The Satsang Journal
Teachings, field notes and stories of service from across The Satsang Foundation.
So, you will notice that Buddhism is basically a religion of renunciation. To follow the path of Gautama, one has to realise the impermanence of this world and give it up to reach Nirvana. ‘Buddham...
‘Right thinking’ means to think without prejudice, to think without selfish desires interfering in the thought process. ‘Righteous living’ is to live without injuring other living beings, without c...
The Buddha was clear that one should steer clear of all bizarre stuff, rituals and complicated practices and stick to enquiry into the reality of things until one realises the emptiness of the outs...
Buddha’s work was an original exposition of the Upanishads in their pristine purity. His effort was to render them in crystal clear thought, as opposed to the ritualism, customs and practices, whic...
When one follows the teachings of Buddha, one understands the impermanence of life and frees oneself from the root of sorrow, which is desire. The understanding is of what it means to dissolve the ...
When you understand something is going to disappear, then there is sorrow. This is apart from the actual sorrows of pain, misery, starvation, death and destruction and everything else that happens ...
Gautam Siddhartha joined the itinerant Jain renunciants who lived near the city of Kapilavastu. He spent many years thinking, contemplating, meditating and observing the spiritual practices he had ...
The Buddha was fond of saying that the human body was like a sore or a boil bound to fall off at any point in time. Somebody asked him once, “If the body is like an open sore, why do you look after...
There is sorrow in the mind. The sorrow off not being able to attain something we want. This is the greatest of sorrows. The other sorrows are considerably physical and economic in their causes; bu...
I have an image about myself. I desire to be presented to the world as what I built myself to be. When the bubble breaks - when somebody pricks it - then I am miserable. I am in sorrow.
Nirvana is freedom from sorrow for all mankind, the cessation of the separate identity, and the cessation of the identity of the self. The cessation of desire is Nirvana, total freedom; and that is...
The priestly class, who considered themselves the guardians of Hinduism and its scriptures, declared that Shankaracharya was none other than a Buddhist in disguise. They called him a ‘Prachanda Bou...