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Tuesday
May212013

True Blessings

In this commentary on a traditional Guru Rinpoche visualization, the contemporary Dzogchen master Tulku Thondup Rinpoche reveals the deep nontheistic essence of Vajrayana practice. We receive the true blessings of the enlightened ones when our mind and theirs become one.

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Tuesday
May212013

A Straight Road with Many Curves 

Gregory Shepherd looks back on his Zen training in Japan with the late Yamada Roshi and the difficult lessons he learned.

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Tuesday
May212013

The Practical Practitioner

If you want to get anywhere with your practice, says Anyen Rinpoche, it must be built on intellectual and experiential certainty.

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Tuesday
May212013

Forum: Your Meditation Reality Check 

Ezra Bayda, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Kamala Masters discuss how to identify obstacles in your practice, apply antidotes that work, and deepen your meditation in the process.

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Tuesday
May212013

Awaken with Them? Really?

Zen priest and professional facilitator catherine toldi examines the painful conflicts that can arise in sanghas and offers practical advice on how to deal with them.

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Tuesday
May212013

Unlimited Heart

After caring for his ailing mother for nine years, Ajahn Viradhammo reflects on self-sacrifice and the importance of cultivating a strong and expansive heart.

One thing that comes up a lot for me is the limitation of personal­ity. There’s something about it that doesn’t change very much.

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Tuesday
May212013

Walking the Talk

by Andrew Olendzki

In classical Buddhist teaching, meditation (samadhi) has always been sandwiched between integrity (sila) on the one hand and wisdom (pañña) on the other. Indeed, this is what makes it Buddhist. As a technol­ogy for the attenuation of consciousness, meditation had been practiced by yogis for centuries before the Buddha, but in his hands it became a tool for the deep transformation of character that results in liberation of the mind from the toxins that cause suffering.

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Monday
May202013

Ask the Teachers

My teacher died twenty-two years ago. Since then I have maintained my connection to the sangha and still practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. But that’s only two of the three jewels. Am I doing myself and the tradition a disservice by trying to practice Buddhism without a guru? Would I be better off opting for another practice—perhaps secular mindfulness—that I can do without a teacher?

Zenkei Blanche Hartman:Certainly I think practicing the Buddha Way without a teacher is better than not practicing at all. However, you have not said anything about why you want to practice without a teacher. Do you live in a location where there are no teachers available? Does it feel somehow disloyal to your original teacher for you to work with a new teacher? Have you asked this question of your deceased teacher in your heart during meditation?

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Monday
May202013

A Family Affair 

Sumi Loundon Kim presents a new model for family-centered dharma communities.

Ed Gensho Welsh, a longtime member of the Zen Community of Oregon, posted the fol­lowing on BuddhistGeeks.com:

In the USA, many couples start attending church after having a baby. And most churches have the resources to support them. In American Buddhism, the pattern appears to be the opposite: have a baby  and disappear. But then, do most sanghas offer the support that churches do? The answer to Ed’s question is no—most Buddhist communities whose membership consists primarily of American Buddhist converts have not created ongoing ways for the whole family to participate.

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Monday
May202013

Inventing the Buddha 

Reviewed by Annabella Pitkin

Imagine opening a book about what we would today call Buddhism and read­ing that it is an Egyptian religion and that the Buddha was a former Egyptian priest exiled from his country during a Persian invasion twenty-three hundred years ago. Or think of reading, in a different treatise on the Buddha, that “We are compelled therefore to believe... that Buddha and [the Norse god] Woden are the same deity, and consequently that the theology of the Gothic and Saxon tribes was a modification of Buddhism...”

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