [Read more...]
Working with Perception
What is perception? It’s the most immediate derived sense of an object: It’s a flower, it’s a car, it’s a person. There’s a mild impact, contact, a sense of, ah—something strikes the eye. There’s an immediate flurrying or movement around what that is. This becomes more apparent when you meditate and slow the mind down, so that you find some space between the rush of ideas and moods. Then as you’re abiding in a fairly spacious state you feel how things strike you. It could be pleasant, like a … [Read more...]
The Radical Buddha
Every Buddha image we see reflects such calm, amused acceptance, it is not easy to appreciate just how radical a figure Siddhartha Gotama Buddha really was. Yet when we look closely at the ways he acted in the world he inhabited, and at the teachings he left behind for us all to follow, I think it fair to say the Buddha was one of the more radical humans ever to have walked the earth. The word “radical,” according to a pocket dictionary at hand, most simply means “favoring fundamental … [Read more...]
Wheels of Fire: The Buddha’s Radical Teaching on Process
Ādittapariyāya Sutta: The Fire Sermon, SN 35.28 "Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye—experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain—that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with … [Read more...]
True & False: Dharma After the Western Enlightenment
Insight Journal: How do Western Buddhists, in spite of our many modern views, take their forms too literally? Rita Gross: Since I often teach in a Mahāyāna setting, let me use an example from that tradition. According to Mahāyāna legend, the Buddha hid his Mahāyāna teachings in the realm of the nāgas, serpent-like creatures who dwell under the sea, because his students were not yet ready to receive them. Eventually these teachings were retrieved by the great 2nd-century master Nāgārjuna. This … [Read more...]
Shining the Light of Death on Life: Maranasati Meditation (Part I)
(Adapted from a workshop at BCBS on November 20, 1993) Meditation on death awareness is one of the oldest practices in all Buddhist traditions. In the words of the Buddha, “of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme." The Tibetan Book of the Dead was one of the first and most popular books to attract the attention of Buddhist practitioners in America in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. The tremendous popularity … [Read more...]