Category Archives: buddhist

26Oct/17

4 Foundational Purifications for Enlightenment

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If you expect to evolve spiritually, you must exert yourself. If you expect miracle to strike simply because you willed it, it’s not likely to happen. You must cultivate the terra firma of your soul so it flowers fruits. You must cleanse the vessel that carries the messages of wisdom and compassion. You must polish the instrument that ignites and channels the transcendental. According to the Shurangama Sutra, a Mahayana Buddhist text that is revered for its teachings on meditation a long and powerful Buddhist mantra, here are four ways to dig deep into the soil of your soul, to bath your messenger, and to make your physical instrument for practice shine.
20Aug/17

11 Steps to Listening: a Buddhist Meditative Practice

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1. Find an uninterrupted period of time, whether five minutes or an hour. 2. Find a quiet place that you can hopefully establish as your sacred space for regular practice. 3. Sit down on a cushion or your bed. It helps to have a cushion or pillow below your buttocks. Sit with your legs crossed.
07Aug/17

8 Reflections on Suffering upon Rising from Practice

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First, “practice” in the Buddhist sense is that it is a regular and consistent sacred routine that you engage in on the spiritual path. It is often compared to nurturing a seed with nutrients consistently until it blossoms. “Practice” also in the sense that it is always evolving. I hesitate…
13Jun/17

7 Paradoxical Teachings in Buddhism

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Typically, we reject contradictions. Buddhists, however, embrace a number of oxymora that serve as levers for opening into profundity likened to light at the end of the tunnel. The unexpected folding into of what is unfolding, and the unfolding of that which is enfolded bend our conscious mind so that…
13Feb/17

5 Buddhist Observations about Life being Awesome

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1. We get to choose that which shapes us. Words shape us. Words originate from thoughts. Thoughts matter – a Buddhist belief. Buddhists hardly use the word awesome. Buddhists hardly use the word awesome to describe life. It is awesome that I am using the word here now and using…
24Jul/14

Admonitions: Part II

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More from Buddhist monastic teachers. With instructions from different people, pronouns shift.Again, as explained more fully in “Admonitions: Part I“, these instructions were directed at monks and nuns and excerpted from my translation of Admonitions for Monastics 緇門警訓. — Even monastics perpetrate grave errors . . . . behavior that can be…
16Jul/14

Admonitions: Part I

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The Buddha Shakyamuni never established any rules for his Order until problems developed. Most of the Buddhist proscriptions were established as individual cases occurred. For instance, it was not until several dozen monks committed suicide by their own or another’s hands due to extreme (and excessive) disgust for their bodies,…