Tuesday 31 January 2017

A Poem That I Like

When I visited the Newport Soto Zen Group the other week Val, one of the group's members, offered a reading from an English rendering of the Satapañcasatka otherwise known as Matrceta's Hymn to the Buddha. The translation is by Ven. S. Dhammika......


In Praise of Benefits Conferred

Just to hear you brings joy; 
just to look upon you calms the heart; 
your speech refreshes and your teaching frees. 

People rejoice at your birth, 
they celebrate as you grow, 
they benefit from your presence 
and sorrow in your absence. 

To praise you removes faults, 
to recollect you brings joy, 
to follow you gives understanding, 
to know you purifies the heart. 

To approach you brings good fortune, 
to serve you gives wisdom, 
to worship you dispels fear, 
to wait upon you bestows prosperity . 

You are a great lake of goodness, 
with waters purified by virtue, 
surface calmed by meditation 
and depths stilled by wisdom. 

Your form is a jewel to see, 
your speech is a jewel to hear, 
your teachings are a jewel to reflect upon. 
Truly, you are a mine bearing the jewels of goodness. 

You are an island for those swept along by the flood, 
a shelter for the stricken, 
a refuge for those in fear of becoming, 
a resort for those who aspire to liberation. 

To, all living beings 
you are a useful vessel because of your virtue, 
a fertile field because of your perfect fruit, 
a true friend because of the benefits you confer. 

You are admired for your altruism, 
charming for your tenderness, 
beloved for your gentleness 
and honoured for your many virtues. 

You are cherished because of your flawlessness, 
delightful because of the goodness of your form and speech, 
opulent because you promote the good of all, 
and blessed because you are the abode of virtues.

Friday 27 January 2017

NEW MOON - Learning in the Dark

Those possessed of profound wisdom,
who see what accords with the Way and what does not,
those who have attained to the peak of possibility,
I call great beings.

Dhammapada v. 403

The idea that we could attain to the 'peak of possibility' can inspire us on the spiritual journey. However, not many travellers on this way reach any degree of greatness without at some stage descending into despair. What is essential, is not the feeling that we are getting closer to enlightenment all the time, but the willingness to learn from all aspects of life as we live it. If we cling to lofty ideas, we programme ourselves to cling to, and thereby become lost in, the not-so lofty ones. The path of wisdom requires us to let go of all ideas, and trust in a quiet, receptive quality of awareness. Ideas come and go: the lofty and inspiring, the mediocre and mundane, and the downright depressing. If we are skilled, we learn from all of them. When we truly appreciate how matured awareness can function, we are willing to meet whatever forms of darkness we encounter, and not just take sides with struggling for the light.

Monday 23 January 2017

Zen on Freshwater Bay

Spotted this shared photo a friend posted from "Totland and Freshwater Today". The scene is Freshwater Bay in the West Wight and is very Zen....................


Creating delicately balanced piles of rocks is a wide spread Buddhist practice. Its origins are unclear but it has been a long term tradition within Korean Buddhism and Japanese Zen.

Some scholars have speculated that the piles are lay peoples emulations of stupas but others point out that stacking the stones is incidental, and it is the coordination, balance and concentration needed to control the mind and body that is the intended outcome.

Thursday 19 January 2017

Mindful Eating - A Resolution

At our most recent Sangha meeting I raised the subject of new year's resolutions and kicked things off with the perennial post Christmas diet resolution. Hands up, I need to lose weight and I have decided to do so mindfully

Yes, as a Buddhist my aim is to live as much of my life mindfully as possible, but there is actually a Mindful Diet.

I recalled reading an article on the subject a while ago in the New York Times and, after a bit of hunting around, tracked it down and have reproduced it here.................


Mindful Eating as Food for Thought By Jeff Gordinier, Feb.7, 2012

TRY this: place a forkful of food in your mouth. It doesn’t matter what the food is, but make it something you love — let’s say it’s that first nibble from three hot, fragrant, perfectly cooked ravioli.

Now comes the hard part. Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because that first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry.

