Last Saturday night, I attended a performance of A Song For All Beings to a packed house. Composed and produced by Jennifer Berezan and friends, A Song For All Beings is based on the Buddhist practice of metta and the four immeasurable minds or Brahma Viharas (divine abodes) of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and […]
What Happens with You Meditate?
What happens when you meditate? Do you loose track of time only to hear the sound of the ending bell? Or does your mind wander and you wonder how it is possible to bring it back to the object of your meditation? Or do you sometimes begin to doze off or even fall asleep? Here […]
The Bodhisattva Vows
When I first was introduced to Zen Meditation at the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) in Green Gulch Farm in Sausalito, I learned the four Bodhisattva vows. One day last week, I woke up thinking about these vows and what they meant to me and then the following came in an email: THE BODHISATTVA PATH […]
Generosity Leads to Happiness
The perfection of generosity (dana) is the first of six paramitas (perfections or virtues) taught by the Buddha. The Buddha taught that generosity leads to happiness and a whole lot of other benefits. Modern research is beginning to confirm this 2,600 year old wisdom tradition. The scientists are also telling us that generosity leads to […]
Ethics from the Heart
These words of wisdom from Lin Jensen talk about the precepts of Buddhism. Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, known as Thay by his followers, likes to call these Mindfulness Trainings. In either case, they teach us to practice ethics from the heart. The Zen attitude about the precepts corresponds quite nicely with Thay’s teachings. In […]
The Bodhisattva’s Edge
These words of wisdom are from the former grand abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, Myogen Steve Stucky. He passed away on December 31, 2013, a little over three months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. On December 27, Steve offered the following Death Poem. which appeared on his website, Subtle Eye: Many Zen […]
19 Reasons Why Pope Francis Is Time Magazine Person Of The Year
This is the text of an email I received from a friend of mine in the dharma. I am reproducing it here because I was so moved by the actions of Pope Francis. There are 19 reasons why Pope Francis is Time Magazine Person of the Year: I hope this Pope lives forever !!! Pope […]
Happy Thanksgiving
These words of wisdom from Lama Surya Das came a couple of days ago and I want to share them with you. I couldn’t have expressed my feelings about loving kindness and gratitude better. Gratitude Thanksgiving is always for me a time of reflection, how it’s never too late to start again or to turn […]
The Six Paramitas
After almost two weeks of articles about giving and the six paramitas, we come to a great video by Pema Chodron from a retreat she led in 1999 called, “Awakening Bodhichitta.” Bodhichitta literally means “heart-mind,” and is refers to awakening the mind of love, compassion, and awakening. The subject of the retreat is the training […]
The Perfection Of Ethics
In the previous post, The Perfection of Generosity, we learned that the perfection of ethics was one of the paramitas taught by the Buddha. The paramitas are practices that take us to the other shore from ill-being to well-being. A common translation of the Sanskrit word, paramita, is perfection or completeness, as was stated previously. […]
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