Category: mind

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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Ohigan Autumnal Equinox – Dharma Talk Video – September 22, 2019

Ohigan and Equinox Well, here we are approaching the autumn equinox.  Twice a year on our planet we have an equinox, a period of equal light and equal dark.  Twice a year we take time during the equinox season to pay particular attention to observing the Six Paramitas.  We find reference to Higan, which means crossing to the other shore, in the Lotus Sutra Chapter 1.  “They had already trained themselves out of their compassion…

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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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