Who is dharma

The spoken dharma is infinitely more nuanced, evocative, and communicative than anything written could be. It carries an abundant and pregnant burden of meaning that is instantly received in its totality by the listeners.

Hearing Sri Lankan, Zen or Tibetan monks chant a Buddhist sutta is an entirely different experience from reading it in print. Through the recitation, a world is suddenly opened and we are immesed in an atmosphere and a feeling that are complete.

In listening the dharma, it is not so unusual to hear a teacher describe a scene, say, from the life of the Buddha, and to find ourselves, before the description is half begun, feeling the coolness of the Indian night and smelling its rich, sweet and pungent scents. It is true that, beginning the in the first century BCE, the dharma began to be written down and now exists in tens of thousands of pages in the various Asian canons. At the same time, it is important to remember that the dharma as teaching is most fundamentally a spoken truth, of which the written word is an analogue and a support.

Particularly for Western Buddhists, the written word is often the initial gate to the vast world of dharma within. Often a book leads us to encounter a Buddhist teacher from whom we may hear the dharma in oral form. Often that teacher encourages us to undertake the path, engaging in the practice of meditation.

This, in turn, begins to lay bare the raw and rugged character of our ordinary lives. As we make a fuller and fuller acquaintance with our lives, we may begin to sense the background of awareness that runs like a thread through all our experience.

As our sense of this awareness-known as buddhanature-deepens, we begin to realize that, more than anything else, this is who we most fundamentally are and always have been. At this point, we have journeyed from seeing that dharma as an interesting book to discovering the eternal dharma as the final truth of our own inherent nature. The entire path, then, is encompassed and summarized in this single word. Reginald A.

Ray, Ph. By using our website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our cookies usage. About Reginald Ray Reginald A. Amalasiddhi talks about his life as a Buddhist. The Dhamma , as taught by the Buddha , is about overcoming dissatisfaction or suffering, which Buddhists call dukkha. This doctrine was originally passed through word of mouth from the Buddha to his group of followers.

These teachings were not written down for many years. They first appeared in written form in the Pali canon , also known as the Tipitaka. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Love words? Need even more definitions? Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms The same, but different.

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