Home › Magazine › Spring 2009 › Looking Inward, Seeing Outward

Looking Inward, Seeing Outward

As REGINALD RAY explains, finding embodiment in meditation is a social matter.

Reginald Ray

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It is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception and intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the cessation of the cosmos.

—The Buddha, Anguttara Nikaya 4.45, translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Sometimes modern people misunderstand Buddhism’s focus on the individual human journey as well as its injunction to people to find out who they are and to seek their own ultimate fulfillment. With our Western suspicions of meditation, of looking within— and, frankly, our fear of being alone—not infrequently, we tend to reject the inward looking of Buddhism...

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