lotusinthemud

different kinds of love

Dharmavidya writes:

Buddha taught us to live in the "unconditioned". What is the unconditioned? The unconditioned, also called nirvana, is love. It is the love that Buddha talks about when he speaks of love, compassion, sympathy and equanimity. In Buddhism there are different ways of practising love. There is the love of the renunciant who loves all equally but with detachment and there is the love of the bhakti practitioner who loves passionately and devotedly. There is love for the Buddha and love for one another.

The problem for a great many Western practitioners, however, is the question whether the ordinary love of lovers has any place in Buddhism. Does being a Buddhist mean detaching oneself from one's nearest and dearest? Is it a matter of avoiding grief by never caring sufficiently about one person to be vulnerable? Undoubtedly some people do interpret Buddhism that way.

However, intimate relationship can also be a demanding spiritual path. In the midst of a close intimate relationship one is likely to be challenged at a greater psychological depth than in almost any other situation. Issues of power, commitment, willingness, self and selflessness, vulnerability, the management of emotional vicissitudes, the translation of sentiment into action, the challenges of conflicting loyalties - in fact all the stuff of real life, appears here often in magnified form. In an intimate relationship that remains alive one's habitual scripts and old karmic patterns are exposed. One's bluff is called. One goes through a process that changes one deeply and goes on being an ever unfolding mysterious process of discovery.

not everything is impermanent

In the Udana, which is a collections of Buddha's most important utterances, there is the core passage that says "There is an unborn, uncreated... the deathless... nirvana... If there were not... then there would be no liberation." According to the text it was this passage that made his disciples really excited "until the hair on the backs of their necks stood on end."

Buddhism as presented in the West, however, commonly de-emphasizes this central aspect of the teaching. Buddhist apologists like to present the idea that Buddhism teaches that "everything is impermanent" when the fact is that Buddhism teaches liberation from the worldly domain where all is impermanent. There is no classical Buddhist school that teaches otherwise. Different schools have different methodologies and different styles of presentation, but they do not differ on this fundamental point.

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obama administration in talks with dalai lama

The Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama today confirmed that discussions between the Dalai Lama and a senior US Government delegation took place in Dharamsala on September 13 and 14.

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guidelines for cats

And, if you are owned by a cat, you will recognise these:

Doors
Do not allow closed doors in any room. To get door opened, stand on hind legs and hammer with forepaws. Once door is opened, it is not necessary to use it. After you have ordered an "outside" door opened, stand halfway in and out and think about several things. This is particularly important during very cold weather, rain, snow, or mosquito season. Swinging doors are to be avoided at all costs.

Chairs and Rugs
If you have to throw up, get to a chair quickly. If you cannot manage in time, get to an Oriental rug. If there is no Oriental rug, shag is good. When throwing up on the carpet, make sure you back up so that it is as long as the human's bare foot.

Bathrooms
Always accompany guests to the bathroom. It is not necessary to do anything . . . just sit and stare.

::and much more, from James S. Huggins' Refrigerator Door

the three fundamentals of amida-shu pureland buddhism

Dharmavidya writes:

We say that there are three fundamental teachings in Amida-shu:

The threefold nature of Buddha
The twofold nature of the practicer
The singular nature of the practice.

The Buddha is the object of refuge and source of grace in three ways: as absolute truth, as spiritual presence and as physical manifestation.
The practicer is 'bombu' in being fallible and vulnerable.
The practice is singular in that nembutsu encompasses all.

Taking refuge in Buddha we choose the nembutsu as our single practice and, when we have done so, all practice becomes nembutsu.
We take refuge because we realise that we are fallible and vulnerable and incapable of saving ourselves from spiritual danger by our own power unaided.
We are able to take refuge because we attain faith by perceiving with our own senses, by having that faith enhanced by spiritual realisation, and by grounding it upon the intuition of absolute truth that lies beyond our immediate comprehension.

This summary encompasses the whole doctrinal and practice basis of Pureland.

Namo Amida Bu
Dharmavidya

daily practice

Dharmavidya writes (on the Friends of Amida site):

I have been asked, what practice should one do daily as a follower of Amida-shu?

The simple answer to this is: say the nembutsu.

Many people do, however, like to have a routine. The important first thing to realise is that any such routine or ritual is what we call 'auxiliary practice'. In Buddhism, there is no magic in ritual. Shakyamuni taught us to do rituals in a good spirit and not to think that they have magic power. Ritual is celebratory. When Ananda asked Shakyamuni what guidelines to follow, Shakyamuni said - Do what works. So, with that caveat.....

You might like to establish a particular place and routine for practice. This might have a rupa (an object, picture or calligraphy symbolising the Buddha or the Dharma) as a centre piece. It is nice, but not essential, if you can have a representation of Amida Buddha. In the shrine room at The Buddhist House we have a statue of Shakyamuni Buddha in the centre facing east, facing toward a picture of Amida Buddha on the west wall: the Buddha of history contemplating the Buddha of the cosmic era.

You might have a table on which you can put associated items and offerings. There are many traditions in Buddhism to do with offerings. The important thing from an Amida-shu perspective is that one regard whatever offerings one makes as nembutsu - as acts of refuge in Amida Buddha or in all the Buddhas, in a spirit of gratitude. Whatever ways we enact the nembutsu, there is the possibility of feelings arising. The practice is touching. This is as it should be.

