Buddhist Centre Features
Buddhist Centre Features

Beauty and Environmental Action (The Dharma Toolkit Podcast, Episode 41)

By Centre Team on Sat, 17 Jul, 2021 - 17:05

Join us for a deep dive into the relationship between art, aesthetics, the environment, and the inner life of people, objects and houses! In this episode we discuss the current ecological and biodiversity crises with an artist and a poet, asking how an appreciation and fuller understanding of beauty itself can help us take action in our own lives.

Be prepared to have your notions of “the beautiful” challenged and, hopefully, also affirmed as we range with our guests Padmacandra and Vilokini...

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The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

In the Footsteps of the Buddha at Rivendell (The Dharma Toolkit Podcast, Episode 38)

By Centre Team on Thu, 25 Mar, 2021 - 14:54

Live from Forest House near Rivendell Retreat Centre in the UK - we’re not sure a podcast setting gets any more mythic than that!

Our friends Mandarava and Nagasiddhi are running an online Home Retreat for us - with amazing puppets, original artwork for the event, and an abundance of magic images illustrating tales from the life of the Buddha. And you are invited!

Register for a space on ‘In the Footsteps of the Buddha’

Meditation,...

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These Are The Moments (The Dharma Toolkit Podcast, Episode 32)

By Centre Team on Fri, 11 Sep, 2020 - 21:36

Hello again! We’re back for a new season of The Dharma Toolkit podcast. We’ve had a wee break, passed through fleeting summer, and are turning towards the first fall/autumn of these strange, pandemic times ready to renew our own sense of connection through community with you. Welcome aboard!

We begin again by following up and extending our previous mini-series ‘The Many Jewels: Buddhism, Writing and the Arts’ about the place of poetry and art in forming a response...

Buddhist Centre Features
The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

Into the Dark Wood (The Dharma Toolkit, Episode 30)

By Centre Team on Wed, 24 Jun, 2020 - 01:58

Join us for a walk into the forest of the unknown. Enchantments await. Groves of images. Bridges to the unseen. A path that wanders lost until some deeper magic happens…

We are back in the realm of art and the making of images, the making of things, the making of meaning. Nagasiddhi’s trainings in technical sculpture, prop design and building, the rituals of puppetry, and carpentry with wood left by his father long ago - all these have prepared him for a...

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The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

The River Under the River (The Dharma Toolkit, Episode 27)

By Centre Team on Tue, 26 May, 2020 - 22:27

“Deserving a place in a realm where miracles happen”

Let’s start with this image: there’s a river under the river. Then follow it via the works of William Stafford and the creative lives of members of the Wolf at the Door group: poets and writers exploring the interplay of modes of attention in their chosen art forms, mediated by the practice of Buddhism.

The wolf is there too. Alive and real and, sometimes, scary. But this...

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The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

Ironic Points of Light (The Dharma Toolkit Daily, Episode 25)

By Centre Team on Sat, 9 May, 2020 - 00:21

Shimmering images, and no less shimmering experiences. Today’s episode begins a series on beauty, poetry, myth, art and symbol as a response to crisis.

Taking our cue from W.H. Auden’s poem, September 1st, 1939, and his recognition of the need to “love one another or die”, we ask how, in the midst of fear – even of death – we can exercise our agency as human beings.

Poetry leads the way in and out of the questioning. Joining Auden in the...

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The Community Toolkit for Uncertain Times

Painting Into Reality (The Dharma Toolkit Daily, Episode 14)

By Centre Team on Sun, 12 Apr, 2020 - 01:05

Abhayavajra loves painting. He loves paint itself. And sees himself more like an archaeologist, revealing something urgent and crucial about the human condition by adding rather than scraping away layers. 

A totally delightful conversation about the quest to integrate and unite Dharma practice with the steady, disciplined practice of an art form. We discuss how appreciating beauty itself is like a healing force at times of stress; and how art itself can be a properly adequate response to suffering in the kind...

Buddhist Centre Features
Buddhist Centre Features

Abhaya On Beauty and The Imagination as Ways to Liberation - New Podcast

By Centre Team on Wed, 24 Jan, 2018 - 14:51

A deep-dive of a conversation between Abhaya and Satyalila, framing the practice of the Dharma as a path towards beauty, letting go, and liberation of the heart and mind. 

Abhaya speaks frankly about the very early days of the FWBO (now Triratna) and how his understanding of Urgyen Sangharakshita’s systematic approach has evolved alongside his personal connection to his teacher and friend. We also hear how his early inspiration around the Tibetan text translated as ‘Self Liberation Through Seeing with Naked...

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London Buddhist Centre Autumn Magazine

London Buddhist Centre Autumn Magazine

By Aryanisha on Mon, 7 Aug, 2017 - 16:38

Each season the London Buddhist Centre publishes a wonderful magazine and programme packed full of great articles, poems, images and more.

In this edition we are treated to a celebration of the children and families in the Sangha, paintings by Kusalasara, a poem by Vishvantara, a cartoon strip on hindrances to meditation, banker-turned-Buddhist fundraiser Amalavajra, from FutureDharma Fund, on love and money, and music maker Tim Exile features in the latest instalment of Diary of a London Buddhist.

You can also follow the ...

Free Buddhist Audio
Free Buddhist Audio

Dharmabyte: The Spiritual Value of the Arts

By Rijupatha on Mon, 12 Oct, 2015 - 11:00

Today’s FBA Dharmabyte introduces one of the more unique of the Six Emphases of Triratna in a talk entitled “The Spiritual Value of the Arts”. From the talk “The Six Distinctive Emphases of the FWBO, Sangharakshita speaks about the importance that the arts have in cultivating sensitivity to beauty and inspiration in the spiritual life.

Talk given at Padmaloka Retreat Centre, 2002.

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