Going to a Pure Land Temple – October 16, 2019

Yesterday I took the train from Syracuse, NY to Niagara Falls Canada for the express purpose of visiting a large temple located there. The temple is referred to as the 10,000 Buddha Temple although that is not the correct name. The correct name of the temple is the Namo Amitabh Buddhist Temple. The temple is a Chinese Pure Land temple. Since I first learned of the temple, almost three years ago, I had wanted to…

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Francophone Study – English and French Language – Video – October 8, 2019

The recording is in French and English. Today we discussed how to have gratitude and appreciation for unpleasant events in our past. In particular how do we have gratitude to parents who may have treated us in unskillful ways, or who harmed us when we were children. The issue is complicated, and not to be over simplified, and certainly we should not read general guidance written for someone else or written for a general audience…

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Name of Buddha – Part 9a – September 18, 2019

Mystical Buddha The Lotus Sutra is a unity, it is as Nichiren teaches a collection of individual characters each of which is a Buddha.  When all these individual characters are strung together in unity it becomes the Lotus Sutra, it also becomes the name of the Eternal Buddha, or the mystical name of Buddha.  The characters are finite and infinite at the same time. There are a definite required number of characters, not one less…

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Righting the Ship – Sangha Building – Dharma Talk – September 18, 2019

Righting the Ship – Sangha Building Sometimes even with our best intentions and our most skillful actions situations arise which affect the entire Sangha in a negative and potentially harmful way.  What I am mostly thinking of in this moment as I write this is about harmful behaviors either from a group of members, single individuals, or leadership including the priest or lay-leader of the Sangha. There needs to be a way to manage these…

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