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Easy Practice
Honen's "One-Page Document": In China and Japan, many learned masters have taught that the nembutsu is to meditate deeply on Buddha. But that is not my understanding. Nembutsu is not meditation, nor does it come from study. It is nothing but reciting namu-amida-butsu and believing in our birth in the Pure Land. The Three Minds and Four Modes of Practice are all contained in this. If I am withholding any deeper knowledge than simple recitation of namu-amida-butsu, may I be lost to the compassion of the two buddhas and slip through the embrace of Amida’s original vow. Those who accept this in faith, though they master all the teachings of Shakyamuni, ought to avoid putting on airs and simply recite namu-amida-butsu alongside illiterate followers of little understanding, no matter whether they be women or men.More » -
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Countdown to the New Millennium: How Many Breaths Do You Have Left?
If you thought focusing on your breath to the count of ten was hard, consider the roughly 770,000 breaths you have left from Thanksgiving Day until the end of the millennium. Here’s how many breaths you can expect to take depending on what you’re doing: A person breathes on average 15 times a minute, 900 times in an hour, 21,600 times a day - that’s 151,200 breaths drawn in a week. If you practice meditation all week, or… If you thought focusing on your breath to the count of ten was hard, consider the roughly 770,000 breaths you have left from Thanksgiving Day until the end of the millennium. Here’s how many breaths you can expect to take depending on what you’re doing: A person breathes on average 15 times a minute, 900 times in an hour, 21,600 times a day - that’s 151,200 breaths drawn in a week. More » -
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Becoming Unbound
FOR NEARLY TWO THOUSAND YEARS, these brittle birch bark scrolls and others like them sat in clay pots in Afghanistan. In the mid-1990s, smuggled out from under the nose of the Taliban, they made their way onto the European antiquities market and eventually into the care of wide-eyed Western scholars. Their excitement was well-founded: recent carbon dating tells us that these are the oldest Buddhist texts ever discovered, the earliest of them dating to 130 C.E. Written in the ancient Kharoshthi script, they are remnants of Gandhara, a kingdom that covered parts of modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan and where Buddhism flourished from the first through fifth centuries C.E. The texts contain a variety of works, from sutras known in other languages to never-before-seen fables. Indicated below are lines thirteen and fourteen of a Dhammapada-like text, a verse also found in the Sutta Nipata of the Pali Canon and translated here from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. More »
