We started a new chapter of our book, One Dharma in our meditation group on Sunday: “Purifying the Mind.” Here’s part of the opening poem, by the 13th century Sufi mystic called Rumi:
A little while alone in your own room will prove more valuable than anything else that could ever be given to you.
There are so many routes to purifying the mind, one might think. There are even a lot of different ideas about what “purifying the mind” means! So many ways to go and so many ways...
Our local meditation group had quite a few people for our 4-hour sitting yesterday and 8-10 people stayed afterward for tea and cheese and crackers and apples and various things people brought. Since there was no regular discussion for me to report on, I have a poem for you, instead, by Wallace Stevens. Poetry often points us toward the gaps in our rationality where we glimpse something else—call it ineffable, call it holy, call it Truth.
Stevens’ poem reminds me of “Song of the...
We had a big group at the Unitarian Church for our usual discussion and sitting practice yesterday, including some new people and some we haven’t seen for a while. It’s great to have them back. I started by reading a paragraph from “Acting for the Good,” the chapter of One Dharma we’re reading now. Joseph Goldstein says we may have a tendency to get judgmental about people who meditate a lot instead of being involved in social action—or the opposite—or people who have no interest in...
What a good talk we had yesterday evening about the second (of the traditional Buddhist 6) skillful actions: sila, or morality. We didn’t get far in Goldstein’s chapter, “Acting for the Good,” from One Dharma, but felt like an important issue—morality. How do we think about “rules” of behavior? We mentioned that some of us grew up thinking of them as “either you do this” or you’ll incur the wrath of God. I mentioned the Puritan preacher Johnathan Edwards’ fiery sermons that described his...
I hope you’re enjoying keeping up with our local sangha. If you’d like to see our website, it’s http://tcmmg.org . We have an hour’s discussion before our hour-long sitting (which is broken into two half-hour segments). During the second half hour of meditation, I offer individual interviews with anyone who wants help with sitting practice or integrating the practice into our ordinary lives. We’ve been meeting for four years now, ever since I left my sangha in Delaware and moved to Traverse...
In our local sangha, we continued our reading and discussion of the chapter titled “Doing No Harm” in Joseph Goldstein’s One Dharma. Since I wasn’t able to be there, Karen led discussion. This is her report:
This week we talked about what Goldstein called “ill will” as one of the three unwholesome actions of the mind. Some other words he suggested may be used in this context are aversion, anger, hatred, and also sorrow and grief.
Goldstein focused sorrow and grief. He writes...
We were fortunate to have Sokuzan Bob Brown, from Battle Creek, Michigan, with us in our local sangha for our 4-hour block sitting on Sunday. In his dharma talk afterward, he talked about sila, samadhi, and prajna. I’ll attempt here to give you a sense of it. Pretend now that you’re sitting, listening—while remembering that these are my words and I may possibly screw something up.
What are we doing when we sit? We are looking as deeply as we can. We keep our eyes open so that we don’...
Sangha is a Sanskrit word that roughly translates as a community or association with a common goal, vision or purpose. In this blog, poet and writer Fleda Brown reflects on the gatherings of her weekly meditation group, speaking to you as one who has long practiced meditation but still comes to the practice with a learner’s mind.
Our local sangha had 11 people sitting with us this Sunday. We always sit for 10 minutes before we begin our discussion. At the end of the first hour, we...
This week in my local meditation group, we started our discussion of Goldstein’s One Dharma by looking at the “unskillful action,” called sexual misconduct. We read that whole section together and looked at how complicated that issue is! There’s always sheer commitment to responsibility to restrain us from hurting ourselves or others—as if that could work! Has abstinence education ever worked in our schools?
The other way may be simply seeing what’s there. When we lose our awareness...
At my local meditation group, we had several new people and another really good discussion last night. We’re starting Chapter 5 of Goldstein’s One Dharma, “Doing No Harm.” The first few pages are crucial to understand WHY we are concerned with ethical and moral behavior in our Buddhist practice. All spiritual traditions that I know of have some “rule” about doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.
