Buddhism

Pure and Simple cover

A Good Dose of Dhamma: For meditators when they are ill, by Upasika Kee Nanayon.

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You can’t prevent pleasure and pain, you can’t keep the mind from labelling things and forming thoughts, but you can put these things to a new use. If the mind labels a pain, saying, `I hurt,’ you have to read the label carefully, contemplating it until you see that it’s wrong. If the label were right, it would have to say that the pain isn’t me, it’s empty. Or if there’s a thought that `I’m in pain,’ this type of thinking is also wrong. You have to take a new approach to your thinking, to see that thinking is inconstant, stressful, and not yours…

Drop-front secretary © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cabinet Making, by Trevor Leggett

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We often do not realise clearly that all our actions are of the same nature: they are bits for the ‘cabinet’ which is being made. One piece is as important as the other; some are bigger, some are smaller, but they are all important…

Kujomidzu, Japan. Photo © Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)

Law suit against reality, by Ken Jones

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‘This’ versus ‘that’ is, I believe, the starting point for an understanding of Dogen. The theme that runs through the essays in his great collection the Shobogenzo is the unmasking of this delusive dualism, and demonstrating the Great Way of opening to a sense of duality which is freed of the self-neediness which drives dualism…