In at least two respects, the teachings of the Buddha were quite remarkable. In the first place, he insisted on the virtue of moderation. He
Tag: Buddhism
Why the Buddha Left Society
‘The Buddhist Scriptures tell us that when Gotama was twenty-nine years old, he saw for the first time an Old man, a Sick Man, a
Camelford Ch’an Week Retreat (North Cornwall)
Numbers vary dramatically, but as we are not a commercial enterprise, this is of no interest. There is always a strong inner core that keeps the teachings of Master Xu Yun (1840-1959) alive in the UK. We have been asked to Hong Kong and China in recent years, and these are invitations we intend to honour in the near future. Our last Ch’an Week Retreat (in the Sai Kung area) of Hong Kong, attracted over 50 participants in 1999, and we had to abandon the building and sit in the beautiful countryside.
Dharma Realm
The Dharma Realm is the realisation that the entirety of existence is interconnected, and this interconnectedness is premised upon the fact that all things exist (and pass away) with a profound emptiness.
Buddhism: Hinayana and Mahayana Notions of Emptiness! (10.12.2014)
Through the work of Nagarjuna, the Mahayana movement developed the interpretation that physical matter is ‘empty’ of any substantiality. This is due to Nagarjuna applying his tetra lemma (catuskoti) formula to the assessment of the ‘Chain of Dependent Origination’ (Pratītyasamutpāda), and logically proving that just as the true enlightened state has no-self associated with it; then it is also equally true that physical matter has no substantiality associated with it. Everything is dependent upon everything else, conditioned by everything else, and contingent upon everything else.
Buddhism and China’s Spiritual Beliefs
China has never had the Western notion of secularism – where spirituality is separate from everyday life – nor the convention that the nobility are separate from the clergy, etc.