Based on a talk given at the IMS Forest Refuge in Barre, MA, last winter. ‘‘Look how he abused me and beat me, How he threw me down and robbed me.” Live with such thoughts and you live in hate... Abandon such thoughts and live in love. In this world Hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, Ancient and inexhaustible. (Dhammapada 3-5) Hatred, indeed, has never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. Hatred just leads to revenge, and revenge … [Read more...]
Working with Anger
These thoughts have been extracted from a program offered at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies on November 12, 2005. One thing psychotherapy and Buddhist practice have in common is that they are both attempting to uncover our subjectivity and allow us to access a kind of emergent knowledge. A lot of the time we walk around with preconceptions about everything; we know how were going to be, we know how other people are going to be. Buddhist practice works to help us get out of these … [Read more...]
Where the Action Is
There are two aspects to every moment’s experience. One is the content, what it is you are aware of; the other is the intention, what your emotional response is toward that object of awareness. In the Buddhist way of looking at things, the first is largely irrelevant, while the second is immensely important. According to Buddhist psychology, human experience is constructed anew every moment as consciousness of one of the six objects (a form, a sound, a smell, a taste, a touch or a thought) … [Read more...]
Escaping the Karma of Addiction
This article is based on teachings given at BCBS in January, 2008 by Paul Simons & Gregory Bivens in a course called Working with Addiction: Spiritual Self-Schema Therapy. It might seem strange to talk about “spiritual self schema” as something to aspire to in a Buddhist context. In the psychological language of Self-Schema Therapy, it describes an alternative to the “addict self,” the type of mistaken identification with one’s negative thoughts and feelings that perpetuates a cycle of … [Read more...]
Freedom from Buddha Nature
“What is the mind? The mind isn’t ‘is’ anything. ” —Ajaan Chah “The mind is neither good nor evil, but it’s what knows good and knows evil. It’s what does good and does evil. And it’s what lets go of good and lets go of evil. ” —Ajaan Lee A brahman once asked the Buddha, “Will all the world reach release [Awakening], or half the world, or a third?” But the Buddha didn’t answer. Ven. Ānanda, concerned that the brahman might misconstrue the Buddha’s silence, took the man aside and gave him … [Read more...]
The Crow-Birth: A Jātaka Story
Jātaka is a Pali word meaning “birth-story” (jāta—“that which is born” and ka—from katheti—“to relate”). The Jātaka may simply be Indian folklore reworked to suit Buddhist aims, but they are also believed to be the Buddha’s own account of his previous lives. In each of these tales, the Bodhisatta [one committed to awakening] is seen perfecting those qualities that led to his full awakening as the Buddha of our era. Scenes from the Jātaka appear on the carved stone railings at Sanchi and Bharhut … [Read more...]
Perennial Issues
Toward the end of World War II, Aldous Huxley published an anthology, The Perennial Philosophy, proposing that there is a common core of truths to all the world’s great religions. These truths clustered around three basic principles: that the Self is by nature divine, that this nature is identical with the divine Ground of Being, and that the ideal life is one spent in the quest to realize this non-dual truth. In the years since Huxley published his anthology, the idea of a perennial … [Read more...]
The Last Stronghold of Self
I find Buddhist practitioners to be quite good at establishing skillful intentions. We endeavor to keep the precepts, to rise up to the demands of daily practice, and to diminish sense desires. And this can be inspiring to witness. Our resolve is undeniable. Still, the thing I hear most often as a Dhamma teacher is how frustrating it can be trying to stay on course once we establish our intentions. We are constantly faced with patterns and habits that run contrary to our … [Read more...]
A Comprehensive Matrix of Constructed Experience
These are the building blocks with which we construct our world. Every action which creates karma is represented on this chart. It is meant as an exhaustive categorization of all conditioned human experience. Try examining each of these options, one at a time, and look for examples of such activity in your own life and practice. You will find that such a matrix of experience provides a generic and de-personalized way of looking at what is taking place moment by moment, which supports the … [Read more...]
A Mother’s Blessing
The woman who is said to have composed this poem was Pajapati, the Buddha's step-mother and a Queen of the Sakyas. Her younger sister was Maya, married to King Suddhodana only after Pajapati herself was unable to conceive an heir. Queen Maya died in childbirth, and it was Pajapati who raised Gotama as her own son. After his enlightenment, Pajapati also left the palace and became the first of the bhikkhuis, the order of nuns. The third stanza suggests that her attainments included the … [Read more...]