What does it mean to take refuge in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha? It’s a repeated refrain in the Pali canon that the path to freedom starts with having faith in the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha – what does that mean for us?
The Buddha was a historical person who led an extraordinary life and accomplished, through his own physical and mental efforts, a goal that many have since pursued. But believing those facts is not the same as understanding their implications. We have to start by understanding, or at least thinking it’s possible, that each of us is imbued with deep psychological roots that are both selfish and unselfish, cruel and kind, wilfully ignorant and that incline towards wisdom. In Buddhist language these are the roots of greed, hatred, and delusion, along with their opposites: generosity, unselfish (even unbounded) love, and clarity and wisdom. If we observe our own…
“The ads for “The Sterile Cuckoo” remind us that you can fall in love for the first time only once in your life. True enough, but that begs the question of whether Pookie and Jerry are really in love. I doubt it. Their relationship is based more on need: her need to be loved, and his need to make love.” Thus begins the critical movie review by Roger Ebert, the late Pulitzer-Prize winning movie critic who died in 2013. See the full review here: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-sterile-cuckoo-1969
I was a movie reviewer for both my high school and college newspapers. I still enjoy watching movies, especially classics, but stopped writing movie reviews long ago. I was more of a promoter than a critic and definitely not as talented a writer as Roger Ebert. Alas.
Liza Minnelli and the song, Come Saturday Morning, were nominated for Oscars, although neither won. Alas.
“Simply pray for what’s best, realizing that you may not know what that is.”
Below is a repost from a thoughtful Tricycle archive article. Regardless of your personal faith tradition, I hope this article offers you some provocative thoughts on what prayer means to you.
Why do we pray? We might think that if we do, the Buddha, or God, or a deity will look kindly upon us, bestow blessings, protect us. We might believe that if we don’t, the deity won’t like us, might even punish us. But the purpose of prayer is not to win the approval or avert the wrath of an exterior God.
To the extent that we understand Buddha, God, the deity, to be an expression of ultimate reality, to that extent we receive blessings when we pray. To the extent that we have faith in the boundless qualities of the deity’s love and compassion, to that extent we receive the blessings of those qualities.
Sometimes we project human characteristics onto things that aren’t human. For example, if we sentimentally think, “My dog is meditating with me,” we’re only attributing that behavior to the dog; we’re imagining what it’s doing. When we anthropomorphize God, we project our own faults and limitations, imagining they’re God’s as well. This is why many people believe that God either likes or dislikes them depending on their behavior. “I won’t be able to have this or that because God doesn’t like me—I forgot to pray.” Or worse, “If God doesn’t like me, I’ll end up in hell.”
If God feels happy or sad because we do or do not offer prayer, then God is not flawless, not an embodiment of perfect compassion and love. Any manifestation of the absolute truth, by its very nature, has neither attachment to our prayers nor aversion to our lack of them. Such attributes are projections of our own mind.
To understand how prayer works, consider the sun, which shines everywhere without hesitation or hindrance. Like God or Buddha, it continuously radiates all its power, warmth, and light without differentiation. When the earth turns, it appears to us that the sun no longer shines. But that has nothing to do with the sun; it’s due to our own position on the shadow side of the earth. If we inhabit a deep, dark mine shaft, it’s not the sun’s fault that we feel cold. Or if we live on the earth’s surface but keep our eyes closed, it’s not the sun’s fault that we don’t see light. The sun’s blessings are all-pervasive, whether we are open to them or not. Through prayer, we come out of the mine shaft, open our eyes, become receptive to enlightened presence, the omnipotent love and compassion that exist for all beings.
Even if we aren’t familiar with the idea of praying to a deity, most of us feel the presence of some higher principle or truth—some source of wisdom, compassion, and power with the ability to benefit. Praying to that higher principle will without doubt be fruitful.
However, it is very important not to be small-minded in prayer. You might want to pray for a new car, but how do you know if a new car is what you need? It’s better to simply pray for what’s best, realizing that you may not know what that is. A few years ago, a Tibetan woman traveled overseas by airplane. When the plane made a brief stop en route, she got out to walk around. Unfamiliar with the airport, with the language, and with foreign travel, she didn’t hear the announcement of her departing flight and missed it. This probably seemed disastrous at the time, but not long after takeoff the plane that she missed crashed, killing most of the passengers.
