I’ll tell you a story about the Supreme Patriarch, something I’ve heard from other people. He went to China and, when he arrived, the Chinese gave him a teacup. It was really beautiful. There was nothing like it in Thailand. And as soon as he received the teacup, he suffered: Where was he going to put it? Where was he going to keep it? He put it in his shoulder bag. If anyone touched his shoulder…

In Pali, the language of early Buddhism, the word for forgiveness—khama—also means “the earth.” A mind like the earth is non-reactive and unperturbed. When you forgive me for harming you, you decide not to retaliate, to seek no revenge. You don’t have to like me. You simply unburden yourself of the weight of resentment and cut the cycle of retribution that would otherwise keep us ensnarled in an u…

Those who cease to set up like against dislike, who are cooled, who are not swayed by worldly conditions – these I call great beings. v. 418 Liking and disliking can happen so quickly that we may feel we have no control over them. Somebody says something pleasant, and we like them. Another person says something hurtful, and we dislike them. It might be true that we can’t stop liking and disliking…

A person endowed with these four qualities can be known as ‘a person of integrity.’ Which four? There is the case where a person of integrity, when asked, doesn’t reveal another person’s bad points, to say nothing of when unasked. Furthermore, when asked, when pressed with questions, he is one who speaks of another person’s bad points not in full, not in detail, with omissions, holding back…. Then…

Tonight some of you have dedicated the chanting to your departed relatives. You did it voluntarily: there has been no instruction to do that. What makes it something so natural and spontaneous that you overcome whatever self-consciousness may be there to write down a dedication with your name on it and put it right up here? What gives you the authority to do that? Where does that come from? When y…

The Buddha relates a story of a king who had all the people in his realm who were born blind assembled together and introduced to an elephant. The king then asked them what an elephant was like. ‘Those blind people who had been shown the head of the elephant replied, “An elephant, your majesty, is just like a water jar.” Those blind people who had been shown the ear of the elephant replied, “An el…

I read something in a book about the Jatakas the other day that really struck me. In the Jatakas, the bodhisatta, the Buddha-to-be, through his countless number of lives throughout the myriad realms and different kinds of birth, broke every kind of precept except for one. The Buddha-to-be never told a lie or spoke a mistruth. There is no Jataka story, as far as I am aware, where you find the bodhi…

Those who live in awakened awareness see the suffering of others but do not create additional sorrow around it. We acknowledge the contact with this human experience of life’s inevitable suffering and the questions that immediately arise: what can we do about it? How should we regard this? The answer of course is mindfulness. With mindfulness, we feel what is impinging on our mind as unpleasant or…

Across the globe, political and religious extremists are spreading terror and causing trauma through increasingly desperate acts of violence. The typical response is more of the same – reprisal following aggression – whether between nations, families, or individuals. What happens on the outside goes on within us, too, and the spiral of hatred escalates. Where does it stop? Though we may feel power…

These precepts point to a sense of impeccability as the standard of the spiritual life. The ethical teachings encourage us to understand the laws of the land and to support those laws, because if we don’t, who will? This is our commitment to community. It is not just taking the easy way out or just going with the popular mood of the day: ‘Well, everyone else is taking things off the back of the lo…