No Thing There’s a story told of a Bodhisattva who went to the mountains to meditate and teach. He had special powers, such as flying and hearing people’s thoughts. He built a Sangha, and five hundred holy men came to there. One day, when the chief follower brought half the community into the woods to gather food, the Bodhisattva lay down to die. As was the tradition, those who had remained behind sat with him, and as the end came near, they asked him, “What was the greatest thing you achieved in your lifetime?” “No thing,” their teacher said. Then he died. Nothing? Their teacher accomplished nothing? He must have…
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No Forgiveness In Buddhism
In Buddhism, There Is No Forgiveness A few months ago, I attended a webinar in which the presenter stated that, in Buddhism, there is no forgiveness. This was not an idea I’d heard before. Because the presenter did not explain what she meant by this, I tried to guess. Could it be that if we dwell in the present moment, the past is gone, so forgiveness is unimportant? I thought of the story of the two monks who were walking along a road. They came to a river. There stood a woman, dressed in finery, looking uncertainly at the rushing water. She asked the monks to carry her across. The…
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Falling and Faithfulness
The Pain of Falling It hurts to fall. Sometimes, when the pain of falling is intense, we lose our faith. Part of what a chaplain does is to sit with those who have crashed and shattered. If we’re lucky, we can offer them the possibility of a way back home, to a new kind of wholeness. We invite them to see, in the distance, a glimmer of a path. Recently, I was struck by the intensity of the fear and agony described by one woman with whom I visited. She had been doing fine, her life drifting along like a lazy river. Now and then, troubles bubbled into a whirlpool…
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The Light of Enlightenment
An Experience of Enlightenment Years ago, as I was listening to my spiritual director talk about the universe, I suddenly saw the universe inside her heart. Like Wordsworth, who saw the world in a grain of sand, I saw the universe as the size of a fist. In that moment, I understood that time and space don’t really exist, that the universe is immensely vast, but incredibly small at the same time. If we could comprehend this and learn to work with the energies that existed, we could cross to where star number 090423 exploded. In 2009, the light from this star reached the space-based Swift satellite. Using redshift analysis,…