SLBF Way of Oneness Podcast

The Greatest….

Posted on by ... in Buddhism, buddhist fellowship, Buddhist practice, salt lake city, Shin Buddhism

The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the worlds ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

Call me by my True Names

Posted on by ... in Buddhism, buddhist fellowship, Buddhist practice, salt lake city, Shin Buddhism

I love this poem from Thich Nhat Hanh

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope,
the rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive….

I am the 12-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving….

Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.[9]

Life comes to us as a great, eternal calling….

Posted on by ... in amida buddha, Buddhism, buddhist fellowship, Buddhist practice, salt lake city, Shin Buddhism

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Life comes to us as a great, eternal calling, reaching out to us, unfolding around and inside of us, while at the same time holding us, in our entirety,from the unnamable past to the unknowable future. Life’s eternal truth is our truth, just as surely as our temporal clinging and attachment to the dance of self and ego is our truth. The Buddha’s teaching emanates from deep insight into the unending mix of pain and promise that is human life. Buddha sees what we cannot see, sees that we cannot see, and out of unfathomable concern for our well being, calls out to all humankind with the equally unfathomable message of our liberation from self-imposed restrictions, anxieties and turmoil. The Nembutsu tradition, more broadly known as Pure Land Buddhism, understands the whole of the Buddhist teaching and its history as Buddha’s entreaty, Buddha’s call to us to awaken to this eternal promise, a call carried by the compassionate movement that is life itself.

– Jerry Bolick

The Path of Foolish Beings

Posted on by ... in amida buddha, Buddhism, buddhist fellowship, Buddhist practice, NASBA, nembutsu, salt lake city, Shin Buddhism

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Here is a great article in the magazine Buddhadahrma about the Shin Buddhist path.   Who are the foolish beings? According to the Shin tradition of Pure Land Buddhism, we all are. Mark Unno explains that only by becoming aware of our limited self and acknowledging our fundamental foolishness can we realize the oneness of all beings and the limitless flow of compassion.

One of the implications of the Mahayana Buddhist idea of emptiness is that the important question is not “What does it mean to be a  buddhist?” It is “What does it means to be a human being?” That’s because emptiness applies to Buddhism itself as much as it does to ordinary objects of attachment. It is only when one has been “emptied” of all preconceived categories, including those of Buddhism, that the deepest reality of being human becomes apparent. As the Zen master Dogen states, “To study the buddhadharma is to study the self. To study the self
is to forget the self.”

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