Today’s experiment in eating, however, involves becoming aware of that reflexive urge to plow through your meal like Cookie Monster on a shortbread bender. Resist it. Leave the fork on the table. Chew slowly. Stop talking. Tune in to the texture of the pasta, the flavor of the cheese, the bright colour of the sauce in the bowl, the aroma of the rising steam.

Continue this way throughout the course of a meal, and you’ll experience the third-eye-opening pleasures and frustrations of a practice known as mindful eating.

The concept has roots in Buddhist teachings. Just as there are forms of meditation that involve sitting, breathing, standing and walking, many Buddhist teachers encourage their students to meditate with food, expanding consciousness by paying close attention to the sensation and purpose of each morsel. In one common exercise, a student is given three raisins, or a tangerine, to spend 10 or 20 minutes gazing at, musing on, holding and patiently masticating.

Lately, though, such experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to seep into a secular arena, from the Harvard School of Public Health to the California campus of Google. In the eyes of some experts, what seems like the simplest of acts — eating slowly and genuinely relishing each bite — could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which an endless parade of new diets never seems to slow a stampede toward obesity.

Mindful eating is not a diet, or about giving up anything at all. It’s about experiencing food more intensely — especially the pleasure of it. You can eat a cheeseburger mindfully, if you wish. You might enjoy it a lot more. Or you might decide, halfway through, that your body has had enough. Or that it really needs some salad.

“This is anti-diet,” said Dr. Jan Chozen Bays, a paediatrician and meditation teacher in Oregon and the author of “Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food.” “I think the fundamental problem is that we go unconscious when we eat.”

The last few years have brought a spate of books, blogs and videos about hyper-conscious eating. A Harvard nutritionist, Dr. Lilian Cheung, has devoted herself to studying its benefits, and is passionately encouraging corporations and health care providers to try it.

At the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, Prof. Brian Wansink, the author of “Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think,” has conducted scores of experiments on the psychological factors that lead to our bottomless bingeing. A mindful lunch hour recently became part of the schedule at Google, and self-help gurus like Oprah Winfrey and Kathy Freston have become cheerleaders for the practice.

With the annual chow-downs of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Super Bowl Sunday behind us, and Lent coming, it’s worth pondering whether mindful eating is something that the mainstream ought to be, well, more mindful of. Could a discipline pioneered by Buddhist monks and nuns help teach us how to get healthy, relieve stress and shed many of the neuroses that we’ve come to associate with food?

Dr. Cheung is convinced that it can. Last week, she met with team members at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and asked them to spend quality time with a chocolate-covered almond.


“The rhythm of life is becoming faster and faster, so we really don’t have the same awareness and the same ability to check into ourselves,” said Dr. Cheung, who, with the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, co-wrote “Savour: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life.” “That’s why mindful eating is becoming more important. We need to be coming back to ourselves and saying: ‘Does my body need this? Why am I eating this? Is it just because I’m so sad and stressed out?’ ”

The topic has even found its way into culinary circles that tend to be more focused on Rabelaisian excess than monastic restraint. In January, Dr. Michael Finkelstein, a holistic physician who oversees SunRaven, a holistic-living center in Bedford, N.Y., gave a talk about mindful gardening and eating at the smorgasbord-friendly headquarters of the James Beard Foundation in New York City.

“The question isn’t what are the foods to eat, in my mind,” he said in an interview. “Most people have a general sense of what the healthy foods are, but they’re not eating them. What’s on your mind when you’re eating: that’s mindful eating to me.”

A good place to try it is the Blue Cliff Monastery, in Pine Bush, N.Y., a Hudson Valley hamlet. At the serene refuge about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan, curious lay people can join Buddhist brothers and sisters for a free “day of mindfulness” twice a week.

At a gathering in January, visitors watched a videotaped lecture by Thich Nhat Hanh , who founded this and other monasteries around the world; they strolled methodically around the grounds as part of a walking meditation, then filed into a dining room for lunch.


