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    Meditations On Guanyin Bodhisattva

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    Natacha Lecamus
    This document discusses Buddhist practices and meditation. It summarizes the author's experience meditating on Guanyin Bodhisattva and parsing the Platform Sutra. The author explains that Buddhist practices are intended to trigger a state of nondual awareness by overwhelming the senses and conceptual mind. Rituals in the Buddha Hall are described as aiming to achieve this by immersing participants in bright lights, chants and mantras until ordinary perceptions of time and space fade. The goal is to develop love, compassion and openness to extraordinary consciousness.

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    Meditations On Guanyin Bodhisattva

    Uploaded by

    Natacha Lecamus
    16 views2 pages
    This document discusses Buddhist practices and meditation. It summarizes the author's experience meditating on Guanyin Bodhisattva and parsing the Platform Sutra. The author explains that Buddhist practices are intended to trigger a state of nondual awareness by overwhelming the senses and conceptual mind. Rituals in the Buddha Hall are described as aiming to achieve this by immersing participants in bright lights, chants and mantras until ordinary perceptions of time and space fade. The goal is to develop love, compassion and openness to extraordinary consciousness.

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    Meditations on Guanyin Bodhisattva

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    This document discusses Buddhist practices and meditation. It summarizes the author's experience meditating on Guanyin Bodhisattva and parsing the Platform Sutra. The author explains that Buddhist practices are intended to trigger a state of nondual awareness by overwhelming the senses and conceptual mind. Rituals in the Buddha Hall are described as aiming to achieve this by immersing participants in bright lights, chants and mantras until ordinary perceptions of time and space fade. The goal is to develop love, compassion and openness to extraordinary consciousness.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    16 views2 pages

    Meditations On Guanyin Bodhisattva

    Uploaded by

    Natacha Lecamus
    This document discusses Buddhist practices and meditation. It summarizes the author's experience meditating on Guanyin Bodhisattva and parsing the Platform Sutra. The author explains that Buddhist practices are intended to trigger a state of nondual awareness by overwhelming the senses and conceptual mind. Rituals in the Buddha Hall are described as aiming to achieve this by immersing participants in bright lights, chants and mantras until ordinary perceptions of time and space fade. The goal is to develop love, compassion and openness to extraordinary consciousness.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    Michael “Mojo” Tchudi

    [email protected]
    November 2017

    Meditations on Guanyin Bodhisattva


    The core of the buddhist disciplines is putting it into practice. There are many approaches

    to buddhist philosophy and science: the eightfold path, the seven-step method for developing

    radical compassion, the six perfectionizers, the five yogic stages, the four noble truths, the three

    principal paths, the two collections, and developing single-pointed concentration, to name but a

    few. As many as there are approaches to practice, there are presented even more ways of

    discussing them: teaching, admonishing, and encouraging alike.

    I’ve spent weeks parsing through the ​Platform Sutra​, a text which cannot be apprehended

    with the intellect alone. Master Huineng has an unconventional approach of inventing creative

    new definitions for established buddhist terminology, and providing wildly heterodox

    explanations for his unique interpretations of classical buddhist teachings. He leaves his students

    in a state of shock and instability. Dumbfounded, the disciples are susceptible to the “direct

    teaching”: a method which overwhelms the intellect altogether and puts one in a state of

    nonconceptual awareness, thus experiencing a nondual state of consciousness.

    Buddhist practices, whether they be gradual or direct (or neither), are intended to trigger

    this awestruck state of nondual, nonconceptual awareness. Major realizations however are not

    caused, rather they are cessations; not an acquisition of something, but a stopping of mistaken

    perspectives. With the Guanyin session, we’ve started to sample this process, and get a taste for

    subsuming the intellect in practice to realize a deeper fundamental state of mind.

    Tchudi 1
    One purpose of ritual is to overwhelm the senses and wear down the conceptual mind’s

    need to grasp and order the outside world. In the Buddha Hall, we are overwhelmed with bright

    lights and thousands of golden Buddha images. In the ceremony, repeated twice each day, we

    rhythmically chant fantastical stories of the enlightened beings’ capacity to save suffering

    creatures from torment. We beg them to rescue us, and chant their powerful names until we lose

    track of ordinary time and space.

    Of course, the Buddhas cannot really save us; they can only teach us how to save

    ourselves. Thus we practice the techniques taught to us: keeping a commitment to morality, a

    willingness to help others, an urgency to drop confusion and affliction, the desire for higher

    knowledge and wisdom, and--crucially--to trigger nonconceptual, nondual awareness. This final

    step is the main event, for which all the other practices and teachings can merely provide

    support. The ceremonies and meditations only function when the heart is consumed with love

    and compassion for others, and the mind is open to extraordinary possibilities for consciousness.

    This is why we enter the Buddha Hall each day and chant the sadhanas and mantras. We

    deepen our resolve, demonstrate our commitment (primarily to our own selves), strengthen our

    capacity for altruism, and release our attachment to our personal comfort and self-importance. It

    is only under these conditions, in this crucible, that we can be open to powerful states of personal

    growth and transformation along the path of the Bodhisattva Buddhas’ ideal.

    Tchudi 2

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