June 20, 2024
‘Everything is Buddha Himself’
Good and bad. Right and wrong. Love and hate. Success and failure. Nirvana and samsara.
We experience the world through the lens of duality. The mind divides
everything it perceives into good and bad, like and dislike—generating
attachments to what we like and aversion towards what we dislike. These
attachments and aversions become the source of our suffering.
The Buddhist teachings remind us that opposites can’t exist without each
other. Rather than being diametric polarities, they exist on a
spectrum. One only has meaning in the context of the other.
In Buddhism, we practice cultivating a nondual awareness that sees
beyond apparent opposites to the essential unity that lies beneath.
Beyond the confines of the thinking mind, dualities collapse into a
state of oneness—the true nature of ourselves and all of life. Or as Zen
Master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi writes, “Everything is Buddha himself.”
“When you become one with Buddha, one with everything that exists, you find the true meaning of being,” writes Suzuki Roshi. “When you forget all your dualistic ideas, everything becomes your teacher, and everything can be the object of worship.”
This week’s Three Teachings explore nonduality as a gateway to the true nature of reality.
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