To reiterate: our environment does not just consist of trees and whales; it’s the interwoven world of the biosphere, the economy, society and our bodies and minds. It’s all suffering from the same root problem – a short-term self-interest that supports careless attention. If you see it like this, it reduces the impotence; you see the paradigm of domination and exploitation and you address it where…
What does Buddhism teach regarding our relationship with the environment? The Buddha had an astonishing memory of past lives, and although he could recall literally “aeons of universal contraction and expansion”, he declared that no beginning to this “wandering on” could be found. As a consequence, Buddhism does not subscribe to the idea that this world is the work of a creator god and does not gi…
A servant of the Buddha prioritizes over everything else the cultivation of unobstructed awareness; the just-knowing mind. A servant of Dhamma regularly asks him or herself, how can I be more accurately attuned to the reality of ‘this’ experience, to what is happening right here, right now, in front of me? For a servant of the sangha, the thing that matters most is that our participation in commun…
Our personal journeys are often messy and chaotic, and our collective evolutionary journey is also messy and chaotic. I hear people say, “I can’t just sit here on the cushion. I need to do something. I need to stop this from happening.” Yes, there is a lot to be done, but whatever we do must be based on right understanding. On the ultimate level, nothing can be gained or lost, but in our conventio…
The religious and spiritual traditions alive in the world today are many and various. The Buddhist customs and practices of monasticism and mendicancy are only one model amongst many of how a community can live and work to bring forth its most worthy qualities, to use an economy of gifts to generate and support well-being. The dynamic found in this Buddhist tradition is only one way of sustaining…
During my years in Thailand, I was often asked why I ordained, why I was interested in Buddhism; but, one time I was asked a more specific version of that question: What was it that Ajaan Fuang taught that attracted me to him particularly? I didn’t have a ready answer right away; but as I thought about it, I began to realize that there was one teaching that had really struck me when I first went t…
Let’s look at another example of this disbanding of things. Imagine that I’m worrying about a presentation I have to give at work next week. Because the mood of worrying is arising, the fearful mind is generating the image of a future possibility of failure, public humiliation, etc. Then I begin to think, “I’m going to be giving this speech and that’s going to happen and it’s going to be very bad…
Many Buddhists will be familiar with the Eightfold Noble Path, but this is just one example of the Path, one that was given to those whose minds were already prepared through training. For those who had no previous training and weren’t committed to his teaching, the Buddha presented something of a more general relevance: a way of turning the heart towards its values and strengths. Through taking u…
At the end of the Buddha’s life, when he was at Kusinara and he was about to realize Parinibbāna, at that time many Devata and Brahma gods gathered together. The sal trees in the forest came out into bloom; they flowered even though it was not the season for their blossoming. The heavenly musicians, the gandhabbas were playing their divine music, filling the air with sublime sounds. Celestial flow…
Impermanence pulls the carpet out from under our feet, but at the same time transforms our values, the qualities which we seek out as valuable in our experiences. If we don’t understand the change, it causes confusion, followed by doubt. Even though we might know what we should be doing, we get stuck in the sense of doubt and meaninglessness, and we can’t even begin. Why do you get up in the morni…
