Roots in the Sky- Tuesday
Online Retreat: Roots in the Sky
Tuesday 25 January
8am
Salute to the 3 Jewels
Refuge verses from the Avatamsaka Sutra
Teaching from Padmasambhava
Unled meditation with bells to mark 5 stages
I take my Refuge in the Buddha
And pray that with all beings
I may understand the Great Way
Whereby the Buddha-seed may forever thrive.
I take my Refuge in the Dharma
And pray that with all beings
I may enter deeply into the Sutra-Treasure
Whereby our wisdom may become vast as the ocean.
I take my Refuge in the Sangha
And pray that with all beings
I may be brought together in Great Harmony
And have nothing to check the unimpeded progress of Truth.
Take measure of your wandering thoughts,
and steady as Mount Meru, enter into meditation.
from Padmasambhava’s Advice and Admonition to the Revealers of Treasures
10.30 am
Talk by Bodhilila
Standing
Walking
Avalokitesvara mantra
Sitting
Padmasambhava mantra
How surely gravity’s law,
Strong as an ocean current,
Takes hold of even the strongest thing
And pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing –
Each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
Push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees…..
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
by Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love poems to God
‘when you know where you are starting from, you are in a position to perceive the choices before you, which gives you a certain degree of freedom. It isn’t absolute freedom – you can’t choose your starting point – but you are free to choose what you make of your situation. Where you are is less important than whether you know where you are……
Buddhism is presented as a path or way, but this is only a manner of speaking. The path is a symbol, representing the fact that we can change, we can develop. If we know what we are now and what we can become, we can take steps to effect that transition.
…. we develop the path. It is not something out there, an objective thing. We are the path. If we think of it as something out there, like a road or track, we may get stuck with an unhelpful notion of the spiritual discipline required in order to follow it. One is not following the Buddhist path if one feels that one is being driven along it like a sheep, rather wishing one could stray off and have a nibble on some succulent wayside shrub or flower…….
the path itself is not out there; it is in here. There is no question of forcing yourself to follow a particular track or go in a particular direction. The path simply represents the individual solution to your particular predicament. If you know and understand yourself as you are now, that puts you in a position to develop in your own way. The path is you in the process of organising your mental states in such a way that growth and development will take place in a positive direction.’
from Path as Symbol, Sangharakshita
4pm
Q&A with Paramananda
Meditation led by Paramananda
Just as is the case with the sesame seed being the cause of the oil and milk being the cause of butter, but where the oil is not obtained without pressing and the butter is not obtained without churning, so all sentient beings, even though they possess the actual essence of Buddhahood, will not realize Buddhahood without engaging in practice.
from Self Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness (a terma text of Padmsambhava)