We pray for what’s best not only for ourselves, but for all beings. When we’re just starting practice, our self-importance is often so strong that our prayers remain very selfish and only reinforce rather than transform self-centeredness. So until our motivation becomes more pure-hearted, it may be beneficial to spend more time cultivating lovingkindness than praying.
With proper motivation, prayer becomes an important component of our practice because it helps to remove obstacles—counterproductive circumstances, imbalances of the subtle energies in the body, confusion and ignorance in the mind. Even in listening to the teachings, we may mentally edit what we hear, adding more to them than is being said or ignoring certain aspects. Prayer offsets these hindrances.
The mind is like a mirror. Although our true nature is the deity, what we now experience are ordinary mind’s reflections. Enemies, hindrances, inauspicious moments—all of which appear to be outside of us—are actually reflections of our own negativities. If you’ve never seen your image before, looking in a mirror you’d think you were gazing through a window, encountering someone altogether independent of you. It wouldn’t seem to have any connection to you as you passed by. If you saw there a horrible-looking person with a dirty face and wild hair, you might feel aversion. You might even try to clean up the image by washing the mirror. But a mirror, like the mind, is reflective—it only shows you yourself. Only if you combed your hair and washed your face could you change what you saw. You’d have to change yourself; you couldn’t change the mirror. Prayer helps to purify the habits of ordinary, small mind and ignorance of our true nature as the deity.
When we pray in the context of deity practice, we sometimes visualize the deity standing or sitting before us in space as an embodiment of perfection, whereas we ourselves have many faults and obscurations. But praying to the deity is not a matter of supplicating something separate from ourselves. The point of using a dualistic method, visualizing the deity outside of us, is to eliminate duality.
When we visualize ourselves as the deity, we deepen our experience of our own intrinsic purity. Finally, in the completion stage of practice, when the form of the deity falls away, we let the mind rest, without effort or contrivance, in its own nature, the ultimate deity.
Thus we begin with an initial conception of purity as external, only to internalize it and ultimately to transcend concepts of inner and outer. This awareness of the nature of the deity increases the power, blessings, and benefit of our prayer.
If the nature of the deity is emptiness, you might wonder why we pray at all. There seems to be a contradiction here. How can we say, on the one hand, that there isn’t a deity, only the reflection of our own intrinsic nature, and, on the other, that we should pray to it? This makes sense only if we understand the inseparability of absolute and relative truth.
On the absolute level, our nature is buddha, we are the deity. But unaware of this, we’re bound by relative truth. In order to make the leap to the realization of our absolute nature, we have to walk on our relative feet, on a relative path. Because absolute truth is so elusive to our ordinary, linear mind, we rely on an increasingly subtle, step-by-step process to work with the mind’s duality until we achieve recognition. Prayer is an essential part of that process.
Red Tara Dedication Prayer
Red Tara is one of Chagdud Tulku’s root practices, which he and his Sangha use daily.
Throughout my many lives and until this moment, whatever virtue I have accomplished, including the merit generated by this practice, and all that I, will ever attain, this I offer for the welfare of sentient beings.
May sickness, war, famine, and suffering be decreased for every being, while their wisdom and compassion increase in this and every future life.
May I clearly perceive all experiences to be as insubstantial as the dream fabric of the night and instantly awaken to perceive the pure wisdom display in the arising of every phenomenon.
May I quickly attain enlightenment in order to work ceaselessly for the liberation of all sentient beings.
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche (1930–2002) was a highly revered meditation master, artist, Tibetan physician and the spiritual director of the Chagdud Gonpa Foundation.
So what? Well, here are the consequences of loneliness according to a recent advisory from the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy :
“you can feel lonely even if you have a lot of people around you, because loneliness is about the quality of your connections.”
the physical consequences of poor connection can be devastating, including a 29% increased risk of heart disease; a 32% increased risk of stroke; and a 50% increased risk of developing dementia for older adults
many young people now use social media as a replacement for in-person relationships, and this often meant lower-quality connections.
U.S. participation in community organizations — from faith groups to recreational leagues — has declined in recent decades.
A 2022 paper from Johns Hopkins University also found socially isolated older adults had a higher chance of developing dementia than their peers. “Social connections matter for our cognitive health, and the risk of social isolation is potentially modifiable for older adults,”
Today’s senryu: Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places
Last week during a 5-day meditation retreat that I and 300 others attended, a special small group consultation session was offered to “anyone who has experienced trauma OR knows someone who has experienced trauma.” Duh! Crowd murmuring began immediately with the gist being: wouldn’t that include everyone here, if not everyone on the planet.
