Dharma Wheel

UPDATE: With permission from my lama, I have made a gofundme to generate money for large offerings in addition to smaller daily offerings which I will do in my own daily practice with my own money. Question: Is it okay to post a link to my new gofundme here? would it be against some rule to make a ...

On the note of sponsoring, you can actually sponsor 100,000 butter lamp offerings at https://mahasiddha.org/prayers/index.php (option 91), but it costs $12,400.

No, in that the "intrinsic" efficacy of other forms of Dharma isn't denied; yes, in that it's held to be incredibly unlikely that anybody in this day and age has the capacity to make other forms of practice work. This is from Essentials of Faith Alone by Seikaku, Shinran's contemporary: When persons...

I'm not able to finish some important works as they keep getting delayed repeatedly due to some or other reason, and when I make a little progress very soon obstacles occur. It's like taking one step ahead and being forced to move back many steps. Constant setbacks are making me stressed, upset and...

Not trying to be flippant with respect to this point, but given the classical view that the citta can only hold one object of focus at a time (and simply switches between objects very rapidly like a single core computer processor), you’d need to have pretty great samadhi to actually remain single-po...

Avalokitesvara has become a Buddha eons ago, why is she considered a Bodhisattva? I think the Karandavyuha Sutra is relevant here when it says “he teaches the Dharma in the form of a bodhisattva to beings who are to be taught by a bodhisattva”—the form of Avalokitesvara that we’re familiar with is ...

Excellent! Excellent!

I'd hate to derail the thread but does anyone have anything about Karma Chagme and vegetarianism, or why tsok in Drikung is mostly vegetarian? Karma Chakme's "Comprehensive Critique of Meat" is available in the book "The Faults of Meat" by Geoffrey Barstow. Here is the conclusion: For all these rea...

Volume 1 of Treasury of Precious Qualities by Jigme Lingpa with the commentary by Kangyur Rinpoche would be a good one

To connect (or to make very strong connection), one needs to touch by tongue and stomach is not very convincing, either. This raises another question - Does the corpse have a lingering connection to the deceased? This practice of benefiting requires a connection. As I understand, once the sensitive...

Just to note that I entered this conversation citing Chatral Rinpoche’s view, not simply to promote a sutric viewpoint. Views within Vajrayana and Dzogchen aren’t uniformly that every ordinary practitioner can eat meat outside of tsok without fault. But of course there are many teachers and lineage...

According to many sutras, the ability to benefit beings is not limited to great masters, or to tantric methods only. For example, in "The basket's display": Yes, I didn’t mean to argue that you need to be a siddha to benefit beings. However, you generally need to have some realisation in order to p...

It seems to me like one would have to be a very good practitioner for one's prayers to send the deceased animals one is eating to a pure land... I think this is along the lines of Chatral Rinpoche’s position, that it definitely is valid for siddhas to eat meat and do such things (just like some of ...

What I find curious is the way that the ritual rules around consuming meat seem to be presented in a way that conveniently justifies developed world consumer choices. I would expect that to really practice tsok, it really demands a very high degree of seriousness, and the casualness of picking out ...

SilenceMonkey wrote: ↑Mon Mar 22, 2021 6:12 pm For what it's worth, Mipham Rinpoche compiled stories of the eight great bodhisattvas into a book titled in English: Garland of Jewels: The Eight Great Bodhisattvas.

Let’s all enjoy it free in ebook form https://dharmaebooks.org/garland-jewels/

Why stop at animals we like to eat? Some animals are food, some animals are not, and this is culturally determined. Also the Buddha determined in Vinaya what kind of meat is acceptable. Iirc, bikkhus and bikkhunis were to eat whatever is given to them even meat as long as the animal wasn't slaughte...

I was taught by my teacher that plants and trees have individual spirits. I would note that it is canonical that spirits inhabit plants and trees and may be intimately associated with them, but strictly speaking they are distinct from the plants and can move into different ones if they like. Not su...

I would also add that there are various methods given in sutra to benefit/liberate animals using their remains without eating them

Similar to coldbeer, I never do anything like shamatha or shikantaza etc. I spend 20-30 minutes per day making devotional prayers and recitations and spend the rest of the day reciting the mani and thinking of Avalokitesvara whenever I remember.

Wouldn't they tell a transmission is needed, if this was the case? They could have mentioned it within this note: This work is provided under the protection of a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution - Non-commercial - No-derivatives) 3.0 copyright. It may be copied or printed for fair use, but...