Post Vajrayana in Kampuchea

“This is my teacher, without him I wouldn’t have this day. The Walk of Peace wouldn’t have happened. Because of his kindness, I said yes to all the monks…and took on that journey. He always stood behind me for everything that I did…”  These are the words of the Venerable Monk Pañnăkära, who along with eighteen other monks walked for 108 days, from Texas to Washington D.C., on a twenty-three hundred mile mission of peace. His humble and selfless concern for all beings above his own personal discomforts demonstrated, perhaps defined, what a Buddhist mission is all about.  Within all the Dharma circles, occasions arise for members of the sangha, monastic and lay communities, to take up a ‘mission.’ It may well be requested of you by your teacher. Or it may just come, as many good ideas do before prayers and meditation, as an ‘inspiring thing to do’—a phrase we can use here as a working definition for the word ‘mission.’ In the auspicious advent a Buddhist mission arises on our pa...

20/1 Conventional—I, me, mine—existence is suffering. It’s not a bug, it’s the main feature of our ignorance continuum. Once you realize this, then nothing is the same. The truth revealing this was pronounced over    2500 years ago. But inside us it’s always been there. Perhaps this young sage can motivate us to rediscover at least this one Noble Truth so we can do something with our lives other than that which he rails against.  Classical Buddhist analysis identifies four erroneous ways of construing a self in relation to the aggregates: identifying the aggregate as the self, regarding the self as possessing the aggregate, conceiving the aggregate as existing within the self, or the self as existing within the aggregate. This schema, found already in early discourses such as the  Saṃyutta Nikāya  and later systematized in Abhidharma literature, functions as a diagnostic tool for ego-grasping (satkāyadṛṣṭi). Tibetan scholastic traditions continue to employ this ...