What the World Needs Now: Jnanavaca on Buddhism in the modern world.
Is that all we want from Buddhism—a nice middle-class life with a nice spirituality to go with it? Do we really quest for something more, something “beyond”? This life, this “reality”, the knowledge and experience of which is limited by our perceptions, is ‘like a dream”; and what we are to “wake up to” is the deeper reality beyond this world of our limited perceptions. —Jnanavacca, Triratna Buddhist Order, UK
The talk is from the 2016 Winter Retreat at the London Buddhist Centre. Other talks from this retreat are listed with this video on YouTube.
In the penultimate Dharma talk of the winter retreat, Singhamanas brings the buddha’s fundamental teaching of dependant arising to life with compelling stories from this world and beyond.
Is there only mind-created world, or only world-created mind? It’s both, there is both a a subjective and objective reality. Mind and world are mutually dependent and arise together.
What arises and causes ‘dukkha” or suffering is “‘tanha” or craving, thirst, urging. But this desire is not your personal desire, which is only one tiny manifestation of it. The “desire” or urging is transpersonal, it is the craving to come into being that has persisted from the beginning of the universe and persists through out lives to future lives, future manifestations of being.
Emergence: what emerges from contingent arising are states of being that are completely unanticipated. Your potential to be a Buddha is not just “you on a good day”. What emerges is something entirely new and unexpected, a new species of being. An oak tree emerges from an acorn, but there is nothing in the acorn that looks like or indicates the possibility of the tree. Beings transcend their conditioned existence, and emerge as something entirely new and spectacular. We can emerge, as buddhas, as beings that go beyond, transcend our conditioned existence. This is what makes awakening possible.
Engage! 
Recent Comments