Todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Heaps of Merit andamp; Offering Up Gratitudeand#8221; the whole practice of Puja, offerings to the Buddha, that which we value most. This excerpt is from the seventh talk in a sparkling, wide-ranging, thoroughly comprehensive ten talk series by Padmavajra on and#8216;The Diamond Sutra and#8211; Taking Mind to its Limitsand#8217;.
Talks given at Padmaloka Retreat Centre, 2004
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. [music] Giving the Dharma, making the Dharma known, keeps alive a completely different dimension of human experience. Keeping the Dharma alive means that you keep the dimension of egolessness alive. The flavour of profound selflessness, the flavour of utter purity. That's what it keeps alive. Sometimes people say, sometimes people feel that, well, you know, in the FWA, we don't do enough to sort of help people on an ordinary level. We should expand into social work and all that sort of thing. Well, fine, if you really feel moved to do that, I think that would be very good. And I think that can be a way indeed of communicating the Dharma. I don't think one needs to make a hard separation necessarily between communicating the Dharma and having a kind of direct hands-on approach to alleviation of suffering. But, you know, there are many bodies within Western society, all over the world, who do things to alleviate actual physical suffering. How much is going on in terms of the communication of the Dharma? I don't just mean the FWA, but if you look around the world, actually, there isn't, by comparison, a lot of Dharma going on, we should be very, very clear about that. And there are people, many, many people, many, many, many people who are suffering because they haven't encountered the Dharma. I remember years ago, Banti talking to some clergyman about this, and they were asking about, they were very interested in the FWA. And they were asking about the sort of social work that I mentioned. And what do we do with the casualties in society? And Banti, one of Banti's replies was, well, our hands are full at the moment with existential casualties. And I think that's a really good phrase, you know, there are social casualties. There are also existential casualties, you know, and these often overlap, we know. In time, of course, if we really do communicate the Dharma vividly and really proclaim it, who knows what effect the Dharma could have on public life, you know, on a wider sphere. Even if you give it then, just communicate it in a very ordinary way to just one other person. It's an incredible thing. With all sorts of reverberations that are all, you know, hidden, that you only discover perhaps years later, we might not even discover in this lifetime. And I must say my own faith and confidence in the Dharma and the power it can have to affect a radical transformation in all aspects of somebody's life, that really came home to me in India, living and working with the Buddhist community in India, the so-called ex-untouchable Buddhist community, just seeing the effect that the Dharma had had in transforming their whole attitude to themselves, the attitude to one another, their attitude to life generally, and all the social and cultural transformations that took place because of Dr. Ambedkar's conversion to Buddhism. And the fact that Ambedkar was such a hard-headed, what kind of rationalist and humanist gave me a lot of confidence in the Dharma, the fact that somebody like him could see the Dharma, you know, from a very, very early on in his life as the key to social and even political transformation and to bring his people out of hell. Well, that's quite something to see. And people used to tell me, people who, when they were around in the early days of the conversion movement, I asked them, well, how did you feel when you converted, you know, just that moment of going for refuge to the three jewels, and they smiled, liberation. Liberation from hell. And I said, was there any immediate material change? No. Quite the contrary, in our village we were boycotted because we'd become Buddhist, the other, you know, the other class, boycotted us. We couldn't buy food in our village. But we felt liberated. We felt this great energy and self-respect, and everything came from that. Amazing. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
