Allowing Ourselves To Be Different, Allowing Ourselves To be the Same.

Portland Buddhist Priory Posted on by

(To view the July 2018 newsletter where this was first published click here.)

My teacher once gave the advice: “allow yourself to be different.” When I look at my own mind and life and try to pin down what or who I am, while I might have some blurry notion about what that is, really, I just see this complicated tangle of changing characteristics. There are certain aspects of myself that I put a lot of energy into defending or reinforcing and the funny thing about that is that some of those characteristics are parts which clearly cause me a lot of trouble. Continue reading →

Turning Toward The Buddha

Portland Buddhist Priory Posted on by

(To view the June 2018 newsletter where this was first published click here.)

An illuminating question we could ask ourselves is what motivates us? There is the sort of motivation that comes from outside ourselves – the wish to have some good attribute like world peace, a clean environment, a comfortable amount of money – and these are worthy of consideration. What I am really interested in, though, is looking at what actually gets me to do what I do, good or bad, throughout the day. Continue reading →

The Will

Portland Buddhist Priory Posted on by

(To view the May 2018 newsletter where this was first published click here.)

I have been thinking a fair bit about how we use the will in practice and keep coming up to two points. The first point, which I can’t get over, under or around, is in an old story of a student who comes to a Zen teacher and says something like “there is a stone in my garden and I would like to carve it into a Buddha, can I do that?” and the teacher says, “yes, you can!” Having second thoughts, the student says “carving that stone into a Buddha would be hard, are you sure I can carve it?” And the teacher says “no, you can’t carve it.” Continue reading →