Posts Tagged ‘four noble truths’
Practice Circle 7/28: Four Tasks
When Practice Circle meets on July 28, 2019, at 6 pm Pacific, 7 Mountain, 8 Central and 9 Eastern, we’ll share practice and discussion of how the Four Noble Truths manifest themselves in secular dharma practice. To prepare, I’m sharing this article I originally wrote in 2013. A link to our free, online practice community…
Read More6/9 Practice Circle: Letting Go
In the Pali texts, Gotama teaches that one cause of our suffering is our inability to allow and accept our experience the way it is. Because we so desperately want conditions to be the way we want them, despite the realization (or perhaps because of it) that we can’t really control our circumstances in any…
Read More4/22 Practice Circle: Mindfulness of Dharmas
When Practice Circle meets again this Sunday, April 8, at 6 p.m. Pacific, 8 Central and 9 Eastern, we’ll conclude our four-part examination of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness by examining the Fourth Foundation, mindfulness of dharmas. The word dharma, or dhamma in Pali, has a number of meanings, but in this instance it refers…
Read MoreWhat are the Four Noble Truths?
The Four Noble Truths are the heart of Buddhist philosophy, but they wouldn’t have been the first thing we encountered when learning the teaching. We will look at where they fit into the path, then each of the truths in turn, and finish with a different take on the teaching, as tasks or practices. Check…
Read MoreReason and Practice
Bodhidharma, the great master who delivered the Meditation School of Buddhism to China, said that there are really two gates that lead us to the path to awakening. He called them the Gate of Reason and the Gate of Practice. The Gate of Reason is realizing through instruction and/or study, coming to understand our true…
Read MoreWhat Is Dependent Arising?
By Linda Blanchard I said that dependent arising is both very simple, and very complex, but always helpful, and worth the effort to understand. Let me start with the very simple. It Really Is Simple Dependent arising says that we come into the world with certain drives that cause us to build a view of…
Read MoreRadical Dharma: A Review
America’s racial sickness has become especially vivid in recent months. Whether it’s the execution of unarmed black people by police, retaliatory violence against police, the disruptive resistance of the Black Lives Matter movement, or the appearance of an openly racist demagogue as the presidential nominee of a major party, anyone who may have supposed that…
Read MoreThe Importance of How We Translate: The End of Suffering
How readers understand Buddhism depends a great deal on how it is presented to us. This should be obvious. Though Buddhism teaches us to see for ourselves whether what we learn applies to our lives, how we practice, and what we look for when we practice is going to be affected by how…
Read MoreOn the Path
The Fourth and last Noble Truth is the most complex and important. In the suttas the Buddha gives many different understandings of the Path to nibbāna, but of those the one most associated with the Fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Path. This is the path of right view, right intention, right speech, right action,…
Read MoreOn Cessation
The Third Noble Truth is the truth of the cessation of craving; that there is a method by which craving can come to an end within a human lifetime. As such it is a rather spare truth: the content of that method awaits the Fourth Noble Truth for its elaboration. What is the cessation of…
Read More