By Sylvia Boorstein
Sylvia Boorstein looks at the paradoxes and subtleties in the central Buddhist concept of no-self.
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CLEAR ALL
Throughout his profound spiritual awakening, the great Tibetan yogi Shabkar experienced immense loss resulting in grief marked by raw pain, a sense of disorientation, sadness, and tears.
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Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel examines common misconceptions about Buddhist practice that can derail even the most seasoned practitioners.
Instead of believing we are such great people for helping others, we can thank all beings for allowing us to be of service.
The word "love"—one of the most compelling in the English language—is commonly used for purposes so widely separated, so gross and so rarefied, as to render it sometimes nearly meaningless.
Loving-kindness is defined in English dictionaries as a feeling of benevolent affection, but in Buddhism, loving-kindness (in Pali, Metta; in Sanskrit, Maitri) is thought of as a mental state or attitude, cultivated and maintained by practice.
Karma is a word everyone knows, yet few in the West understand what it means. Westerners too often think it means "fate" or is some kind of cosmic justice system. This is not a Buddhist understanding of karma, however.
The practice of love, says bell hooks, is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination. She traces her thirty-year meditation on love, power, and Buddhism, and concludes it is only love that transforms our personal relationships and heals the wounds of oppression.
What does it mean to be a religion without a God? More broadly, what does it mean to live without an exterior savior of any kind?
According to Reginald Ray, Buddhist philosophy and practice can’t be separated. Once you understand, through study, what the Buddha is saying about his own awakening, you are already within the fiery process of the path.
If the “self” is ultimately nothing more than a figment of our imagination, what is this figment like and how does it come to seem so real? In the third of four posts on the self, Dr. Reginald “Reggie” Ray breaks it down.