Historically, the Japanese have considered women to be the proper interpreters of the teaching of the gods. In fact, the first spiritual and political leader of Japan on record was Himiko (or Pimiko), a queen whose authority was based on her religious or magical powers. She was a Shaman who the Chinese chronicles describe as unmarried with a thousand women attendants and one man, and who spent her time with magic and sorcery. She was a mediator between the people and their gods…
Green tea is chosen over other beverages because of its subtlety. In order to fully appreciate it the mind must be quiet and empty of distracting thoughts. If you talk while drinking, it is likely that you will miss the fullness of the taste. And as the ability to appreciate the subtle taste develops over the years, the person changes accordingly…
Scenes of Tibetan terrain, travel facilities, housing, a New Year religious festival, the Dalai Lama’s palaces in Lhasa, monasteries and other religious buildings. 40 minutes.
Life in the West is full or problems and traumas, and we move from one to the next like a blind person finding the way along a rope bridge. We can, it is true, refuse to see the ‘bad’ things, or simply live on the surface of life, but that merely produces another kind of unhappiness with the voice of our lost psyche calling us from a long way away, with not only the problem shelved but our humanity and the richness and colour of our lives as well…
People who have a religion which provides for after-death welfare, such as in Tibetan Buddhism, are less troubled. But those without such beliefs, can trust to nature’s spiritual intentions for them, as they, like plants, struggle instinctively and unerringly towards the light…
Contemplate contentment and gratitude.
So much of our suffering is around attachment to perceptions, views, opinions and emotional habits. In the enlightened mind one is breaking out of conditioning. Because there is an infinite variety of conditioned phenomena, the Buddha talked in terms of just five groups (five khandhas) in which to get a perspective on it, and this is to be understood in a very direct way, not in a theoretical way. Each one of us experiences through the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness, and…
What was interesting for me on this particular retreat was that I suddenly saw the very angry person who never seemed to get his own way, as a cat. ‘Funny,’ I thought one day, ‘If he were a cat, I wouldn’t take him so seriously.’
Buddhism now 