A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
If
you love yourself, you will never enjoy making yourself angry. If you
love yourself, you will have the opportunity to love others. And if you
love others, you will never try to hurt those people with rude and angry
words.
Ven. Mahindasiri Thero, “How to Deal with Toxic People”
The
2025 Tricycle Film Festival is available online, now through March 27,
2025! If you don’t yet have a ticket, get yours today to gain access to
10 Buddhist films (5 feature-length, 5 short films) that you can watch
online as many times as you want for the duration of the festival.
RIGHT VIEW Understanding the Noble Truth of Suffering
When people have met with
suffering and become victims of suffering, they come to me and ask me
about the noble truth of suffering. Being asked, I explain to them the
noble truth of suffering. (MN 77) What is suffering? (MN 9)
Sorrow and lamentation are suffering: the sorrow, sorrowing,
sorrowfulness, inner sorrow, inner sorriness of one who has encountered
some misfortune or is affected by some painful state. (MN 9)
Reflection
The first noble
truth, the truth of suffering, is described in some detail in these
texts. Here the experience of loss and sorrow is highlighted. Elsewhere
we might be able to make a distinction between sorrow as a form of
mental pain and suffering as a state of emotional affliction, but here
we are simply directed to the universal human experience of the pain of
loss or misfortune. It hurts a lot to lose someone you love.
Daily Practice
The truth of
suffering is not meant to encourage us to wallow in our afflictions, but
it does not let us try to escape them through some kind of denial. The
first noble truth is a starting point. Only when the suffering is
acknowledged can the healing begin. Look at some aspect of your own
suffering with courage and without fear and decide that you can and will
undertake a path to heal the pain by understanding it and letting it
go.
Tomorrow: Cultivating Lovingkindness One week from today: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media #DhammaWheel
Be
neither glad nor regretful when sadness and gloom appear within the
heart. Look on them as mental conditions that must be investigated, as
things that arise, cease, and come out from the heart. They depend on
the heart for their birth and then latch on to it.
Whatever a person frequently thinks about and ponders, that will become the inclination of their mind. If one frequently thinks about and ponders healthy states, one has abandoned unhealthy states to cultivate healthy states, and then one’s mind inclines to healthy states. (MN 19)
Here a person rouses the will, makes an effort, stirs up energy, exerts the mind, and strives to maintain arisen healthy mental states. One maintains the arisen joy-awakening factor. (MN 141)
Reflection
Last week we looked at abandoning unhealthy states that have arisen in the mind, and this week we are doing the opposite: practicing to maintain the good states of mind that have come up. If we are feeling generous or kind, or are being truthful, that is a good thing and should be supported. The word translated here as “maintain” also has the sense of guarding or protecting healthy emotions and healthy thoughts.
Daily Practice
All kinds of positive states arise and pass away naturally in the mind. The practice here is to notice that and to support, reinforce, and sustain positive states. If you say something nice to someone, say it again or say it to another person. If you give something to someone in an act of generosity, acknowledge that giving to others is good for you and look for opportunities to give again and again in different ways.
Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects and Abiding in the Fourth Jhāna One week from today: Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media #DhammaWheel
Seeing more clearly into how the mind functions tends to shatter some of the meditator’s most cherished beliefs about cognition, consciousness, and the nature of self.
Follow the lives of four Korean women and their journey to become Buddhist nuns in this unprecedented glimpse into Backheung-am, a thousand-year-old rural Korean Buddhist nunnery, the documentary.