Home › Buddhist Traditions › Mahayana

Mahayana

 The bodhisattva path of seeking complete enlightenment for the sake of all beings
  • Tricycle Community 2 comments

    Revealing a World of Bliss Paid Member

    By Norman Fischer
    WHEN BUDDHA WAS on Vulture Peak he twirled a flower before the assembly. Everyone was silent. Only Mahakashyapa smiled. Buddha said: "I have the eye treasury of the true teaching, the heart of nirvana, the true form of non-form, and the ineffable gate of dharma. It is a special transmission outside the teaching. I now entrust it to Mahakashyapa." More »
  • Tricycle Community 0 comments

    This is Your Brain on Buddhism Paid Member

    By Kate Wheeler
    SOMETIME IN THE 1980S while residing at a meditation center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I heard of Tibetan yogis being tested with rectal thermometers for increased body temperature, a side effect of the meditation called tumo, the inner heat that burns up subtle obscurations. The yogis, apparently, were uncomfortable with the experiment; someone told me one of them had died not long after returning to India and that the pool of tumo practitioners willing to participate in Western research had dried up for several years as a result. These were merely rumors, yet they revealed the beliefs and prejudices of both sides, as rumors tend to do, making the Westerners sound crude and ruthless, the yogis ignorant and superstitious. More »
  • Tricycle Community 0 comments

    Questioning The Question Paid Member

    Real questioning has no methods, no knowing - just wondering freely, vulnerably, what is it that is actually happening inside and out. Not the word, not the idea of it, not the reaction to it, but the simple fact. Toni Packer, The Work of This Moment Who’s Asking the Question?  Gil Fronsdal In my first question to a Buddhist teacher I asked, “What kind of effort is needed to practice zazen?” He questioned back, “Who is it that makes the effort?” His response made no sense to me; the conversation came to an immediate end. As I mulled over this exchange, I concluded that I would have to answer both my own question and his counter-question for myself. In doing so I discovered that there are certain spiritual questions that we only answer through our own direct experience. More »
  • Tricycle Community 2 comments

    Enduring The Fires Paid Member

    By H.H. the Dalai Lama
    Patience is one of the vital elements in the bodhisattva's training. This third chapter of the Bodhicaryavatara, which deals with patience, and the eighth chapter, which deals with meditation, together explain the key points of bodhicitta. 1. Good works gathered in a thousand ages,Such as deeds of generosityOr offerings to the Blissful Ones:A single flash of anger shatters them. 2. No evil is there similar to hatred,Nor austerity to be compared with patience.Steep yourself, therefore, in patienceIn all ways, urgently, with zeal More »
  • Tricycle Community 27 comments

    Nagarjuna's Verses from the Center Paid Member

    By Stephen Batchelor
    Although Nagarjuna is arguably the most important figure in Buddhism after the Buddha himself, very little is known about him. All that can be said with any certainty is that he lived at some time around the second century C.E. in India and is the author of a Sanskrit work of 448 verses, divided into twenty-seven chapters entitled: Verses from the Center (Mulamadhyamakakarika). The first known account of Nagarjuna’s life was composed from Indian sources by Kumarajiva, the Central Asian scholar who translated Verses from the Center from Sanskrit into Chinese in 409 C.E. More »