A Fistful of Sand

Hongaku Jodo Website Click here to subscribe to our newsletter. Dr. Masaru Emoto has experimented on water for more than a decade. He proved that water can sense, comprehend, see, and listen. It seems that water can understand our minds. He found that water can respond to writing, language, music, and even peoples’ minds. If someone feels love and writes the word “Love” in different languages and stick the paper on a bottle of water for water to “see” it and later freeze the water bottle. When looking at the water under a microscope, we will see beautiful water crystals. If the write the word “Hate” in any language, the water crystals seemingly become ugly to some people. Water also seems to listen to & understand music. When classical music is played the water crystals become beautiful. Say words like, “I hate you” or “I don’t like you” to water, the crystals become what is usually described as ugly. This seems to prove, at least to some, that water is a living org...

Nothing exists outside of the way we think of it; yet at the same time, nothing exists the way we think of it. The way we experience “things,” through the six consciousnesses and five aggregates, means that we are sentient beings. We have sensations, we think, we have views and prejudices. On the other hand, because on a deeper level reality also lays outside of our usual experience, the things we experience exist well beyond what we think of as our personal experience. The way we experience existence is the way we think about it, the way we perceive it; and the way our mind interprets it also determines how we cling to it or run from it, and the way we are conscious of it. Our experience of reality is what we experience in our mind, the way we think of it. This is a function of what the Buddha called conditional reality.  There is another reality that is far vaster than anything we can now know — transcendent reality. Intellectually we can all understand this reality. Al...

The terms  Hinayana  (Small Vehicle) and  Mahayana  (Great Vehicle) are unknown to Pali literature. They are absent from the Pali Canon (Tripitaka) and the Commentaries on them. Not even in the Dipavamsa and the Mahavamsa, Pali Chronicles of Ceylon, use this term. The Dipavamsa (about the 4th Century A.D.) and Pali Commentaries mention Vitandavadins, apparently a sect of dissenting Buddhists holding somewhat “unorthodox” beliefs respecting some aspects of the Buddha’s teaching. The Vitandavadin and the Theravadin both quote the same authorities and name the sutras of the Tripitaka in order to support their opinions, the only difference being in the approach they take in their analysis. The Mahavamsa (dated from the 5th Century A.D.) and a Commentary on the Abhidhamma both discuss the Vetulla, or Vetulyavadins (Sanskrit: Vaitulyavadin), instead of Vitandavadin. From the internal evidence of the texts, it may not be wrong to consider that these two expressions, Vi...