No one spoke, in keeping with a key principle of mindful eating. The point is simply to eat, as opposed to eating and talking, eating and watching TV, or eating and watching TV and gossiping on the phone while Tweeting and updating one’s Facebook status.

A long buffet table of food awaited, all of it vegan and mindfully prepared by two monks in the kitchen. There was plenty of rice, herbed chickpeas, a soup made with cubes of taro, a stew of fried tofu in tomato sauce.

In silence, people piled their plates with food, added a squirt or two of condiments (eating mindfully doesn’t mean forsaking the hot sauce) and sat down together with eyes closed during a Buddhist prayer for gratitude and moderation.

What followed was captivating and mysterious. Surrounded by a murmur of clinking forks, spoons and chopsticks, the Blue Cliff congregation, or sangha, spent the lunch hour contemplating the enjoyment of spice, crunch, saltiness, warmth, tenderness and like-minded company.

Some were thinking, too, about the origins of the food: the thousands of farmers, truck drivers and labourers whose work had brought it here.

As their jaws moved slowly, their faces took on expressions of deep focus. Every now and then came a pause within the pause: A chime would sound, and, according to the monastery’s custom, all would stop moving and chewing in order to breathe and explore an even deeper level of sensory awareness. 

It looked peaceful, but inside some of those heads, a struggle was afoot.

“It’s much more challenging than we would imagine,” said Carolyn Cronin, 64, who lives near the monastery and regularly attends the mindfulness days. “People are used to eating so fast. This is a practice of stopping, and we don’t realize how much we’re not stopping.”

For many people, eating fast means eating more. Mindful eating is meant to nudge us beyond what we’re craving so that we wake up to why we’re craving it and what factors might be stoking the habit of belly-stuffing.

“As we practice this regularly, we become aware that we don’t need to eat as much,” said Phap Khoi, 43, a robed monk who has been stationed at Blue Cliff since it opened in 2007. “Whereas when people just gulp down food, they can eat a lot and not feel full.”

It’s this byproduct of mindful eating — its potential as a psychological barrier to overeating — that has generated excitement among nutritionists like Dr. Cheung.

“Thich Nhat Hanh often talks about our craving being like a crying baby who is trying to draw our attention,” she said. “When the baby cries, the mother cradles the baby to try to calm the baby right away. By acknowledging and embracing our cravings through a few breaths, we can stop our autopilot of reaching out to the pint of ice cream or the bag of chips.”

The average American doesn’t have the luxury of ruminating on the intense tang of sriracha sauce at a monastery. “Most of us are not going to be Buddhist monks,” said Dr. Finkelstein, the holistic physician. “What I’ve learned is that it has to work at home.”

To that end, he and others suggest that people start with a few baby steps. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Dr. Cheung said. “You’re not supposed to be able to switch on your mindfulness button and be able to do it 100 percent. It’s a practice you keep working toward.”

Dr. Bays, the paediatrician, has recommendations that can sound like a return to the simple rhythms of Mayberry, if not “Little House on the Prairie.” If it’s impossible to eat mindfully every day, consider planning one special repast a week. Click off the TV. Sit at the table with loved ones.

“How about the first five minutes we eat, we just eat in silence and really enjoy our food?” she said. “It happens step by step.”

Sometimes, even she is too busy to contemplate a chickpea. So there are days when Dr. Bays will take three mindful sips of tea, “and then, O.K., I’ve got to go do my work,” she said. “Anybody can do that. Anywhere.”

Even scarfing down a burrito in the car offers an opportunity for insight. “Mindful eating includes mindless eating,” she said. “ ‘I am aware that I am eating and driving.’ ”

Few places in America are as frantically abuzz with activity as the Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., but when Thich Nhat Hanh dropped by for a day of mindfulness in September, hundreds of employees showed up.

Part of the event was devoted to eating thoughtfully in silence, and the practice was so well received that an hourlong wordless vegan lunch is now a monthly observance on the Google campus. 

