How to Meditate - Guided Meditation Techniques - Buddhist Meditations The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying In his foreword to the book, the 14th Dalai Lama says: In this timely book, Sogyal Rinpoche focuses on how to understand the true meaning of life, how to accept death, and how to help the dying, and the dead...Death and dying provide a meeting point between the Tibetan Buddhist and modern scientific traditions. I believe both have a great deal to contribute to each other on the level of understanding and practical benefit. Sogyal Rinpoche is particularly well placed to facilitate this meeting; having been born and brought up in the Tibetan tradition, he has received instructions from some of our greatest Lamas. Having also benefited from a modern education and lived and worked in the West, he has become well acquainted with Western ways of thought. Conception and writing[edit] Background[edit] Writing process[edit] Later, while Rinpoche was leading retreats in Germany and Australia, he would send through long faxes to Gaffney and Harvey full of corrections, changes and new paragraphs.
The Buddha This documentary for PBS by award-winning filmmaker David Grubin and narrated by Richard Gere, tells the story of the Buddha’s life, a journey especially relevant to our own bewildering times of violent change and spiritual confusion. It features the work of some of the world’s greatest artists and sculptors, who across two millennia, have depicted the Buddha’s life in art rich in beauty and complexity. Hear insights into the ancient narrative by contemporary Buddhists, including Pulitzer Prize winning poet W.S. Merwin and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Join the conversation and learn more about meditation, the history of Buddhism, and how to incorporate the Buddha’s teachings on compassion and mindfulness into daily life. Two-thousand-five-hundred years ago in northern India, Prince Siddhartha left his palace where he had spent twenty-nine years indulging in pleasures. He was determined to comprehend the nature of human suffering. Watch the full documentary now (playlist - )
The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation The following text is based upon a talk given by Mr. S.N. Goenka in Berne, Switzerland. Everyone seeks peace and harmony, because this is what we lack in our lives. From time to time we all experience agitation, irritation, disharmony. And when we suffer from these miseries, we don't keep them to ourselves; we often distribute them to others as well. We ought to live at peace with ourselves, and at peace with others. In order to be relieved of our misery, we have to know the basic reason for it, the cause of the suffering. How do we start generating negativity? Now, one way to solve this problem is to arrange that nothing unwanted happens in life, that everything keeps on happening exactly as we desire. This solution was helpful; it worked. Other explorers of inner truth went still further in their search and, by experiencing the reality of mind and matter within themselves, recognized that diverting the attention is only running away from the problem. Vipassana is such a remedy.
The Dalai Lama - At Home in Exile by David Turnley - The Digital Journalist Dirck Halstead photographs and videos by Dirck Halstead Categories Photography Video Pages About Dirck Subscribe Subscribe to content Subscribe to comments Contact dhalstead@me.com Search Whoops! Credits All content © 2012 by Dirck Halstead Theme Customization: bluprojekt Buddhist Television Network (BTN) and The Buddhist Channel inks collaboration for news exchange Face to faith: How western Buddhism has changed in 50 years It's 50 years since Buddhist teachers started arriving in the west in the early 60s and Buddhism crash-landed into the counterculture. So what have we learned about western Buddhism? 1. It's not all about enlightenment. Many who found Buddhism in the 60s saw nirvana as the ultimate peak experience. A decade later these recovering hippies were painfully finding out that Buddhism is more concerned with reshaping character and behaviour than big, mystical experiences. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy 1. The Meaning of the Term Zen The designation of this school of the Buddha-Way as Zen, which means sitting meditation, is derived from a transliteration of the Chinese word Chán. Because the Chinese term is in turn a transliteration of the Sanskrit term dhyāna, however, Zen owes its historical origin to early Indian Buddhism, where a deepened state of meditation, called samādhi, was singled out as one of the three components of study a Buddhist was required to master, the other two being an observation of ethical precepts (sīla) and an embodiment of nondiscriminatory wisdom (prajñā). Meditation was picked as the name for this school because the historical Buddha achieved enlightenment (nirvāna) through the practice of meditation. 2. According to Hakuin (1685–1768), who systematized kōans, there are formally seventeen hundred cases of kōans, and if sub-questions are added to them, a total number of cases comprising the system would be roughly three thousand. 3. 4. 5. 6. 6.3 Zen “Seeing”
What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really? | NeuroTribes Hello there! If you enjoy the content on Neurotribes, consider subscribing for future posts via email or RSS feed. Kobun Chino Otogawa, Steve Jobs' Zen teacher. One reason I was looking forward to reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Steve Jobs was my hope that, as a sharp-eyed reporter, Isaacson would probe to the heart of what one of the few entrepreneurs who really deserved the term “visionary” learned from Buddhism. By now, everyone knows the stories of how the future founder of Apple dropped acid, went to India on a quest for spiritual insight, met a laughing Hindu holy man who took a straight razor to his unkempt hair, and was married in a Zen ceremony to Laurene Powell in 1991. Isaacson does a fine job of showing how Jobs’ engagement with Buddhism was more than just a lotus-scented footnote to a brilliant Silicon Valley career. Why would a former phone phreak who perseverated over the design of motherboards be interested in doing that? Flowers at Tassajara. Bodhidharma.
Buddhists’ Delight If you really want to hear about it (to borrow a phrase from Holden Caulfield), I was on retreat. Perhaps I should say, I was in retreat, from a frenetic Manhattan life, hoping to find the balance and harmony that have formed the basis of the Buddhist tradition ever since Siddhartha Gautama discovered enlightenment around 2,500 years ago while sitting under a Bodhi tree in Northern India. The fundamental insight of the Buddha (the Awakened One) is this: life consists of suffering, and suffering is caused by attachment to the self, which is in turn attached to the things of this world. Only by liberating ourselves from the tyranny of perpetual wanting can we be truly free. Not that I am ready to renounce this world, or its things. “I am still expecting something exciting,” Edmund Wilson confided in his journal when he was in his mid-60s: “drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: an uninhibited exchange of ideas.” Many converts are what Thomas A. So who are these — dare I coin the term?