Shurangama Sutra
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? With the upcoming Guanyin session, many of us at CTTB will be spending the week contemplating the nature of sound. Just as the Buddha was pragmatically agnostic when questioned about a world beyond perception, the [...]
For Deleuze, time itself is always in the newness of our immediate experience. Any sense of time that we add to the present experience is a mental construct. But any mental construct is itself experienced in the newness of each moment. So as we realize ourselves foundationally, it’s always within this newness. We are constantly living in a tension created by the immediacy of sense experience and the meaning that we create through various mental constructs. [...]
The act of seeking, at this subtle level, is directly related to one of the twelve links in the Buddha’s teaching on dependent origination. The tenth link is called bhava in Sanskrit. In English, it is translated as becoming or continuation. The way in which seeking is related to this link is through its involvement in moving the mind’s attention away from the present and into the future. When we seek, we are always seeking after something in the future, because of the fact that in the present we feel discontent. [...]
Back in 2003, I first came across the original BTTS (Buddhist Text Translation Society) version of the Shurangama Sutra, which was available online. That sutra and its commentary had a profound effect on my view of the Dharma. In Master Hsuan Hua’s commentary, there were a few of his teachings that influenced me the most [...]
“Except that it robs you of who you are, What can you say about speech? Inconceivable to live without And impossible to live with, Speech diminishes you. Speak with a wise man, there’ll be Much to learn; speak with a fool, All you get is prattle. Strike a half-empty pot, and it’ll make A loud [...]
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) is a French philosopher and considered by many as one of the great thinkers of 20th century. His two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia (which he co-wrote with Felix Guattari) delivers insights into human nature and devastating critiques of capitalism. As part of a course on post-modernism and Buddhism he gave at the Graduate [...]