The Zen Studies Podcast

There are many aspects of Buddhism which suggest you ought to have deep spiritual questions – questions which are not merely intellectual, but which matter to you, personally, very much. Questions which bother you so much that you are driven to seek answers in the hope that they will bring peace of mind, or reveal better ways to think or behave, better ways to live your precious life. How can you come up with meaningful spiritual questions, or choose which of your many questions you should focus on?

Buddhism is based on seeking – seeking freedom from suffering, greater wisdom and compassion, greater skillfulness in benefiting beings, and a more authentic, connected way of being. Our spiritual growth depends on arousing and sustaining “Bodhi-Mind,” or the “Way-Seeking Mind,” which in turn generates questions, curiosity, energy, and determination. How do we arouse our Way-Seeking Mind and thereby give direction and inspiration to our practice?

Teachings like Emptiness, Buddha-Nature, Suchness, Absolute and Relative, and Mind-with-a-capital-M are challenging, and sometimes people wonder if they’re all just terms for the same thing, more or less, or whether they’re part of a long list of difficult-to-comprehend concepts we need to master as Buddhists. It may be helpful to realize that each of these classic Buddhist concepts describes Reality-with-a-capital-R, and there’s only one Reality. The concepts, therefore, are intimately related to one another, and each one emphasizes different aspects of Reality in a very useful way. In this episode I discuss Buddhist descriptions of Reality in general, and then talk about Sunyata, or Emptiness.

If we live without self-discipline – without clarifying aspirations, forming intentions, or training ourselves – our lives are unlikely to go in the direction we would like them to. Unfortunately, self-discipline is notoriously difficult! In the last episode I discussed the importance of self-discipline and some of the mistakes we make when applying it. In this episode I talk about what skillful self-discipline looks like.

If we live without self-discipline – without clarifying aspirations, forming intentions, or training ourselves – our lives are unlikely to go in the direction we would like them to. Unfortunately, self-discipline is notoriously difficult! In this episode I will discuss the importance of self-discipline and some of the mistakes we make when applying it. In the next episode (Part 2), I’ll talk about what skillful self-discipline looks like.

In Part 1 I defined what I mean by “worldly pleasure,” and then discussed five drawbacks of such pleasure as described in Buddhist teachings, and in our own experience. In this episode I talk about how - if we can engage worldly things with the mind that sees impermanence - we are not only inoculated against the many usual drawbacks of worldly pleasures, we can use every encounter we have with the world as an opportunity to practice deeply. Not only that, we actually end up engaging worldly pleasures with more appreciation and awareness.

Traditionally, the ideal of Buddhism is the renunciate monastic who forgoes worldly pleasures because they are fleeting and distract us from practice. How should a serious practitioner relate to worldly pleasures if they’re not living a renunciate lifestyle? Is it possible to fully enjoy the pleasures in our lives while maintaining a strong Buddhist practice, or are we fooling ourselves when we try to do so? In this episode I define what I mean by “worldly pleasure,” and then discuss five drawbacks of such pleasure as described in Buddhist teachings, and in our own experience.

Why aren't we just all born enlightened and avoid suffering? Or, we could ask: Why are human beings the way they are? Why did they evolve to cause so much suffering for themselves and others? If we all have Buddha-Nature, why isn’t that manifest from the beginning, and why does it get obscured so completely? Why is practice so hard if, as the teachings say, we have everything we need from the beginning?

On the meditation seat and off, we may experience significant insights - realizations that shift our perceptions of ourselves and world, and help relieve suffering. Insights may be sudden or gradual, major or minor, but we naturally want to be able to hold on them instead of forgetting them and going back to our previous way of thinking or being. Yet sometimes these insights seem to slip away or fade with time. Our effort to hold on to them sometimes causes them to recede even further. How can we integrate insights into our lives and practice?

I explore how - for some of us - explaining, dismissing, or justifying the story of the Buddha’s resistance to ordaining women (told in the Gotami Sutta) does not completely neutralize the discouraging effect of this story’s presence in the Buddhist canon. I then discuss how we can relate to this story without losing our faith in Buddhism as a path of practice.