Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment

think of Western adaptations of Zen oryoki (eating meditation), Theravadan walking meditation, and the Tibetan encouragement to experience “small moments, many times.”

Basketball players and tennis players do different things—but they can both be star athletes. Likewise in contemplative practice.

aporia.

Every desire, every identification, every place where your ego is hiding out and saying “I’m this.” Let go, let go, let go, and keep on falling—because there ain’t no place to land. Yet this falling, I am here to tell you, is the same as flight. Because, third, the states are not the point. As Joseph Goldstein put it, “one week [on retreat] gives t

the Buddha was not a Buddhist. On the contrary, according to the Pali Canon, he requested that his image not be depicted, he worried that he might be worshiped as a god, he allowed people to continue to practice their existing religious rites, and he remained agnostic on such fundamental questions about the creation of the world and what happens af

Formations change all the time. The joys they bring—though often wonderful, profound, and amazing—are short-lived. Even when we get exactly what we want, it gets old after a while, and we want something else.

Water the garden of greed, and you get greedier; nourish the saplings of compassion, and eventually they grow instead. Such is the core of the Buddha’s “four noble truths”: that suffering exists; that clinging, craving desire is its cause; that it is possible to end suffering; and that there is a systematic, step-by-step, empirically verifiable pro

to understand, intuitively and deeply, that what Buddhists call “conditioned formations”—i.e., stuff, ideas, people, emotions, and everything else—are incapable of providing lasting, deep happiness.

For me, the fourth jhana is really the point because it leads to one of the deep insights of the jhanas: that God is not in the fire, or the earthquake, or the flood. There’s a tendency that all of us have to deify and thus “idol-ize” certain states. Oh, that gorgeous warmth of lighting candles. Oh, we were so high during that drum circle/yoga sess

When the thinking mind and desiring mind are slowed down enough, this love and compassion arise naturally, without any prodding or effort from me. (I’m very bad at prodding myself to be nicer; for me, the only way that works is to actually become more loving, sincerely.)