When a negative feeling like irritation comes up, it can be challenging to want to be truly awake to that irritation. At those moments, one just needs to trust in this practice because one’s intentions are good. Developing trust in that full consciousness is often all you have to do. You don’t have to get rid of a negative mood or emotion, nor do you have to hate yourself for having it; but you do…
Compassion and empathetic joy—are expressions of goodwill. Compassion is what goodwill feels when encountering suffering; empathetic joy is what goodwill feels when encountering those who are happy. We tend to think of these attitudes as being very easy. Of course we feel sorry for people or animals who are suffering. Of course we feel happy when we see other people being happy. But these attitude…
When all of this was related to me while I was in India, I couldn’t help thinking of the Buddha, who was pure by virtue of the peerless quality of his heart to the point where he was able to invest the properties in his body with power, making them more pure than any other properties in the world. His relics, for example, have appeared to those devoted to him and, I have heard, come and go on thei…
How can we work together to do this? With our project along the Mekong, we began by drawing in people affiliated with the monastery who were interested in helping. In a Buddhist society, the monastery is a foundation we could build on, a field for social action. Because the monastery is dependent on lay people to support it, there is a day-to- day connection with the neighbouring society. It is a…
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…
