Fun and laughter are also central to the story of Maitreya, the future Buddha, as taught in Mahayana literature.
Buddhism
Buddhist Insight from Mahasi Meditation Tradition, by Bhante Bodhidhamma
Bhante Bodhidhamma’s talk begins with a short meditation then goes on to explore the nature of self as experience.
Wrinkles, The Universe and All That, by Linda Clark
I never really thought about the ageing process until I was twenty-five and my new employers, the South-Eastern Electricity Board, sent me to London on an induction course. I was a very timid soul in those days and it was… Read More ›
Tea with the last Emperor, by Patty Elwood
Bronzes were arranged along the stairway, one of them being the Buddha-rupa which I have now.
Buddha Calling the Earth to Witness
Buddhist art: Some Buddha images.
Cherishing Others, by Dalai Lama
Equalizing oneself and others means developing the attitude and understanding that: ‘Just as I desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering, so do all living beings, beings as infinite as space; they also desire happiness and wish to avoid suffering.’
The Real Way by John Aske
These loves, hates, frustrations etc, unpleasant as they seem, are the essential manure out of which the lotus of enlightenment grows and blossoms. And the bigger the clay, the bigger the Buddha, as the Zen men say, so the more and better the manure, the better for the flowering.
Our culture doesn’t encourage too much contemplation on birth and death
We see and know impermanence as a constant. And that is liberating. All the mental suffering about what is going to happen to us, about being this or that person who will eventually disappear, about becoming ‘nothing’, is dissipated and this moment becomes a vast timelessness. The Buddha called it ‘birthlessness’ and ‘deathlessness’, freedom from birth and death…
Buddhism now 