Buddhism As Education

When we live with another person, to protect each other's happiness, we should help one another transform the internal formations that we produce together. By practicing understanding and loving speech, we can help each other a great deal. Happiness is no longer an individual matter alone. If the other person is not happy, we will not be happy either. To transform the other person's knots will help bring about our own happiness as well. A wife can create internal formations in her husband and a husband can do so in his wife and if they continue to create knots in each other, one day, there will be no happiness left. In this case, as soon as a knot is created, the wife, for instance should know that a knot has just been tied onto her. She should not overlook it. She should take the time to observe it and with her husband's help, transform it. She might say, "darling, I think we would better discuss a conflict I saw growing". This is easy when the states of...

Anger is an unpleasant feeling. It is like a blazing flame that burns up our self-control and causes us to say and do things that we will regret later. When someone is angry, we can see clearly that he or she is abiding in hell. Anger and hatred are the materials from which hell is made. A mind without anger is cool, fresh and sane. The absence of anger is the basis of real happiness, the basis of live and compassion. When our anger is placed under the lamp of mindfulness, it immediately begins to lose some of its destructive nature. We can say to ourselves, "Breathing in, I know that anger is in me. Breathing out, I know that I am my anger". If we follow our breathing closely while we identify and mindfully observe our anger, it can no longer monopolize our consciousness. Awareness can be called upon to be a companion for our anger. Our awareness of our anger does not suppress it or drive it out. It just looks after it. This is a very important principle. Mindfulness ...

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in the sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain, without rain, the trees cannot grow, without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. "Interbeing" is the word that is not in the dictionary yet but if we combine the prefix "inter" with the verb "to be", we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are. If we look into the sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we ...

Penetration means to enter something, not just to stand outside of it. when we want to understand something, we cannot just stand outside and observe it. We have to enter deeply into it and be one with it in order to really understand it. If we want to understand a person, we have to feel their feelings, suffer their sufferings and enjoy their joy. Penetration is an excellent word. The word "comprehend" is made up of the Latin roots "com", which means "together in mind" and "prehendere" which means "to grasp it or pick it up". To comprehend something means to pick it up and be one with it. there is no other way to understand something. If we only look at the sheet of paper as an observer, standing outside, we cannot understand it completely. We have to penetrate it. we have to be a loud, be the sunshine and be the logger. If we can enter it and be everything that is in it, our understanding of the sheet of paper will be perfect...

Our feelings play a very important part in directing of our thoughts and actions. I us, there is a river of feelings, in which every drop of water is a different feeling and each feeling relies on all the others for its existence. To observe it, we just sit on the bank of the river and identify each feeling as it surfaces, flows by and disappears. There are three kinds of feelings, pleasant, unpleasant and neutral. When we have an unpleasant feeling, we may want to chase it away. But it is more effective to return to our conscious breathing and just observe it, identifying it silently to ourselves: "Breathing in, I know there is an unpleasant feeling on me. Breathing out, I know there is an unpleasant feeling on me". Calling a feeling by its name, such as anger, sorrow, joy or happiness, helps us identify it clearly and recognise it deeper. We can use our breathing to be in contact with our feelings and accept them. If our breathing is light and calm, a natural result ...

For the next prison, we want to mention being deceived by the thing known as "saiyasatr". All superstitious formalities and beliefs are saiyasatr. The more ignorance there is, the more one lacks correct knowledge, then the more trapped one is in superstitious prison. Now, education and science (vidayasatr) has improved, which has led to a better understanding of natural truths and of all things. Still there remains too much entrapment in superstitious prisons, It is a personal thing. Some people are caught in different degrees and ways, but we can say that there are still people caught in the prison of saiyasatr, trapped by superstition. Although, in general, superstition has diminished greatly due to the progress of science, there is still quite a bit of saiyasatr left in the temples and churches. Please forgive us for saying so, but the place we can find superstition the most are in churches and temples and in those kind of places. Although superstition has lessene...