To Provide Compassionate Care for the sick & terminally ill and create a supportive, nurturing environment for people to consciously face their illness and/or end-of-life journeys.
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Living and practicing harmoniously with others is essential to Buddhist teachings |
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Life Or Death
The one thing I have never fully understood about many Buddhists is why they devote so much attention to the individual roots of greed, hatred, and ignorance, yet so little attention to the manifestations of these poisons in social institutions. Is it simply understood that the real work needs to be done on our individual failings, with social greed, hatred, and ignorance being someone else’s problem? Or is it that Buddhists, like so many people, have been deceived into believing that political issues are “none of their business”? Have they been trained to see problems and solutions solely in personal rather than political terms? More » -
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Creating Sangha
A Buddhist community - a sangha - is not something one is merely born into or chooses to join, but something one is challenged to create. A sangha provides a matrix of communal support for people to realize their commitment to a common vision or concern. Yet it is in danger of lapsing into an institution intent on preserving the power of a minority of professionals. A sangha requires some kind of organized structure to serve an effective purpose…A Buddhist community - a sangha - is not something one is merely born into or chooses to join, but something one is challenged to create. A sangha provides a matrix of communal support for people to realize their commitment to a common vision or concern. Yet it is in danger of lapsing into an institution intent on preserving the power of a minority of professionals. A sangha requires some kind of organized structure to serve an effective purpose within a given society and persist over generations. More » -
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No Place to Hide
In people's idealized notions of a monk or a nun, one assumption is very accurate: that it simplifies your life so that you can put all your energy into waking up. Of course, not only monks and nuns are committed to waking up. But for many people, regular life is too distracting—which is to say, they are not at a place where they feel they can follow a path, because their ordinary life keeps overwhelming them or dragging them into passion, aggression, and ignorance. More » -
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What Would William Penn Think?
SITTING UP STRAIGHT in tall Shaker-style chairs, the members of Lilac Breeze Sangha follow their breath to the tune of Quaker silence. Like many other Westerners, they’ve taken to Buddhist sitting practice without giving up their religious roots, combining traditions for a customized spiritual experience. For math teacher David Shen, who combines Catholicism, Taoism, Quakerism, and Buddhism in his practice, mixing faiths works to their mutual enrichment: “In Quaker meeting,” he says, “when people speak, I now listen deeply, the way Buddhists would listen.” More » -
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Selective Wisdom
For most of us born in the Western world, remote from Buddhism of any institutional kind, knowledge of the dhamma has come entirely from books and, occasionally, spoken words, some quite excellent and informative, certainly. But this kind of learning still retains a somewhat ethereal air in the absence of actions, traditions, and spiritual observances in which we can participate. That the Buddhist religion has survived so long in the world is a result not so much of the durability of manuscripts as of the power of ideas embodied in custom; and custom, for all our abundant sources of information, is what we lack and cannot in the long run do without. Books crumble easily enough; thought crumbles faster, if not made firm by some sort of concrete practice that holds together believers and sees to the transmission of the teaching to the young. More »
