Sublime

Now we enter a dimension of Buddhist psychology that can pose real questions for the Western mind—the teachings about past and future lives. This multiple-life perspective is rooted in formal cosmology as well as in popular culture, where it serves to explain both individual and social circumstances. When I came to the forest monastery I was a scie

This koan has always encouraged me to trust the difficulties I run up against and the slowness with which I work with them. It is as if an impasse has its own journey built into it, a journey that belongs only to that impasse and which is a unique path to freedom. Each step in the dark turns out in the end to have been on course after all.

Being a guru is not a profession, especially in the Vajrayana. There is no standardized teacher’s training that ends with a certificate of completion. There is no office where you can go to apply to be a vajra master, no application to fill out. There is no rule book.

the general practice of Buddhism, which is to free the mind from its habitual confusion of words, ideas, and concepts with reality, and from all those emotional disturbances and entanglements which flow from this confusion. Thus the ego, time, the body, life, and death are all viewed as concepts having neither more nor less reality than abstract nu

“the path of the Bodhisattva:” I am the protector of the unprotected and the caravan-leader for travelers. I have become the boat, the causeway, and the bridge for those who long to reach the further shore. May I be a light for those in need of light. May I be a bed for those in need of rest. May I be a servant for those in need of service, for all

When we live our life fully, our life becomes what Zen Buddhists call “the supreme meal.” We make this supreme meal by using the ingredients at hand to make the best meal possible, and then by offering it.