The Importance of Being Yourself
You can hear a lot about selflessness in psychological and spiritual circles “just do what is needed for the other person” or “selflessness means putting your o...
Category: Buddhism
The Dharma of the sliced thumb
A post shared by Kaspalita (@kaspalita) on Dec 12, 2017 at 12:51am PST It was Thursday evening. I was still recovering from a heavy cold. It had lodged itself i...
Everything can become an offering
Late afternoon on Friday. The sun had already dipped behind the hills leaving the temple and garden in shadow, but the wide Severn valley and the distant hills ...
Paying attention to a world that is falling apart
The clouds are mostly just grey today; a flat sky that only gives up its colour and texture under close examination. I woke up at eight, to the sound of our old...
Fragile and Uncertain Creatures
On the top floor of the temple is a long, high ceilinged hallway between the residents bedrooms. The carpet is a mottled beige, worn down the centre. Dim lightb...
Living with change
Written late spring/early summer Suzuki Roshi was once asked if anything was constant in this life. He replied with one word: change. A couple of weeks ago I wa...
How accepting ‘what is’ leads to real change
Yesterday afternoon I was tired, and I was grumpy. I was upset with someone for not having behaved how I wanted them too, or how I thought I would have behaved ...
Dogma, the Kalama Sutta, and a Bad Book Review
Over the Christmas break a book review appeared on Amazon.com that amused me. It was a review of mine and Satya’s book Just As You Are: Buddhism for Fooli...
Reasonable attachments?
Are there such thing as reasonable attachments? In the training community I lived in, one of the old rules was that people should not be attached to their rooms...
Absolute Love —Total Freedom
I became a Pureland Buddhist in 2006. I didn’t know anything about Pureland Buddhism at the time. I had been practicing Buddhism for a few years, and then I met...