Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are

As the African-American sage George Washington Carver explained, “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.”

Sarvodaya combines Buddhist principles of right livelihood, right action, right understanding, and compassion and has organized citizens in one-third of that nation’s villages to dig wells, build schools, meditate, and collaborate as a form of spiritual practice.

form. As Zen master Dogen says, “Flowers fall with our attachment, and weeds spring up with our aversion.”

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.

Sylvia Boorstein

In the Christian mystical tradition one of the great texts is Dark Night of the Soul by Saint John of the Cross, in which he talks about the periods of loneliness, fear, and doubt that one goes through after the initial awakenings into the light. Evagrius,

Gorillas in the Mist.

The art of listening is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive. —ALAN WATTS

Buddha in the Jungle by Kamala Tiyavanich. From her research of Buddhism in Thailand, extending back to the earliest written records of previous centuries, you see a very wide range of meditation practices in use. You read how the forest lineages included healers, educators, schoolteachers, priests, peacemakers, and meditators; some were soothsayer

Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this when he said, “If a person sweeps streets for a living, he should sweep them as Michelangelo painted, as Beethoven composed music, as Shakespeare wrote his plays.”