A Fistful of Sand

Part 3 of the Visuddhimagga is called “Understanding (Paññá).” Nestled amongst the very boring and hard to understand sentences is §74 — §82. It comes across as a sort of Abhidhammic verification of the Pure Land School of Buddhism. It deals almost exclusively with the “faith devotee” described as one of the seven kinds of noble person. The list ranks them this way… (1)    The faith devotee, (2)   One liberated by faith, (3)   The body witness, (4)    The both-ways liberated, (5)    The Dhamma devotee, (6)    One attained to vision, and (7)    One liberated by understanding. Buddhaghosa cryptically ends the list by saying; “This knowledge of equanimity about formations is a condition for their being placed as these seven classes.” We can be grateful that he didn’t just leave it at that. He actual explains himself in a very clear and detailed way, in spite of the cumbersome translation. When a resolut...

If the ways of the mind were simple, its problems would be simple too and therefore easy to fathom. In showing how to end its problems, the Buddha might have opted for simple and short inst ructions. He probably would have given us a single, all-encompassing approach to whatever happens to us in the present — like what we find today in the spiritual marketplace of New Age Buddhism. We would have received from the Buddha, instead of modern gurus, a Noble Single-fold Path. It might have read, “just mindfulness,” “just concentration,” “just non-reactive awareness,” “just choiceless awareness,” or “just meditation — whatever that means in our Western enlightenment market — or even “just emptiness,” another word with a myriad of meanings depending on the teacher. Like many current self-proclaimed voices of the Buddha, he might not have bothered to teach much at all, knowing that people could easily solve their problems on their own and give credit for it. "Trust your innate natur...

Visit the Hongaku Jodo Website Click here to subscribe to our newsletter. Traditional versus Secular Buddhism. Do we need secular Buddhism and what does that mean? We have to make a decision on what “Buddhism” means. It’s a shame that the word Buddhism was not copyrighted because now everyone can put the label of Buddhism on anything they do. But that doesn’t make it Buddhism. Until we decide as a global culture and as Buddhists what the we are referring to we will continually get the hodgepodge of classical Buddhism and something sort of like but not altogether identical to Buddhism which has been branded “Secular” or “New Age” Buddhism which seems very unlike the teaching of the Buddha. We call that Mārayāna. How do we even know if we are Buddhists or not? It depends on what we focus on. It is remarkable that amongst all the Buddhists in the world we find so much in common. We have Theravada Buddhists, the Mahayana Movement, Vajrayana, the Western “Tradition —...