By Free Buddhist Audio on Mon, 4 Jun, 2012 - 21:44
In the third in our series of talks from the 2012 Triratna International Retreat, Dhammadinna evokes Ratnasambhava, the ‘Richly Endowed Buddha of the Southern Realm’…
By Candradasa on Sat, 2 Jun, 2012 - 16:18In this talk given to the Triratna Buddhist Order International Convention, 2011, Vishvapani explores and re-imagines the life and teachings of the Buddha as they have come to us through stories about him and the ancient texts that enshrine his teaching.
By Candradasa on Sat, 2 Jun, 2012 - 15:16A jewel of a talk from Dhammadinna on how to cultivate a practice of reflection on the qualities of the Buddha that is relevant to your life experience, and your own culture. Taking as her theme, ‘Re-imagining the Buddha’, she opens up several key areas for us to contemplate - not least the practice of ‘waiting’ to let the images come to us.
This talk closes with a marvellous evocation of ‘felt presence’ (so key to any...
By lokabandhu on Sat, 2 Jun, 2012 - 10:33‘Imagining the Buddha’ was probably chosen as the theme of the 2012 Triratna International Retreat thanks to the influence of a paper entitled ‘Re-Imagining The Buddha’ jointly published by Sangharakshita and Subhuti some 18 months ago. Since then it’s become a theme widely studied and debated throughout Triratna. Sangharakshita introduces it like this:
“Towards the end of August, 2010, Subhuti and I had a series of discussions centred on the topic of the imagination. I had long...
Imagining the Buddha - by Maitreyabandhu. In this talk Maitreyabandhu explores his responses to Aloka’s remarkable new Buddha Rupa in the Padmaloka shrine room. You can see a glimpse of the image itself here.
Lokabandhu (“pretending to be a journalist”) wandering amongst the 70 or so folk who have arrived early to help set up the retreat. The first of many such forays one suspects…!
“To live the Buddhist life, to become like the Buddha, we must imagine the Buddha. The goal must be embodied in our imaginations, our deepest energies gathered in an image of what we are trying to move towards.
… Imagination has direct access to its objects, in contrast to reason, which deals with concepts derived from experience. It is a means of knowing, its truths being symbolic rather than conceptual. As it matures, imagination becomes the faculty of faculties, combining and transcending reason, emotion, and the senses, whether physical or visionary.
Those who are truly creative know very well that imagination has in it something that is more than the individual. One cannot say that the poem or painting or music came from oneself, if it is at all successful; one did not will it: the creation seemed to will itself. This is important for us to understand if we wish to develop our imaginations. For the imagination to flower we must suspend our willing and allow something new to arise from beyond our conscious identity”.
