Daily meditations from the buddhist tradition Christopher Titmuss This early experience proved to be the foundation for my contact with Buddhism. Since then I.
Table of contents
- Practicing Buddhism in daily life
- Inviting Dialogue Among Buddhist Traditions : Northwest Dharma Association
- Compassionate Action
The little girl loved the melodies of the mantras. This helped her because whenever she got upset or frightened, she knew she could chant mantras to calm herself down. After your morning meditation, have breakfast and set off for work. How are you going to practice Dharma In the most general sense, Dharma refers to the teachings of the Buddha. Most specifically, it refers to the realizations of the path and the resultant cessations of suffering and its causes.
First, try to remember the kind heart and the motivation you cultivated in the morning. To remind yourself of this, you can use a frequent event as a trigger to call you back to your motivation. For example, every time you stop at a red light, instead of being irritated and thinking, "Why is this red light so long? When the telephone rings, instead of rushing to pick it up, first think, "May I be of service to whomever is on the line.
Every time your pager goes off, calmly come back to the kind heart, then respond to the call. A friend told me that her trigger to come back to the kind heart was her children calling, "Mommy! Throughout the day, try to be aware of what you are thinking, feeling, saying, and doing, instead of living on "automatic. This is why we feel out of touch with ourselves, like strangers to ourselves. For example, you get in the car and drive to work. When you got to work, if somebody asked you, "What did you think about during the half hour you were driving?
We are unaware of what is going on inside us. Yet a lot is going on and this influences how we feel about ourselves and how we relate to other people. The antidote to living on automatic is to cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being aware of what we are thinking, feeling, saying, and doing each moment. It also means being mindful of our ethical values and of the kind heart, so that we can live according to them in our daily lives.
By cultivating this awareness, we will no longer be spaced out, just reacting to things, and then wondering why we are so confused and exhausted at the end of the day. If we are mindful, we will notice that we have a kind heart and will enrich it and let our actions flow from it. Or, we might become aware that we are upset, irritated, angry, or are on the verge of scolding somebody. If we realize that, we can come back to our breath, come back to our kind heart, instead of throwing our negative energy out in the world.
We also become more mindful of how we interact with our environment. We realize that we live in an interdependent world, and if we pollute our environment, we are affecting ourselves, our children, and other living beings. Because we are mindful of being kind, we will curtail the ways in which we pollute the environment. We will carpool when going to work or school, instead of using up gasoline in a car by ourselves. We will recycle the things we use: We know that if we throw these away in the garbage, we are destroying our planet and are affecting other beings in a negative way.
Thus, we will reuse our plastic bags and paper bags when we go to the supermarket. In addition, we will not leave our air conditioners or heaters on when we are not home, and will not use products such as styrofoam whose production releases many pollutants into the air.
Practicing Buddhism in daily life
I think that if the Buddha were alive today, he would establish vows that said we have to recycle and stop wasting resources. Many of our monastic vows arose because lay people complained to the Buddha about what monks or nuns did.
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Each time this happened, the Buddha would establish a precept in order to curb the detrimental behavior. If the Buddha were alive today, people would complain to him, "So many Buddhists throw out their tin cans, glass jars, and newspaper!
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They use disposable cups, chopsticks and plates, which not only make more garbage but also cause the destruction of many trees. They do not seem to care about the environment and the living beings in it! Mindfulness also enables us to be aware if we are about to act destructively as we go through the day.
Mindfulness says, "Uh oh! Then instead of harming them out of anger, we will be more compassionate and understanding, and will work with them to negotiate an agreement. We have to practice beforehand, in our meditation practice. In the same way that a football team practices on a regular basis, we need to meditate on patience and to recite prayers daily to get well-trained. Then when we encounter a situation in daily life, we will be able to use the teachings. Another practice to increase our mindfulness and help us remember our motivation is offering our food before we eat.
We imagine the food to be blissful wisdom nectar—something very delicious that increases our bliss and wisdom, not our attachment , when we eat. Then we imagine a small Buddha made of light at our heart.
Inviting Dialogue Among Buddhist Traditions : Northwest Dharma Association
When we eat, we offer this nectar to the Buddha at our heart. The Buddha radiates light that fills us up. You can visualize and contemplate in this way while waiting for the food. While your companions or business associates continue to chat, you can do this visualization and offer your food to the Buddha without anyone knowing. I stayed with one family and their six-year-old son led us in reciting the prayer. It was very touching. When you eat, eat mindfully.
Be aware of the effort other people put into growing, transporting, and preparing the food. Realize your interdependence with other living beings and how much benefit you have received from them, such as the food we eat. If we reflect in this way before we eat, we will feel very happy and grateful when we eat, and we will eat more mindfully too. It is important to eat in a dignified manner. This is eating on automatic. It resembles a dog who runs to the bowl and slurps up the food. When we do this reflection and offer our food to the Buddha at our heart, we eat slower and are more relaxed.
This is how human beings eat.
Compassionate Action
In this way, we maintain mindfulness and enrich our kind heart as we go through the day. When we come home in the evening, instead of collapsing in front of the TV or dropping on the bed and falling asleep, we can take a few minutes to sit quietly by ourselves. We reflect about and come to terms with what happened during the day. We look back over our day and think, "What went well today? Did I act with a kind heart? We dedicate that merit Imprints of positive actions, which will result in happiness in the future. In reviewing the day, we may discover that we were angry, jealous, or greedy.
