Manchester Buddhist Centre

Dayamala has heard some inspir­ing Dharma talks at the Tri­r­atna Buddhist Com­munity Inter­na­tional Retreat, and we can hear them too!

The mar­velous Clear Vis­ion crew are upload­ing the retreat’s talks to Video­Sangha as the week­end pro­gresses — the first is already avail­able, and more on their way

Dayamala writes …

Sunday after­noon — beau­ti­ful sun­shine today with a very strong wind which I’m thor­oughly enjoy­ing and feel ener­gised by. How­ever it is also uproot­ing some of the poles keep­ing the main shrine mar­quee upright!

I went to Jnanavaca’s group fol­low­ing his talk — the quantum phys­ics workshop!

We began look­ing at a glass of hot water and tried to describe what we were see­ing. What is it? What’s out there? (a more object­ive dimen­sion) and what’s going on? what can we know? (a more sub­ject­ive dimension).

We were left with the cliff­hanger, grossly sim­pli­fy­ing and para­phras­ing, that a particle changes its beha­viour if it knows it’s being observed! I found all this mind­blow­ing. Even my response to the ori­ginal ques­tions about the glass of water was: I don’t know. I really do not know what it really is!

I woke up with Padmasambhava’s exhorta­tion to real­ise “I do not know, I do not have, I do not under­stand” on my mind!

Cel­eb­rat­ing the Buddha’s Enlightenment

Fant­astic storytelling of the Buddha’s Enlight­en­ment last night with three young chil­dren becom­ing Buddhas! Vajra­mudita was one of the Maras, and Cara, her daugh­ter, one of Mara’s daugh­ters try­ing to dis­tract the Buddha-to-be! This was fol­lowed by a very rich and inspir­ing puja to Shakyamuni.

Today’s chop­ping for me was gar­lic, gar­lic and more gar­lic. The smell on my hands has already disappeared!

Con­sumer­ism and the three laksanas

This morn­ing Vajradar­shini gave a very good talk on Everything mat­ters — turn­ing con­sumer­ism on its head.

She looked at, amongst many things, the three lak­sanas — marks of con­di­tioned exist­ence — imper­man­ence, insub­stan­ti­al­ity and unsat­is­fact­or­i­ness, in rela­tion to con­sumer­ism. She talked about the her­mit not turn­ing away from what is, so how can we bring a fla­vour of that her­mit qual­ity to our con­sumer­ist lives?

She encour­aged us to turn towards things rather than away from, to see the beauty in things — even in terms of Wabi Sabi — the “flawed” (my word) — that things repaired in Wabi Sabi have a lot of value because of the care someone has taken to repair them.

She sug­ges­ted that the more we turn to the lak­sanas, we go through the doors of lib­er­a­tion con­nec­ted with them:

• the sign­less, free­dom from labelling, which she sug­ges­ted brought a vivid­ness to our experience
• the door of open­ness, free of lim­it­a­tions and divi­sion which brings a mys­tery to our experience
• and the door of the wish­less, free­dom from wish­ing things to be dif­fer­ent, a will­ing­ness to be with what is

She star­ted with a red tank top and fin­ished with pota­toes and you’ll have to listen to see what else there was in between! How excellent!

All for now, I’m going for a cuppa before the next mind-blowing ses­sion with Jnanavaca!

Metta to all from this won­der­fully pos­it­ive retreat!