viriyalila's picture
viriyalila

Entering the Mandala

Tue, 26 Feb, 2013 - 12:40
If you like listening to these talks, this is a lovely introduction on mandalas titled: “Entering the Mandala” by Garava.

Candradasa's picture
Candradasa

Candradasa in conversation on Pagan FM

Sat, 12 Jan, 2013 - 18:11
Candradasa from the Portsmouth Buddhist Center and Dharmachakra, home of thebuddhistcentre.com and Free Buddhist Audio, in conversation with Deirdre Hebert and Jasper Salach from Pagan FM radio. A wide-ranging discussion about Buddhism, old and new, and the spirit of different religious approaches to life and death. With a little sprinkle of magic every so often!

You can hear the whole show with music here.

Recorded on Portsmouth...
viriyalila's picture
viriyalila

Salutation to the Three Jewels

Wed, 9 Jan, 2013 - 18:09
Our Sangha Night theme this month is Going for Refuge and Faith in Buddhist Practice. In a few weeks we’ll be chanting the ‘Tiratana Vandana’ - a classic Buddhist salute to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

Here’s is a recording of this well-loved chant from Free Buddhist Audio, just to give you a little taste of what’s to come.

Sangha Nights - January 2013

Candradasa's picture
Candradasa

Religion Without God, Part 4 - Magic For the Modern World

Sat, 10 Nov, 2012 - 14:50
In the final talk of our series on ‘Religion Without God’, Candradasa offers a personal look at aspects of magic in the East and West, considering its place in Buddhist history and practice and also its meeting with Christianity at the time of the Renaissance. What emerges is a picture of how magic defined in various ways can be a powerful metaphor for the everyday work of Buddhist meditation and ethical practice - with the enchantment of love and wisdom...
Candradasa's picture
Candradasa

Religion Without God, Part 3 - Death and the Biggest Questions of All

Sat, 20 Oct, 2012 - 20:57
In the third talk in our ‘Religion without God’ series, we have some big questions. When you don’t believe in an afterlife, what vision can there be around death and dying? What did the Buddha mean when he taught about karma, re-becoming and rebirth?

Here Candradasa uses Buddhist scripture, vision literature, and poetry to tease out a sense of the Buddha’s awesome vision of what life is, and how that might affect our ideas of what happens after death...
Candradasa's picture
Candradasa

Spiritual Receptivity and Just Sitting

Tue, 16 Oct, 2012 - 13:40
We’ve been touching throughout the ‘Religion Without God’ series on the idea of working in meditation to get a feel for a ‘space’ or ‘gap’ between the arising of a feeling (in response to what we take in via the senses) and our emotional/volitional response (liking, not liking, etc.). Vessantara is pretty wonderful on this kind of ‘spiritual receptivity’ work, looking to see what is present in our experience and learning how to attend to it...
Candradasa's picture
Candradasa

Religion Without God, Part 2: Sex and Morality - Going Beyond Puritanism

Fri, 12 Oct, 2012 - 22:09
In the second talk in his ‘Religion Without God’ series, Candradasa considers the origins of negative views of the body and its desires in relation to spiritual life, as seen through the prism of Puritanism and its influences.

Tracking the Platonic ideal through St. Augustine we get a sense of the conditioning we seek to move away from as Buddhists while still wrestling with the key questions posed by our own experience of the connection between desire and suffering.
...
Candradasa's picture
Candradasa

Death and the Self, and the Buddha's Unanswered Questions

Mon, 8 Oct, 2012 - 18:47
This is – as usual! – a brilliant and entertaining talk from Vaddhaka on the 10 (sometimes 14) unanswered questions I mentioned in passing in my first talk on ‘Religion Without God. I’ll probably refer to these again later in the series so I thought I’d post this talk here as a reference and resource. It also includes the wonderful story of the Buddha’s teaching about removing the poisoned arrow from your eye, as...
Candradasa's picture
Candradasa

Religion Without God, Part 1 - A Radical Community of Values

Thu, 4 Oct, 2012 - 20:31
The first talk in ‘Religion without God’, a four-part series looking at how you can have a full spiritual life as a 21st Century person without recourse to blind faith or setting yourself against the rational world we find ourselves in. The Buddha faced some of the same dilemmas as us in India in 500 BCE, and we face some new challenges with 2500 years of culture and experience in between his time and our own.

In this...
Candradasa's picture
Candradasa

Viradhamma on the Work of the Nagaloka Institute, India

Fri, 27 Apr, 2012 - 23:38
In case you missed it, here is Viradhamma talking at the Portsmouth Buddhist Center a few weeks ago about his work to support the extraordinary Nagaloka Institute project in India, which provides education and Buddhist training to young people from the some of the poorest communities in India. It was an incredibly inspiring evening and he was overwhelmed at the genrosity of the seacoast Sangha. Together with our friends at Aryaloka we provided enough in donations to...