The parallels with the story of the young Prince Siddhartha 2500 years earlier are clear. As childhood with its certainties (if we are lucky) and its securities, moves into adolescence and then maturity, we are all confronted with the opportunity of opening up to the world (and ourselves) and exploring it, or turning away from it and trying to restore the gilded cage we once lived in…
‘Other people may offer a solution to our problems, but it is usually a solution to their problems, to something a bit different, and if it helps us, it is usually by luck.’
Previously I had lacked the self-awareness to see a passing mood as ‘internal’ without absorbing into it or being absorbed in it, and saw it, for example, as ‘being depressed’…
They settled at the crossroads of the ancient eastern world, and from there commanded the silk road between India, China, and the great entrepôt of Balkh, from which the caravans journeyed to Rome and the west…
Because life itself as it unfolds is unbound, and as the barriers to our understanding fall away, the simple uncompounded freedom that the Buddha taught becomes our life, and our happiness.
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.
We all have to learn the comfort of being ourselves — and not someone else. It is much harder than it looks and the problem never really goes away.
Einstein’s eyes were luminous and serene, like the eyes of a jade bodhisattva, lost in an absoluteness of being, where there is neither cat nor mouse, but only grace…
Buddhism now 