A Fistful of Sand

Hongaku Jodo Website Click here to subscribe to our newsletter. I hate to be a downer but the facts are there is no one who has been born that can avoid sickness, aging, weakness, separation from and death of your loved ones, loss of wealth, and the hate and harm of your enemy. The poor want to become rich, the childless want to have children, the unemployed want to have a job, and so Saṃsāra goes. How many of these desperate dreams will come into being? It often seems like there is no solution to our problems. People all over the world are dying in terrible ways, car accidents, terrible diseases, mudslides, violence of war, violence of poverty, many in hopelessness take their own lives. We are constantly threatened with human extinction through nuclear, biological or climate catastrophe. Unexpected death is facing us everyday. We are taught that even though a living body can die consciousness never dies. The person manifests around this consciousness and a persona...

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...