While first or second-hand trauma seem part of our times, does that mean we should “wallow in misery”?
A Healthline article, How to Identify and Deal with a Victim Mentality, written by Crystal Raypole (see http://www.healthline.com/health/victim-mentality), offers a lot of information on this malady. Here are a couple of highlights:
“The victim mentality rests on three key beliefs: Bad things happen and will keep happening. Other people or circumstances are to blame. Any efforts to create change will fail, so there’s no point in trying.
People identify with the victim role when they “veer into the belief that everyone else caused their misery and nothing they do will ever make a difference.”
A victim mentality can be distressing and create challenges, both for those living with it and the people in their lives. But it can be overcome with the help of a therapist, as well as plenty of compassion and self-kindness.”
Here’s another Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation repost (from https://cac.org/daily-meditations/). It’s a beautiful reminder, similar to a message from the Bhagavad Gita, that divine DNA is in all of us and that love and life are messy.
Purity Is Not Holiness
Pastor and public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber describes how emphasizing “purity” leads us away from holiness:
Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy. They only create insiders and outsiders. They are mechanisms for delivering our drug of choice: self-righteousness, as juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil runs down our chins. And these purity systems affect far more than our relationship to sex and booze: they show up in political ideology, in the way people shame each other on social media, in the way we obsess about “eating clean.” Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from….
To connect to the holy is to access the deepest, juiciest part of our spirits. Perhaps this is why we set up so many boundaries, protections, and rules around both sex and religion…. But when the boundaries, protections, and rules become more important than the sacred thing they are intended to protect, casualties ensue.
But no matter how much we strive for purity in our minds, bodies, spirits, or ideologies, purity is not the same as holiness. It’s just easier to define what is pure than what is holy, so we pretend they are interchangeable.
Bolz-Weber points to Jesus’ actions to encourage seeking holiness over purity:
Jesus seemed to want connection with those around him, not separation. He touched human bodies deemed unclean as if they were themselves holy: dead little girls, lepers, menstruating women. People of his day were disgusted that Jesus’ disciples would eat with unwashed hands, and they tried to shame him for it. But he responded, “It is not what enters the mouth that makes one unclean but what comes out of it that defiles” [Matthew 15:11]. He was loyal to the law, just not at the expense of the people.
Jesus kept violating boundaries of decency to get to the people on the other side of that boundary, those who’d been wounded by it, those who were separated from the others: the motherless, the sex workers, the victims, and the victimizers. He cared about real holiness, the connection of things human and divine, the unity of sinners, the coming together of that which was formerly set apart.
When I think of holiness, the kind that is sensual and embodied and free from shame and deeply present in the moment and comes from union with God, I think of a particular scene in the Gospels when, right in the middle of a dinner party, a woman cracks open a jar of myrrh and pours it over Jesus’ feet [Luke 7:37–38]. She then takes her unbound hair and wipes his feet, mixing her mane, her tears, and her offering on the feet of God. Her separateness, from herself and her God, is alleviated in that moment. Holiness braided the strands of her being into their original and divine integrated configuration.
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation (New York: Convergent Books, 2019), 26, 22, 26–27.
Sunday morning coming down … the last day of retreat is for final talks and final goodbyes. Some people linger as long as possible while others pack up early and are eager to return to home, family, work, and/or civilization.
The vast majority of retreatants are making promises to themselves and/or others to return again. There are many goodbye hugs and well wishes shared.
Today’s senryu: Last Day of Retreat
renewed spirits and
relief to move forward – yes
impermanence is
The six-hour drive home includes a lot of debriefing with car mates that had similar yet different experiences than you. Since retreatants are assigned living quarters by gender and meditation groups by chance, it’s very likely that each traveler has a different perspective on what was their favorite part of the retreat.
A Magnolia Grove retreat includes a lot of silent time. Chatter is discouraged to enhance the collective solitude for all.
However, by the third day, a routine is established and we learn when and where to take mini-breaks. New friendships are made and/or old friendships enriched.
Walked four beautiful girls, one at a time, downtown St. Louis yesterday. All available for adoption through Stray Rescue of St. Louis. Hard to imagine that they haven’t been adopted already. I can certainly vouch for each one as prime candidates for best fur friends forever: BFFF!
Life Matters 