It may have been our attitude, or what we said to somebody, or how we acted. To remedy this, we develop regret and do some purification practice so we can forgive ourselves and let that negative energy go. In this way, we "clean up" emotionally and resolve any uncomfortable feelings or misdirected actions that may have arisen during the day.
Having done this, our sleep will be peaceful. Yet for Buddhists, the present state of human existence is "fallen" in that men are caught in a web of illusion, and long for liberation. Even though, according to Buddhist theory, men have not inherited the guilt flowing from an original sin, they are still trapped in a present state of suffering as result of evil committed in numerous past lives.
Buddhism and Christianity agree that man is far from what he should be and his world is subject to the control of a malicious spirit, a powerful king of desire. His name is in the language of Sanskrit and literally means death. He is a God of both Sex and Death. It is the act of love that brings a person into the world and death terminates a person. Thus, this god of death and love could be interpreted as a symbol for samsara , the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.
By conquering Mara the Buddha is in effect conquering samsara. Occasionally, he is refered to as the Prince of Darkness in Buddhism. See also the Shaman spiritual entity and sometime foe similar to Mara to the Buddha called the Ally. One could interpret Mara as representing an 'Anti-Buddha' as the opposite of everything the Buddha represents, "the enemy of the Good Law.
The Buddha stands for the end of death via the Death of the Ego while Mara is death. Sakyamuni Buddha is peaceful.
She had sent her maid ahead to tidy up the area around the spread of the holy tree, but at the sight of the starving man seated beneath the tree the maid thought the deity had made himself visible to receive their offering in person. She ran back in great excitement to inform her mistress.
Prince Siddhartha began to eat the food beneath the shadow of the tree, sitting in a meditative mood underneath the tree from early morning to sunset, with a fiery determination and an iron resolve: Let my body perish. Let my flesh dry up. I will not get up from this seat till I get full illumination". He plunged himself into deep meditation. At night he entered into Deep Samadhi. The to-be Buddha's encounter with Mara begins with that meditation. The possibility of Siddhartha becoming a Buddha and being liberated from the Earthly realm was not something that Mara desired.
Mara decided to lure Shakyamuni away from his quest for Enlightenment. He beseeched the Prince to follow his duties of father, ruler and husband and to abandon the quest for liberation from the material world. It is not proper for a king to renounce the world that he rules. The best life, Mara claimed, is to "subdue the world both with arrows and with sacrifices, and from the world obtain the world of Vsava. Even when the arrow was shot, Sakyamuni stirred not. After failing to lead Gautama to the path of sensual gratification Mara utilized fear in his attempt to make Sakyamuni run away from the search for liberation.
Mara gathered his fiendish minions from the deepest pits to wage war with Prince Siddhartha. Sakkaya-ditthi is translated as "personality belief". Vicikiccha means "skeptical doubt' about the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha. One of the The Five Hindrances. Silabbata Paramasa means "adherence to wrongful rites, rituals and ceremonies.
Kama-raga means temptation, "sensual desire. Arati, another of the three daughters initially unleashed by Mara. Rupa-raga is "attachment to the form realms.
Patanjali's samprajnata samadhi is usually considered as being at the same level. Samprajnata-samadhi incorporates the first four Jhanas within its scope, which when overcome can lead to the eradication of The Five Hindrances, a major step toward liberation. As lust, Raga is also considered one of the Three Daughters of Mara.
Arupa-raga is "attachment to the formless realms. Patanjali's asamprajnata samadhi is usually considered to be at the same level. Asamprajnata-samadhi incorporates the last four Jhanas within its scope. Asamprajnata-samadhi is sometimes known in Vedanta circles as Nirvikalpa-samadhi.
Mana "conceit, arrogance, self-assertion or pride, feeling oneself to be superior to others. Uddhacca, self-righteousness, "restlessness," agitation of the heart, turmoil of mind. One of The Five Hindrances. Avijja is translated as ignorance and delusion, especially of the Four Noble Truths. As ignorance, the last of The Three Poisons. The weather was turbulent, the power of Chaos, Hun-tun , mirroring the anarchic behaviour of the demons and the turmoil of the conflict. See The Ten Fetters of Buddhism.
In White Light Shields Robert Bruce puts into words a known manifestation that arises for those along the spiritual path: Humans have a tendency to remake the unknown into the familiar, something they know and can relate to. In doing so humans are highly anthropomorphic, that is they apply "human-like" and sometimes "nonhuman-like" but recognizable tendencies around the phenomenon.
Just like some people see faces in the grilles and front ends of cars while others see archers and goats and snakes by connecting the dots of stars in the constellations, they also apply human-recognizable attributes to manifestations of the power. When something is seen or understood to have been moved or changed or interacted with, somehow hands and arms and sometimes claws and teeth and other such things are created in the mind's eye to make sense of it all.
Hands and arms and claws and teeth of course, by default, means some sort of a body for them to be attached to which, again by default, means a head, mind, and possibly conscious, independent thought. Viola, the power becomes a entity, then legend, then reality. Under much inner concertation his solution, without revealing it, as he saw it and as I have extrapolated it in hindsight, was me becoming cognizant of those events as well as bypassing any potentially powerful Mara induced impediments by coming in on the side of time in front of them, that is before they happened.
Thus in a sense, after which returning into the present time forward, maintaining in place any 'mental barriers that had been reduced to nothingness' before the impediments were set into motion.