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…

Power, possessions, status, praise, happiness and suffering - these are the worldly dhammas. These worldly dhammas engulf worldly beings. Worldly beings are led around by the worldly dhammas: gain and loss, acclaim and slander, status and loss of status, happiness and suffering. These dhammas are trouble makers; if you don’t reflect on their true nature, you will suffer. People even commit murder…

‘Buddha’ means ‘one who is awake’. But being awake is not easy to talk about. As soon as we start speaking, we complicate everything. We enter another field of understanding, which is the intellect. Looking at the mind, dealing with the mind, is slippery business. We have at our disposal an array of tools and skilful means to liberate the mind, but they are competing with the incredible complexiti…

Buddhism teaches contentment. But if everyone was content with their life, how would human progress ever be achieved? Virtues taught by the Buddha are to be understood within the overall context of his path to awakening. Whenever the Buddha spoke about contentment, he paired it with an energetic quality such as diligence, persistence or industriousness. He was careful to make clear that contentmen…

Mindfulness is sometimes likened to a monarch. This monarch is surveying, supervising, impartial, aware, connected. They are not pulling, not struggling, not trying to hold things, not arrogant. It is the true monarch – the true king or queen. The false monarchs are the inner tyrant who keeps bullying you and the braggart who becomes cocksure when they get a little bit of something good. Mindfulne…

The Buddhist festival known as the Kathina revolves around the simple act of offering a piece of cloth to a monastic. But it’s really much more than that. What this ceremony symbolizes is the profound relationship between the two halves of the Buddhist community: the Sangha and lay society. In the Kathina, there is a recognition of the physical dependency of the monastics on their lay supporters.…