The teaching that is going to take place here today is preceding the ceremony for taking the generation of the mind of enlightenment and for that I will be doing some preliminary recitations including the recitation of the Heart Sutra. In the context of giving the teachings, both on the part...
According to the Treasury of Abhidharma, there are three causes for the afflictions to arise: not abandoning the kernels of the afflictions, the object being present, and inappropriate attention. An older person with more anger in them, for example, has not abandoned the kernel of anger. Whe...
On the surface, we’re just addressing the suffering of negative thoughts and feelings about ourselves that so many of us are burdened by. But when we apply Buddhist analysis to it, we see that the cause of our self-negativity goes deep, and so the remedy must too. In fact, the three...
love, compassion and wisdom. Many of the people we admire — the Buddha, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi and others — had the ability to remain internally undisturbed in the face of harm and
THE PREMISE OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHINGS Nowadays Buddhism is approached outside of its traditional cultures, and we might want to appreciate how the great science of enlightenment stands apart from the modern science most of us have grown up with. Very briefly, we can say that Buddhism and wha...
After spending what seemed like an eternity ensuring that the sensors had good contact with the scalp, the experiment was finally ready to begin. A precise analysis of something as squishy as, say, compassion demands an exacting protocol, one that can detect that mental state’s specific pattern...
On the other hand, there’s nothing bad about criticism. It’s very good to be criticised because it stops delusions such as attachment or pride from arising. Criticism points out faults that we’re currently unaware of, allowing us to confront and correct them. Meditators usually say that ...
In Tibetan, the word “meditation” comes from the same verbal root as “to habituate” or “to familiarise.” Thus, in meditation we endeavour to habituate ourselves to valuable ways of viewing the world. We also seek to familiarise ourselves with an accurate view of reality, so that we ...
as we understand it in the West, exclusively intellectual and psychological. Mind includes all the material world. It also includes the “transcendent world,” which sounds odd. Isn’t it commonplace to think of Buddhism as having, refreshingly, no idea of the transcendent, which sounds like Go...
himself. It was because of his infinitely compassionate concern for the benefit and liberation of all beings without exception, that he revealed the way of liberation from all suffering. Like the love of a mother who cherishes her only child, this was the loving-kindness of the Buddha’s ...