Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Analogies
David
A human residing in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Ancestral territory of the Erie, Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Mississauga and Neutral First Nations Veteran
I don't really know why I started this thread but I just thought of an analogy and thought we could use a thread for random analogies.
You may beg to differ.
The self is like a black hole.
Nobody has seen one directly but they affect everything around them.
2
Comments
philosophy is like a pot to pot a plant. You can change the living heart of the plant into a bigger pot. But the pot is nothing without that heart. The mind/heart is the plant and the philosophy is the pot. various pots are different in appearance.
The mind is like a cathedral filled with petty parishioners.
It was like there was a small sun in my chest radiating happiness and joy.
The Buddha's teachings/Suttas are full of analogies. They're an excellent way to impart teachings in ways that are easily comprehensible...
Simpsapa Sutta
Sona Sutta
The twin arrows
The lighthouse
The monk carrying the woman across the stream
The raft
The samurai Heaven/hell
The nails in the fence
to name but a few analogical teachings....
I love some of the Vajrayana anologies/symbols.
So enlightenment is YAB-YUM
. . . the merging of wisdom and compassion.
That is the most amazingly extraordinary picture, @lobster. I find it breathtakingly beautiful.... Thanks for sharing.
^^^ It took me long time to find it. Most of the YAB-YUM pictures are of a smaller female with a larger male in sexual congress. I did once come across a large Tara with a smaller male consort. Not appropriate.
The magical hermaphrodite image is far more balanced and I would suggest less gender biased and might be one of the ways a Western Tantra is eventually increasingly depicted.
Personally I respond well to visual imagery. I would suggest that finding this internal yin/yang balance is part of the process of the Middle Way. Even though Yin/Yang is not specifically a Buddhist dharma . . . I feel it has tremendous value . . .
"Just as when boys or girls are playing with little sand castles:[4] as long as they are not free from passion, desire, love, thirst, fever, & craving for those little sand castles, that's how long they have fun with those sand castles, enjoy them, treasure them, feel possessive of them. But when they become free from passion, desire, love, thirst, fever, & craving for those little sand castles, then they smash them, scatter them, demolish them with their hands or feet and make them unfit for play."
Satta Sutta
In vajrayana male is compassion and female is wisdom.
Digha Nikaya 21, Sakka-pañha Sutta
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.21.2x.than.html
We are beggars.
We come to the dharma full. We steal, we beg, we take more. Eventually we end up with Nothing. Then we stand on the corner with an empty bowl.
We are beggars.
I don't think so @lobster... I just don't get what you are saying. For me there is mindfulness of feeling and breathing every day again and again. also teachings..
the teaching for me is 'getting off on the right foot' with Buddhas on the tip of your nose.
then giving such as filling water bowls.
forgot the other five sorry
but seriously there is endless material to study. How do you feel? Maybe I can help or commiserate?
Ah someone who has been enriched.
Great now you have offerings to give away, so then your bowl is full?
and now back to the alms race . . .
I have been enriched yes. My bowl is ok. I have the second bottle of wine between 2 to be honest. Nothing magic. Just wondered why anything was 'bad'. Good question what my offering is?? Murky. I have no idea what steotypical thinking... seriously I am assuming you are making an effort to practice and wonder what is normal.
My offering is to just do your best. good lord. meditate and be well