Sublime

Guided Meditation: Embracing Life with a Smile The compassionate Buddha is often seen in statues and pictures with a slight smile as he embraces the ten thousand joys and sorrows. When we meditate with the spirit of a smile, we awaken our natural capacity for unconditional friendliness. Sitting comfortably, close your eyes and let the natural rhyth

Here is one of the main links between Taoism and Zen, for the style and terminology of the Book of Chao is Taoist throughout though the subject matter is Buddhist. The sayings of the early Zen masters, such as Hui-neng, Shen-hui, and Huang-po, are full of these very ideas-that truly to know is not to know, that the awakened mind responds immediatel

Chiang Wei-nung says, “Listening here is connected with ‘thus have I heard’ at the beginning of the sutra. If Subhuti did not wish to listen to this, Ananda would not have heard it. There are three kinds of listening. First, we listen to the words. Second, we listen to the meaning. Third, we listen to the truth. As we listen to these words about co

Zhaozhou often quoted this saying by Sengcan: “The great way is not difficult if you just don’t pick and choose.”

So the crux of zazen is this: all we must do is constantly to create a little shift from the spinning world we’ve got in our heads to right-here-now. That’s our practice. The intensity and ability to be right-here-now is what we have to develop.

The Buddhist concept of the “middle way,” or “not too tight, not too loose,” is the ideal guide.

Gunabhadra,

The two main teachings of the Lotus Sutra are: (1) everyone has the capacity to become a fully enlightened Buddha, and (2) the Buddha is present everywhere, all the time.

I had many teachers, but the most central were two of the wisest Theravada teachers of the past century: one in Thailand, Ajahn Chah, and one in Burma, Mahasi Sayadaw.