In Buddhist practice, we have moral and ethical guidelines as a training,...
I’d say we had at least 15 people coming and going for our meditation group’s four-hour sitting on Sunday. It’s great when you’re able to come even for an hour. The more often we choose to sit with the group, the more we embed in ourselves the commitment to the practice, and our support of others in the practice.
I was thinking about last week’s discussion of prayer and doubt, and I started re-reading Chogyam Trumgpa’s The Myth of Freedom. In the opening section, “Fantasy and Reality...
I’d say we had at least 15 people coming and going for our local four-hour block meditation on Sunday. It’s great when people are able to come even for an hour. The more often we choose to sit with the group, the more we embed in ourselves the commitment to the practice, and our support of others in the practice.
I was thinking about last week’s discussion of prayer and doubt, and I started re-reading Chogyam Trumgpa’s The Myth of Freedom. In the opening section, “Fantasy and...
In this week’s discussion at our local meditation group, we finished up Chapter 4 in Goldstein’s One Dharma, the sections on prayer and on doubt. These generated a lot of interest, especially since many of the group are former Catholics who grew up with the rosary and other liturgical prayers. What is—was—the value of these? One of the group members, Janet, said that reciting the rosary is not only comforting, but it also pulls a person into a state of concentration. Someone else in the...
“All the siblings in my family are authentic members of my family. Because our identity doesn’t depend on our possessing some unchanging “common thing,” we don’t have to argue over who has more of it.If we understand identity in this way, all Buddhists are 100 percent Buddhist. ”
This is a quote from an article by Linda Heuman in this summer’s issue of Tricycle. It’s long, but it’s worth it and it’s right on the subject of the book we’re reading now, Joseph Goldstein’s book, One...
Yesterday our meditation group began Chapter 3 of Joseph Goldstein’s One Dharma. It seems fitting, having just finished a retreat, to think about the four “reminders,” or “reflections,” as Goldstein calls them, that we can use to turn our minds toward the practice and the teachings. We talked at length about the first of those: “Precious human birth.”
I’d say we’ve had quite enough of that old idea that humans were “put on the earth” to “subdue” it. The idea here isn’t that we as...
Our meditation group’s sitting last night included three fans and flapping vertical blinds. It was very hot in the un-airconditioned building, and the heat is expected to last for a few more days. We had a really good discussion, though, after we turned the fans on low. We’re finishing up Chapter 2 of Joseph Goldstein’s One Dharma, “The Early History.” This chapter tells in short form the story of how the Buddha’s remembered words, set down many years later, evolved into a number of...
Our meditation group had six stalwart sitters yesterday for our four-hour block sitting, in spite of the our city’s annual summer festival being in full swing, the gorgeous weather, and the Fourth of July weekend. Since we don’t discuss our reading on the block-sitting days, I thought I’d say a bit about why we do long meditations.
The goal of all our searching is to quit searching. If we think about it, we know that’s true. We’re tired of chasing after this “goal” of spiritual...
This week our local Sangha, or meditation group, started our study of One Dharma, by Joseph Goldstein. I read this book years ago, but I come to it new, now, as I’m in a different phase of my own practice. Like Goldstein, I spent many years in the Theravada tradition (Vipassana, with Shinzen Young as my teacher), and then, like Goldstein, came into the presence of a different flavor of the practice. A couple of years ago I met Sokuzan Bob Brown, a Zen Buddhist priest, who introduced me to...
You should know right off, you won’t find here an interesting discussion of Vasubandu’s role in Yogacara Buddhism, or the subtle accretions of the practice from the Theravadans to the Mayahanans. I’ve studied Buddhist texts only as a dedicated meditator who has a whole other career. That is to say, I know not a heck of a lot.
What I will do in this blog is talk to you as one meditator to another, or as one meditator who’s been at it a long time to one who may be new at it. Or may be...
