Category: The Basics

Contemplating Disease – Cessation – Part 13i – January 20, 2019

Chih-I talks quite a lot about compassion and how important it is to cultivate when one has dis-ease, disease, and illness.  As I have been studying this text I am struck by the direction he suggests compassion needs to flow.   Usually when compassion is mentioned, at lease in the medical settings I’ve been in and the other conversations I’ve read and heard outside hospitals, the direction of compassion goes from the healthy towards the…

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Contemplating Disease – Cessation – Part 13h – January 19, 2019

I’ve brought up pain and I would like to diverge slightly away from Chih-I for a moment.  Over the past several years doctors and nurses have been asking people to rate their pain on a scale, usually 1-10.  Some people are not quite sure about how they are supposed to rate pain, it hurts and they want it to stop. Some fear if they say it is too low, then their pain will be ignored. …

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Contemplating Disease – Cessation – Part 13f – January 17, 2019

The point here is that by understanding this by seeking to understand this dependent origination as we live with and through disease can be the cause for our entering the realm of pratyekabuddhahood.   As I have been studying this and thinking deeply on the subject it is easy to see that these very same principles can be applied to any and every aspect of our lives.  What condition or realm of the Ten Worlds…

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Contemplating Disease – Cessation – Part 13e – January 16, 2019

The Mind holds the essence or essential nature of each organ the mind can distinguish between the kidney, the heart, the spleen and so forth.  In that regard there is no essential substance to destruct and so it is indestructible. The four mental or four skandas maintain the essence of the four elements and five organs.  The mind or skanda of consciousness maintains earth.  “The mental skanda of conceptions maintains wind.  The mental skanda of…

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