Category: Basics

Answers to questions frequently asked at the temple.

Contemplating Disease – Part 5c – Comforting the Ill – September 3, 2018

Walking the fine line between remembering the emptiness of the body and dwelling upon final extinction is often the fine line many who deliver medical care and care-givers travel.  How do you be honest without being forlorn or slipping into causing hopelessness.  Vimalakirti saw this difficulty and cautioned the person seeking to provide comfort.  Not being dishonest about the disease or illness causes harm, being too brutally honest also causes harm.  There is no one…

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Contemplating Disease – Part 5a – Comforting the Ill – August 29, 2018

At this point I’d like to make a little detour away from Chih-I and look at Vimalakirti.  I mentioned earlier that the illness we are talking about do not cover those taken on by Buddhas or Bodhisattvas for the purpose of instruction, such as the illness of Vimalakirti.  Yet in the Vimalakirti Sutra we can learn important lesson, such as found in the exchange between Manjusuri and Vimalakirti on how to encourage a bodhisattva who…

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Contemplating Disease Part 4 – Resting in Forbearance – August 27, 2018

Subscribe to my blog post newsletter Diseases to be contemplated as has already been said do not include those that are taken on as a means to educate or instruct someone in the Dharma.  What is left is the wide range of karmic diseases, or diseases that are ours because we have a physical body.  We are in this case speaking of karma in a general and broad sense and not to any specific karmic…

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Conclusion – Why We Chant the Junnyoze Three Times – August 28, 2018

Subscribe to my blog post newsletter During our service and the recitation of portions from the Lotus Sutra we recite the Junnyoze from Chapter II three times.  You may wonder why that is since it is only written one time in the sutra.  I’m surprised more people don’t ask about that since it is so clearly at odds with any other recitation we do, repeating something that isn’t written. I suppose it is because some…

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