Author: Luna Kadampa

A guest article My name is Jan J and I’ve been a practising Kadampa for many years. I work full time and, like many, have family commitments and responsibilities, which means that finding the time for formal Buddhist or Dharma practice can be difficult. Some years ago I realised that I had to change my relationship with Dharma practice if I really wanted to make progress. Rather than trying to force Dharma practice into the tiny space of time I had ‘available’ between all the other responsibilities in my life, I had to take seriously the advice of my teacher,…

What do Buddhists like me have faith in? I’ll start with what I try not to have too much faith in. If we have faith in our Buddhist religion as a inherently existent system, and holy beings as saviors who are inherently different to us — “I am over here inherently unworthy and you are over there inherently pure! Save us!” – we could run the danger of falling into an ancient trap. Some good karma ripened on me yesterday when I met a gorgeous young Black woman – we got chatting in a café and spent the next three…

Buddha’s teachings on Sutra and Tantra are all designed to solve our suffering and center us in the solution. This is quite a big subject, so I’m going to try and streamline it by dividing Buddha’s teachings into five parts, called the “five seeds”. I didn’t make this up – Je Pabongkhapa, who is the Guru of my Guru’s Guru – my Great-Grand-Guru as it were – suggested we sow these five seeds together and let them all ripen together. In general within Kadampa Buddhism we touch on these every day in our meditation sessions and daily lives – once…

I’ve been watching a couple of gentle dramas unfold on the other side of this lake. First up, a group of schoolchildren skipping along laughing – such potential, and with their whole future ahead of them. What will this strange world look like for them? Will they be able to keep up this enthusiasm? Will these small human beings meet the path to enlightenment and realize their actual spiritual potential? Next was a group of mentally disabled adults, whose Buddha nature was shining through their innocent faces — as it was in their supervisor trying so hard to get them…

Buddhist meditation is said to be the path that leads from joy to joy, culminating in the spontaneous great joy of Tantric completion stage and full enlightenment. Sometimes we might think we have to postpone our joy to some point in the future, like when we are a proper decent meditator, and that it’s okay to be miserable practicing Buddhism in the meantime because, after all, we are creating the causes for future happiness. But there is something not quite right about this way of thinking, which is one reason we have this Kadampa motto: Always rely upon a happy…

A guest article My name is Jan J and I’ve been a practising Kadampa for many years. I’ve collected together some thoughts that have arisen as a result of mixing Buddhism (Dharma) with everyday appearances, including nature; and share them with you in this and future articles in the hope they might be of some small benefit to at least one person who reads them. These 4 anecdotes are all to do with birds. Flights of fancy Sitting in a garden yesterday, I noticed a bird behaving oddly – he was tapping on the shed window, flapping around a little,…

In a world of illusion, what matters? For one thing, I think it’s important to explore  the connection between our intentions and our experiences — the infallible law of cause and effect as applied to our consciousness — so that we’re in charge of where our daily actions are taking us. To be free, we need to observe the law of karma – practicing ethics and kindness and ideally bodhichitta so as to create the best possible intentions. Why? Because everything is mere karmic appearance of mind. Our intentions are what sow the seeds for what appears to our mind as…

Just to quickly revisit the central theme of Everything Everywhere All at Once, ie, how kindness makes the world go round … the man sitting on the other side of the neuroscientist told us he was volunteering to help kids in a primary school who had epilepsy and other serious problems. The neuroscientist thanked him for his service, wishing there were more people like him; to which he replied: “Nah you don’t need to thank me because it’s very rewarding. Kids are the future; we have to help them.” And they went on to agree that helping others in this…

If you’ve ever wondered what meditation is all about and how it’s possible to do it, especially in a very busy life, or if you want to answer other people’s questions about meditation in a really relatable way … … here is a must-listen podcast. (It’s also available on YouTube and Apple).  Whether you meditate already or not, I think you’re going to find Kadam Adam’s conversation with Garry both encouraging and interesting, not to mention practical. And very entertaining. No time? Well, I listened out on a walk, and my walk was very enjoyable as a result. And you’ll…

 Several people have told me that they found the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once quite chaotic and hard to keep up with. Some cursory Googling reveals that the directors did apparently have in mind the metaverse as metaphor for internet overload (which, let’s face it, is a significant factor these days): “Written in 2016, “Everything Everywhere” was in part a product of the contradictions and emotional whiplash of being very online at the time. “The internet had started to create these alternate universes,” said Daniel Kwan. “We were for the first time realizing how scary the internet was, moving…