Sublime

Subhuti has just witnessed the compassion and detachment with which the Buddha performed his daily round of giving and receiving offerings,

Trungpa Rinpoche gave a definition of taking refuge that was pinned up on our bulletin board the other day. It begins with an absolute statement: “Since all things are naked, clear from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize.” But then Rinpoche goes further and makes it very practical. “The everyday practice is simply to develop a

Then we have gurus in the tradition of Patrul Rinpoche and present-day Alak Zenkar Rinpoche, who never belonged to a legendary monastery and who have no entourage or patrons.

transcendental liberating truth, we come back to our life as it is. Perhaps only when we forget our aspiration to become Buddhas can we really enjoy our lives as ordinary human beings. Let others decide whether we’re acting like a buddha or not. Abandoning self-improvement we exert ourselves fully and naturally as birds who enjoy frolicking in the

(Samyuktagama Sutra,

This is called the middle way, which is another way of describing the path of the warrior-bodhisattva. When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in

Zen Buddhism over the past two millennia has been, with a few notable exceptions, the history of monks and monastic practice. While there are now vibrant monastic communities firmly established here in America, the history of Zen has gradually, subtly, but inexorably, shifted out of the monastery and into the daily life of lay practice. Lay

Thirty-Seven Practices is about the bodhisattva path. What, then, is a bodhisattva? One answer is that a bodhisattva is a person who lives and breathes compassion. Compassion is ordinarily understood as an emotion, but the compassion of a bodhisattva is not a sentiment. It is not pity. It is a quality of awareness itself, the knowing that is the