Privacy Policy

Buddha inseparably fused two fundamental principles and made them the firm basis of daily practice – the priority of mind and the ultimacy of Dharma. Declaring that The mind is the precursor of all propensities (I.1), he taught that the tropism of the mind can enslave or emancipate, inducing perpetual discontent or progressive fulfilment. Seeking pleasure and shunning pain is wasted effort, for pleasure and pain intermix in unpredictable ways, and since their unstable admixture aggravates frustration and repeated disillusionment, no mere tinkering with external conditions can bring mental and moral strength. The tropism of the mind must be confronted and understood if it is to be changed significantly. One must come to see clearly that If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him even as his never-departing shadow (I.2)

Altering the habitual orientation or oscillation of consciousness demands wise restraint, a taste for temperance, increasing faith and cool perseverance, but at root it requires a fundamental rethinking of one's shallow relationship with a fast-moving world. Hatred is never stilled through hatred in this world; by non-hatred alone is hatred stilled. This is the Eternal Law (sanantana dhamma) (I.5). Dharma is not just religiosity as distinguished from other profane aspects of life, nor is it a remote ideal unrelated to the world of imperfect subjects and illusory objects. Dharma is the omnipresent normative order, the bedrock of the manifest universe. If this were not so, it would be difficult to grasp how ignorance, avidya, invariably leads to suffering rather than arbitrarily producing a variety of alterable results in Samsara. Given that Dharma is the fundamental anchor amidst the flux of fleeting existence, it follows that unrelieved ignorance leading to tanha, the desperate thirst for sensory consciousness, gives rise to a false sense of self which seeks to situate and shape the world around its unauthentic centre and thereby comes into continual conflict with Dharma, the common source of universal obligation.