Foundations

Until now, I have been writing almost entirely about my own impressions, opinions, and experiences of the dharma and other, related teachings. This has been intentional and was for two reasons:

• This blog is about my journey and I didn't want to start off by verbatim quoting the masters to establish my credentials. I don't have any credentials and I don't feel the need of any. I want this blog to be about my personal take on this material and entirely accessible to everyone, even (especially!) those who have no grounding, or perhaps not even any interest, in the Buddha or his teachings. By making this as personal as I can, I hope I have thus far given you access to one human being struggling with many of the same questions you are.
• The other reason is related to the first, but slightly different. Because I want to give you the feeling that the dharma is wholly available to you and to all people everywhere, I didn't want to start out with a bunch of abstruse background that would only serve to make me sound intellectual without clarifying much of anything. It is always worth remembering what I said a few posts ago about the finger and the moon: every spiritual path worth anything leads to freedom and there are as many roads to get there as there are dust motes in the universe. The idea that you will be excluded from enlightenment if you don't subscribe to a particular dogma or don't understand some obscure point are the absurd ravings of egomaniacs. But that message is out there in every spiritual tradition, including Buddhism. There is an old Zen saying, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." (Don't those Zen folks know how to keep it light?). Of course this isn't literal, but means that if you believe you have found one solid, incontrovertible truth that is Enlightenment or Nirvana, or if you encounter a teacher who says that he or she has it (and for only $499.99 you can have it, too!), kill that image and move on. Your path is your path and while there are guideposts, only you can know what is true for you; whether or not you are moving toward true freedom.

However, my views did not arise from nowhere, and I will from time to time be acknowledging my debt to certain specific teachers under this rubric of Foundations. The following post (which I intend to put up today in addition to this one) will concern the first of these, Tara Brach's Radical Acceptance. I hope it goes without saying that all of the books and teachings I mention in these Foundations posts are well worth picking up and reading or listening to on your own.

If you are particularly interested in the series of Foundations posts, as I write them I will be listing them here for easy reference:

Radical Acceptance

Mindful Eating 

Women, Food, and God 

Pema Chödrön