At The Buddhist House we commonly have three formal sessions in the morning.
1. The first is a sutra recitation. We either read the whole of the Smaller Sutra or a part of the Larger Sutra. This usually takes anything from 15 to 45 minutes depending on time available.
2. We then have a practice session in which we do three practices. This can take between 30 minutes and several hours.
(a) Walking nembutsu: walking while chanting, circumambulating the rupa.
(b) Nei Quan: reflecting upon the past 24 hours using the questions (i) what have I received or been supported by? (ii) what have I done in return? (iii) What troubles has my existence occasioned for others?
(c) Chih Quan: offering the fruits of he practice and receiving the Buddha's blessing, grace, peace. Sitting in that tranquil abiding.
3. We then have morning service which includes recitations from the Nei Quan Book (see Main Page, right column), offering verses, nembutsu, Summary of Faith and Practice, Tan Butsu Ge, Verses in Praise of the Buddha and performance of prostrations. Again this can be ten minutes or anything up to an hour depending on how much one includes.

meeting of amida order members

I was delighted to spend time with other members of the Amida Order at our main centre in Narborough, Leicestershire:

Members of the Amida Order met over the weekend of 7-8 March to take stock of current developments in Amida-shu. There was a generally bouyant atmosphere and considerable enthusiasm for the possibilities that seem to be opening up for spreading the Dharma more widely. The meeting was also greatly cheered to receive news of the refuge ceremonies that took place on the Sunday in Delhi and a Skype link enabled those present at the Order meeting to talk with the Order members who are in Delhi. ::link

the mongols, manchus, china and buddhist tibet

By Thubten Samphel

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There’s a new law in force in China these days that says the Chinese authorities in future would choose reincarnating Tibetan lamas. Partly in anticipation of such a move and mostly to keep pace with the changing times, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said he has been toying with different methods to choose his successor. This standoff between Tibetan Buddhism and the Chinese Communist Party has brought international media spotlight on this unique system of selecting Tibetan spiritual leaders and on one culture’s spiritual beliefs and a state’s political ambitions.

Buddhists believe that highly realized beings have the capacity to choose where and when they want to be reborn. It’s a matter of putting the efforts of a lifetime (or, in most cases, lifetimes) to adjust one’s internal mechanism to reach the level when one could project one’s spiritual qualities over time and space. These qualities enable highly realized beings to manifest themselves simultaneously in several places, as the historical Buddha did when he was seen teaching at several places at the same time. Or, over many lifetimes, rebirth after rebirth, and in different life forms, as the Buddha did and which forms the basis and the moral of the classic book, the Jataka Tales.

The Chinese authorities once considered all this voodoo, a leftover from Tibet’s dark, feudal superstitious past. Back in 1954, Mao Zedong told His Holiness the Dalai Lama, “Religion is the opiate of the people.” Later, the Tibetans were told that there could not be “two suns in the same sky: communism and Buddhism.”

This forthright Chinese attitude to their culture cost the Tibetan people dear. At the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1969, Tibet had lost about 6,000 monasteries. The inmates of these centres of learning had either fled or been imprisoned or died. Tibet became a land of lost content. This is the equivalent of saying that one fine day India finds all its universities in ruins and nothing is seen or heard of all the promising students and brilliant faculty members.

meditation and pain management

From Wildmind:
Guest article: One moment at a time, by Vidyamala

I am a forty-five-year-old woman who suffered a spinal injury thirty years ago that has resulted in a legacy of on-going physical pain. Of course this has been difficult to live with, but some twenty years ago I had a significant experience that radically changed my perspective on life and plunged me into the wonder of living in ‘the present moment’.

I was in an intensive care ward at the time, with an acute deterioration of my condition. I had been bedridden for several months and unable to sit up, but on this occasion I had undergone a diagnostic procedure that required me to sit up for several hours afterwards. During this long night of intense pain I felt myself sliding towards the edge of madness.

I spent hours with two internal voices locked in combat - one voice convinced I could not stay sane till morning and the other willing me to do so. It was an incredibly intense, brittle, heart-breaking experience.

Then, suddenly, my experience completely changed when I heard a quiet inner voice saying: “You don’t have to get through till morning; you only have to get through the present moment”. It was like a house of cards collapsing, revealing the space that had been present all along, if only I could have recognised it.
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four reasons buddhists can love evolution

Bodhipaksa writes:

Evolution — at least in the United States — has a deeply troubled relationship with religion. Or at least it does with some religions.

As you can see from the Pew Trust chart below, Buddhists on the whole (81% of them) think that evolution is the best explanation for the origins of human life on Earth.

In fact of all the religious traditions included on the chart, Buddhists are the most accepting of evolution, with evangelical Christians, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses being the least accepting.

Those of us who value an objective and evidence-based (read “scientific”) understanding of the world are greatly disturbed by attempts to displace sound science from the classroom, to introduce spurious ideas such as “creation science” and “Intelligent Design,” and to give the impression that evolution is somehow scientifically controversial, when in fact it’s backed by an overwhelming amount of evidence from all branches of science.

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