For 30 Years the Best of Buddhism in America:
Meditation If any one thing defines the Shambhala Sun it is the practice of meditation. Meditation is the path by which we all might awaken to the true nature of mind and bring wisdom and compassion into our lives. And so we conclude our 30th anniversary series with a selection of great meditation teachings from the pages of the Sun.
The following articles are excerpted in our January 2010 issue. Here you can read them in their complete, original forms. Just click any article's title to start reading now.
Thich Nhat Hanh offers a guided meditation
to relax our body and mind and return to the here and now. Fully
present, fully alive, we find we are already home.
Joseph Goldstein on how three principles of
meditation can be applied to the world's conflicts. The method is
mindfulness, the expression is compassion, and the essence is wisdom.
“Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible," says Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. "Just by sitting and doing nothing, we are doing a tremendous amount.”
The ability to dissolve thoughts is
essential to attaining liberation, says renowned Dzogchen teacher
Chökyi Nyima Rinpoche. Devotion and Pure Perception are two principles
that lie at the root of Vajrayana practice that lead beyond confusion
to thought-free wakefulness.
“In subtle and in more obvious ways, the
experience of birth and death is continuous," says Judy Lief. "All that
we experience arises fresh, appears for a time, and then dissolves. It
is as if we were riding the crest of a wave in the middle of a vast
ocean. That arising and falling of experience is our life; it is what
we have to work with.”
A complete spiritual practice—or even just
a healthy, satisfying life—requires working with both body and mind.
Cyndi Lee and David Nichtern explain why yoga practice and Buddhist
meditation is the perfect mind-body combination.
Rebirth and karma are the Buddhist beliefs
that Westerners find hardest to accept. Yet are they really so foreign
to us? If we look at our own experience, we find that thoughts,
emotions, and self-images are continually arising, ending, and being
reborn. We see that the seeds we plant in our consciousness in one
moment will determine what we experience in the next. This is also what
we experience as we go from lifetime to lifetime. Therefore, says Tulku
Thondup Rinpoche, we should be concerned above all else with creating
positive karma to lay the ground for our future enlightenment.
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche on meditation, the spiritual path, and a sense of basic being beyond relative time
The
Zen practice of just sitting, says Lewis Richmond, doesn’t help us to
reach our destination. It allows us to stop having one. But how do you
“go” nowhere?
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