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Tag: enlightened

  • Awakening Our Compassion

     From: The Places That Scare You

    By Pema Chödrön

    All beings have the capacity to feel tenderness – to experience heartbreak, pain, and uncertainty. Therefore the enlightened heart of bodhichitta is available to us all. The insight meditation teacher Jack Kornfield tells of witnessing this in Cambodia during the time of the Khmer Rouge. Fifty thousand people had become communists at gunpoint, threatened with death if they continued their Buddhist practices. In spite of the danger, a temple was established in the refugee camp, and twenty thousand people attended the opening ceremony. There were no lectures or prayers but simply continuous chanting of one of the central teachings of the Buddha:

    Hatred never ceases by hatred But by love alone is healed. This is an ancient and eternal law.

    Thousands of people chanted and wept, knowing that the truth in these words was even greater than their suffering.

    Bodhichitta has this kind of power. It will inspire and support us in good times and bad. It is like discovering a wisdom and courage we do not even know we have. Just as alchemy changes any metal into gold, bodhichitta can, if we let it, transform any activity, word, or thought into a vehicle for awakening our compassion.

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  • Fair Wind, Be Kind

    Fair Wind, Be Kind

    by Hafez

    Fair wind, be kind –
    Tell that lovely gazelle who it was
    That made me wander distraught
    Across desert sands and mountain cliffs.

    The seller of sweets,
    May she have long life –
    Why is she not generous
    To this parrot longing for honey?

    Oh flower,
    Is it your proud nature
    That keeps you aloof
    From the bird dancing around you?

    It is the beauty of one’s nature
    That nets the seekers.
    Ropes and cages never trap
    The wary bird.

    How is it that those tall beauties,
    With black eyes shining
    From faces of moonlike radiance –
    Pass me by?

    How can your face show such beauty,
    While here in Earth
    You are the image
    Of inconstancy and faithlessness?

    Hafiz –
    Your sayings draw melodies
    From the stars
    And set even the son of Mary to dance.

    While you keep the company of the enlightened
    And quaff the mystic wine,
    Forget not those, who sail upon the heavens
    As birds glide upon the wind.

    From: The Diwan of Hafiz Shirazi, Selected and Translated from the Farsi by
    Parham Noori-Esfandiari and Alan Dean Ild, Edited by Michael R. Brown

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