The Way Out of Suffering: Wonderment & Seeing the World As it Is {video}

There is so much more than our time on Facebook or our favorite shows on TV or Netflix. The universe is bigger than our bad day at work or our disagreements with our ex-spouses or our current spouses.

 

By Daniel Scharpenburg

Cultivating the Empty Field is a book I really like.

There is a section in here with a quote by Zen Master Hongzhi: “All things are innately amazing beyond description. Perfect vision has no gap. In mountain groves, grasslands and woods, the truth has always been exhibited.”

That’s what this video talk is about—the sense of wonder we get when we just start paying attention. We get caught up in our problems and a lot of the time we just don’t see the wonder in our lives. One of the reasons people like to go into the mountains or go look at the ocean is to see that there is so much that is bigger than us and bigger than our everyday problems.

There is so much more than our time on Facebook or our favorite shows on TV or Netflix. The universe is bigger than our bad day at work or our disagreements with our ex-spouses or our current spouses.

Buddhism often gets a bad reputation for being negative with The Four Nobles Truths and the idea that life is about suffering, but Buddhism also shows us that life is about being present and wonder. There is a way out of suffering.

There is great wonder in nature, but the truth is there’s great wonder everywhere, all the time. We just have to slow down and pay attention to see it.

 


Quotes are taken from “Cultivating the Empty Field, The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi” by Taigen Dan Leighton, which you can get here:

 


 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

Did you like this post? You might also like:

 

The Buddha’s Story Includes Women

  By Michelleanne Bradley I have been revisiting the story of Siddhartha Gautama’s enlightenment, because I love the story. I do call Siddhartha’s enlightenment a story because there are so many versions, none of them were recorded for social media, and we know...

How To Study Dharma

By Reginald Ray, Ph.D.   In Buddhism, an ever-deepening understanding unfolds naturally from intellectual study. This process is classically expressed in the teaching of the three prajnas, or kinds of knowledge—hearing, contemplating and meditating. The first...

Matters of the Heart: The Heart Knows What it Wants {Part Two}

  By Indira Grace Emily Dickinson once wrote, “The heart wants what it wants-or else it does not care” in a letter to her friend Mary Bowles in the spring of 1862. Mary’s husband had gone away for a while and her friend, Emily, took some time to offer her...

That Breathing Thing: What to Remember Before You Burn The Bridge

  By Kellie Schorr My father worked for a defense contractor so we moved every two years. They weren’t little moves from one side of town to the other. They were big honking cultural change kinds of moves---the Marshall Islands to North...

Comments

comments