An Illuminating Millennial Resolution

Making enlightenment a priority. My friend Joseph Goldstein, the Insight Meditation teacher, and I were eating breakfast together in Boston's Copley Square recently--discussing our writing projects, our pilgrimages, and our late Asian gurus. Then we fell upon the inevitable subject of what we will be doing on the millennial eve. Cultures use many different calendars. While Jews are marking the year 5760, for my Tibetan friends, it is the Earth Rabbit Year, the 2126th year of their reckoning. Therefore, I doubt that everything in our world will change overnight as the apocalypticists predict,...

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Whether elaborate or spartan, what a true home altar really needs is attention and faith. Q: I would like to create a home shrine. What are the essentials of a true Buddhist altar? Tibetans often have amazing altars in their temples and homes, but I would like to have something simpler, so I'm looking for the basics. A: I love altar practice. My home shrine helps focus my spiritual practice and create sacred space, and my meditation seat in front of the altar invites me to daily practice. Not that you need an altar or other kinds of props for following the path of awakening, but altars are a beautiful,...

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What happens when you withdraw from the world and concentrate on spiritual practice? Q. I heard you were in meditation retreat for six years. What is the purpose of Buddhist retreat and what was it like? A. A retreat is like an extended Sabbath, a holy time dedicated to spirit and reflection. In the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, a Sabbath was built into each week to provide a regularly scheduled time for people to let go of work and ordinary concerns and turn their hearts and minds toward spiritual matters. Many Buddhist cultures do the same: in southeast Asia, for example, the days...

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In a selection from his new book, Surya Das shows just how practical it is to view everything as a blessing. All Buddhist teachers, and I am no exception, point out that all of our happiness as well as all of our despair arise from the mind. When we search for happiness and an end to suffering, the only place to look is within the mind itself. We each contain within ourselves all that we need for personal joy, bliss, wisdom, equanimity, and peace. There is no reason to look to externals or anywhere else. When one truly embraces this thought, there is nothing to fear. We are truly free. Until...

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How would Buddha love? By seeing everything as fundamentally like himself If one's thoughts towards spirituality were of the same intensity as those towards love, one would become a Buddha in this very body, in this very life." --from the Love Poems of the Sixth Dalai Lama   Valentine's Day is one of my favorite American holidays. The fact that this heart-centered if over-commercialized day falls around the same time as Tibetan New Year reminds me to make new year's resolutions relating to those I love and renew my commitment to cultivating goodness of heart. These resolutions usually...

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