A lovely, thoughtful exploration of the traditional Buddhist path of ethics, meditation and wisdom, using poetry and the ideas of contemporary science to evoke the mystery that lies at the heart of practice. Dhammadassin's beautifully weighted talk challenges us to look at how we think and how we act, and is rooted in a moving fidelity to experience as the ground of our inspiration. One to be treasured!
Excerpted from the talk Standing on Emptiness: View, Meditation, and Action given at the Women’s National Order weekend, 2004.
***
Subscribe to our Dharmabytes podcast: On Apple Podcasts | On Spotify | On Google Podcasts
Bite-sized inspiration three times every week.
Subscribe to our Free Buddhist Audio podcast: On Apple Podcasts | On Spotify | On Google Podcasts
A full, curated, quality Dharma talk, every week. 3,000,000 downloads and counting!
Subscribe using these RSS feeds or search for Free Buddhist Audio or Dharmabytes in your favourite podcast service!
Help us keep FBA Podcasts free for everyone: donate now!
Follow Free Buddhist Audio: YouTube | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Soundcloud
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. So the first way I wanted to talk about view is through study. And again, according to a teacher, the way we take up view is to combine three things. The practice of the Brahmani Haras, careful study of the Dharma, and direct experience. Sounds like a well balanced retreat program. And you might be concerned that this means head down, no nonsense, wall-to-wall Majamika when I say careful study, and I think we should be so lucky. And just because I'm standing here and you're all sitting there, I wanted to give you my favourite, crazy example. Just to show how much fun you could be having, just listen to this. Something else is something else based on something else. Something else is not something else without something else. Something is not different from that something on which it depends. Something else as such is not found in something else. Nor is it found in something that is not something else. And the editor, hopefully, has here in itself. Since something else in itself is not to be found, something else, and that something in relation to which it is something else, certainly do not exist. But the aim is not just wackiness, is that well. But it's meant to stretch our minds further than they can go. Because if you can make concepts cancel each other out and hold your mind there, then according to Jung, you find out what supports you when you can no longer support yourself. And that's what the perfection of wisdom texts are after. And I had a little experience a bit like this, and I think of getting things to cancel out and hold it in your mind there on a tiny scale very recently. And I wanted to thank her for this publicly, but Amri Gita and I were involved in a chapter date on a particular discussion recently, and she did help me get a taste of this. Because she was willing to be a sort of brick wall of reality in relation to what I was saying. She just kept confounding it. I thought what I was saying was so reasonable. But she just kept confounding my view. She just kept saying it's not like that. It's not like that. Yeah, yeah, but it's not like that. And I went through this whole kind of series of mild irritation, frustration, disbelief. Come on, you must be kidding me, agree with me, agree with me, whatever it was. But she just kept saying it's not like that, it's not like that. And just being a complete brick wall appropriately, I must say. We just ended up laughing. But also, I did have this sense of kind of softening around it. It was a bit like I just hit my head off it. I could see for myself. I began to see for myself the limitations of what I was saying, but that I was still insisting on in spite of myself. And it just kind of broke. It just broke. And gave way to a kind of softness, a kind of sympathy, kind of openness. So thank you Amri Gita. So careful study, and this coming up against the limits of what we think. But as Mama Givinda says, we must first have reached the limits of our thinking before we are qualified to transcend them. So if thinking is exploring experience to a practice, do we do enough? Do we think? No. What does that mean to us? Thinking. I suppose by that I really mean, well, how seriously? You see how much fun you can have, but how seriously do we take study? No. How seriously do we really take finding out what Dharma says? We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. Thank you. (gentle music)