“Interestingly enough, a lot of the participants are the engineers, which pleases us very much,” said Olivia Wu, an executive chef at the company. “I think it quiets the mind. I think there is a real sense of feeling restored so that they can go back to the crazy pace that they came from.”

It’s not often, after all, that those workhorse technicians get to stop and smell the pesto. “Somebody will say, ‘I ate so much less,’ ” Ms. Wu said. “And someone else will say, ‘You know, I never noticed how spicy arugula tastes.’ ”

And that could be the ingredient that helps mindful eating gain traction in mainstream American culture: flavor.

“So many people now have found themselves in an adversarial relationship with food, which is very tragic,” Dr. Bays said. “Eating should be a pleasurable activity.”

Monday 16 January 2017

A Simple and Easy New Years Resolution

Some of you may recall that last June we ran a piece about mindfulness exercises. For some time I had been emailing out regular weekly mindfulness/meditation exercises to the members of the West Wight Sangha and to other friends and associates. Last New Year I introduced an additional Daily Mindfulness Exercise and post a reminder of this with each weeks email.

Quite simply, the exercise is to remember to pick up and dispose of one piece of litter every day.


So it was with interest that I read the following letter from Marion Draper in the Isle of Wight County Press just before Christmas................

"MANY will soon be making new-year resolutions, most of which will probably be abandoned before the month is out. 

How about we all make a resolution to keep the pavement, verge, gutter in front of our home, shop, business or school free of litter for the whole year? 

It will cost each of us nothing more than a minute of our time each day to do that and it will help turn our beautiful Island into one of the cleanest places to live and to visit. 

Of course, it would be wonderful if the slovenly, thoughtless people who discard all the rubbish could be persuaded not to, but that's a harder nut to crack. 

However, if we can enthuse the youngest in our communities to come up with ideas to encourage the older children and adults who do the littering to alter their behaviour, perhaps in tune we can reduce the amount of rubbish that is so carelessly discarded in the streets and countryside, sometimes no more than a few feet from a bin."

Thursday 12 January 2017

FULL MOON - Slowing Down

There are those who discover
they can completely abandon confused reactions
and become patient as the earth;
unmoved by anger, unshaken as a pillar,
unperturbed as a clear and quiet pool.

Dhammapada v. 95

For some, to slow down looks like 'losing the edge' and risk becoming irrelevant. In reality, slowing down is probably the very thing needed before we can let go of all our confusion and find true peace. Slowing down might even be needed for our survival. If we can't stop clouding our minds with compulsive thinking and constricting our hearts with irrational fears, we will continue to compromise intelligence and keep making the same mistakes. Slow or fast, though, is not really the point; seeing clearly is what matters. However, before we can see clearly we do need the subtlety of mind that recognises it is selfishness which causes all this confusion and suffering. Sitting for hours in samadhi may not be necessary, but when we are always in 'fast mode' we miss essential details.

Thursday 5 January 2017

Derek Parfit, Philosopher (and accidental Buddhist) Dies

Derek Parfit, the British philosopher who specialised in problems of personal identity, rationality,
ethics, and the relations among them, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 74.

Parfit, who was associated with All Souls College at Oxford for his entire career, rose to pre-eminence with the publication of his first paper, “Personal Identity,” in 1971.

He developed a theory of identity that downgraded the notion, and the importance, of an irreducible self — the “deep further fact,” as he called it” — in terms not dissimilar to Buddhism.

Anattā (no-self, without soul, no essence) is the nature of living beings, and this is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhism, along with Anicca (impermanence, nothing lasts) and Dukkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness is innate in birth, ageing, death, rebirth, redeath – the Saṃsāra cycle of existence).

Meditation helps one to view what is really going on within the construct which we call "me". It is ever changing, dependent for its identity upon "exterior" factors and can be seen as merely a vocalised response to sensory inputs and re-run memories and random thoughts. It is impermanent (Anicca) , it will die.

It's activities are constantly searching for fulfilment (Dukkha), the avoidance of the suffering we inflict upon ourselves when we can't escape contact with that which we dislike or get what we want.