Rational Nation USA

  "Buddhanature is the inn ate primordial freedom of the mind, which is naturally imbued with wisdom, compassion, power, and bliss."         Karl Brunnholzl "Seek first to understand, then to be understood."    Steven Covey

  We all are buddhas, right here, right now. Buddhadharma  - Siddhartha arrived at the conclusion that learning about meditation, no matter how sophisticated the education, wasn’t enough—he should really buckle down and focus on actually practicing. In this spirit, he embarked on a retreat on the banks of the Niranjana river; for six years, he took part in no activities apart from practice. However, even after this mammoth effort, he was still not fully satisfied that he had attained the type of ultimate wisdom he was after. Finally, at Bodh Gaya, he simply let it all go. He let go of practice, let go of study, let go of meditation. He let go of the path itself. He meditated with nonmeditation—he just let everything be, as it is. And at last, when he began to let it be as it is, everything came together. Overnight, he discovered the true answer he had been so ardently seeking. The answer: that there is no answer. Not only is there no answer, there’s no question. Everything is ...

  What Is Emptiness? Emptiness (in Sanskrit,  shunyata ) is a foundational doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism. It is also possibly the most misunderstood doctrine in all of Buddhism. Too often, people assume it means that nothing exists. But this is not the case. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama said, "The  existence  of things and events is not in dispute; it is the  manner in which  they exist that must be clarified." Put another way, things and events have no  intrinsic  existence and no individual identity except in our thoughts. The  Dalai Lama  also teaches that "existence can only be understood in terms of dependent origination."  Dependent origination  is a teaching that no being or thing exists independently of other beings or things. In the  Four Noble Truths , the Buddha taught that our distresses ultimately spring from thinking ourselves to be independently existing beings with an intrinsic "self." Thoroughly percei...