Notes from "Ending Dukkha: Taking Care of this Precious Life (2 of 2)"
- Buddhism offers a holistic approach to alleviating Dukkha, including maximizing our overall spiritual health, working with our karma, and curing its ultimate cause.
Maximizing Our Spiritual Health.
- No matter how strong your Dharma practice is, you’re likely to experience more Dukkha when you’re not getting enough sleep, when you’re sick, when you’re stressed or overworked, or when you haven’t been maintaining supportive relationships. Taking care of yourself and your life is part of your practice.
- The value of positive human relationships to your spiritual health can’t be overemphasized.
Working with Our Karma, or Managing Our Symptoms
- You are a bundle of physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional conditions and conditioning, habits and habit energy. This bundle is both the result of the past and the cause of your future.
- understanding a change does not eliminate the need for a gradual behavioural adjustment.
Curing Dukkha’s Ultimate Cause: Our False Views
Is it true? Where did you get the view? What are the consequences of holding the view? What assumptions are the view based on?
- Even when our Dukkha is not extreme, it is a sign of lingering false views, so we continue to pay close attention to it and seek to end it.
There is a Zen saying: “First we practice for the sake of our own suffering. Then we practice for the sake of others. Finally, we practice for the sake of the Dharma.”
Added 2024-11-22.