Here is a poem that I wrote this morning:
Imagination
Most dear to us is what we can imagine
more dear than all we sense or think about
for though “real life” will often call us out
it’s in our soul our treasures are most seen.
There are those who say, i
Read more…In the Korean Buddhist tradition there is a text called “Treatise on the Ocean Seal Samadhi”. This was composed by a teacher called Myonghyo. The text is extremely complicated and encompasses a vast number of different Buddhist doctrines, but running
Read more…Now, many Buddhists may do their meditations on the elements, they may meditate on earth element and they realise: The earth element is not my self because the earth element is something that I come up against, I bump into it, so it must be different
Read more…Space and spaciousness are very important concepts in Buddhist practice, in our reflections philosophically and in our practices, and in our reflections upon our lives and our world. Sometimes we think of space as, you might say, the container of all
Read more…We’ve had some hot days this summer and often I’ve taken my meals or a snack outdoors in the garden, sat on the garden seat in the sunshine. Sometimes it has been so hot that I have had to move the seat into the shade of the tree. I can sit there and
Read more…So, settle yourself for meditation.
Relax the body. Notice the breathing.
The inhalation – the exhalation.
Feel the air entering the chest. Feel it all the way down into the abdomen. Sensing the movement of the diaphragm and the chest as the air comes i
Read more…Something about the water element: I have talked a little about the earth element and we might well think that we are made of the earth element or that the earth element makes a large part of our world. We live in a materialist society, we say. But t
Read more…Today I’d like to say something about the earth element. I’d like to make some reflections on this subject. Shakyamuni Buddha often talks about the elements, and he usually starts by talking about the earth element.
Buddhism is quite practical and qui
Read more…We are at the beginning of a new semester, a new term, and so I would like to take the time and perhaps make a slightly longer podcast to set out the basics of the Buddhis message.
The Buddha taught Four Truths:
I - Dukkha
The first of these was the Tru
Read more…I’ve been thinking about friendship and philia. Philia is one of the Greek words for love, but in this case love between friends. There are other words for other kinds of love in Greek, so we have eros, which is love between lovers, storge, which is
Read more…One of the key passages in the text Genjo Koan written by Dogen Zenji reads in translation as follows:
To comprehend what we call the Buddha Tao means to comprehend the self.
To comprehend the self is to forget the self.
Forgetting self is confirmed b
Pick the fruit – discard the root: you’ll have no tree next year.
Feed the soil – firm the root: you’ll have fruit forever.
This idea has much application to our approach to the Dharma. The soil represents the conditions that we build for our life.
Read more…Yesterday we had a good meeting to reflect on the Lotus Sutra. We read the Parable of the Magic City (Chapter VII), meditated on it and had an interesting discussion afterwards.
We meet every Wednesday from 14:00 - 15:00 (Rome). Do join us! More inf
When I feel profoundly lonely, even among those who love me,
And I fly over a deep abyss with wings painfully expanded –
Quan Shi Yin quickly rises into the air,
Because her thousand eyes have spotted me up in the sky.
Tactfully she invites me in
Aging, sickness and death are inevitable and all our attempts to avoid this reality are temporary expedients that will themselves age, decay and fail. All our projects come to an end. Should we not be depressed? Should we not despair? Are our happy s
Read more…When we enter the sangha, we tend to bring with us the patterns which we have established in our life. A group of us were recently exploring how our experience in our own family of origin affects our attitude to our life in the sangha.
What do we bri
Read more…There are countless butterflies at Eleusis. Lavender, roses, lilacs along with wild flowers and herbs spread a fine, irresistible fragrance throughout the garden and forest. It is such a delight to interrupt the work and watch these beautiful, dreaml
Read more…I was thinking recently about theTen Mahayana Precepts. Sometimes we take these precepts as a way of committing ourselves to the Dharma path; and we undertake not to kill, not to steal, not to tell lies and so on. And when we think of these undertaki
On his spiritual quest Siddhartha Gautama wandered many years in Northern India to spend time with teachers and even after his Great Awakening, the Buddha remained a mendicant. Towards the end of his life the Buddha said to Ananda: “There are these f
Read more…In the time of Shakyamuni Buddha India was divided into quite a number of small states. Different states were ruled in different ways. Magadha was a kingdom, other states were, I suppose we would say, republics or tribal states with a tribal council.
Read more…