Greetings & questions

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risinglight
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Greetings & questions

Post by risinglight »

Hi everyone,

I recently started to explore Buddhism and other spirituality practices and am so glad I found this forum. You all seem like nice people, and I'd love to get some help from you as I'm very new to Buddhism. Some of my questions are:

Do you know of any good resources for a beginner to learn more about or practice Buddhism? I prefer books but other venues (websites, podcasts, etc.) are welcome too.
How did everyone get started with practicing Buddhism?
Do you meditate? If so, what has helped you with it and what have you found to be most difficult with meditation?

Thank you for any answers that you can give me. I look forward to learning more from this board.
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Ben
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Re: Greetings & questions

Post by Ben »

Greetigns risinglight and welcome to Dhamma Wheel.
Check out the "introductory resources" thread in the Discovering Theravada sub-forum.
That is a good place to start.
How did everyone get started with practicing Buddhism?
After reading books for years, at the age of 22 I attended a ten-day course in Vipassana Meditation, and that was the beginning of integrating the Dhamma into my daily life.
Do you meditate? If so, what has helped you with it and what have you found to be most difficult with meditation?
Yes. Engaging with practice is difficult because one begins to swim against the tide of past conditionings. Hence, when one begins one encounters difficulties such as sloth & torpor, restlessness, lust, ill-will, aches and pains and a myriad of distractions. But if one continues with practice, of which meditation is a component, it has the potential to transform one's life.
kind regards,

Ben
“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
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Learn this from the waters:
in mountain clefts and chasms,
loud gush the streamlets,
but great rivers flow silently.
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DNS
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Re: Greetings & questions

Post by DNS »

Welcome to Dhamma Wheel!

:meditate:
Coyote
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Re: Greetings & questions

Post by Coyote »

Hello risinglight!

I'd like to specifically recommend the http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ website as it has loads of really interesting articles and information on it.

As for your questions: I became interested in Dhamma because after much searching it is the only teaching that speaks to my experience of reality. It is very practical, and you can see its benefits almost immediately and in every situation.
I am only a beginner in meditation so the hardest thing for me is getting the energy and motivation to practice, and then not to be distracted. Also not perpetuating unwholesome when it arises.
"If beings knew, as I know, the results of giving & sharing, they would not eat without having given, nor would the stain of miserliness overcome their minds. Even if it were their last bite, their last mouthful, they would not eat without having shared."
Iti 26
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Khalil Bodhi
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Re: Greetings & questions

Post by Khalil Bodhi »

Welcome!
To avoid all evil, to cultivate good, and to cleanse one's mind — this is the teaching of the Buddhas.
-Dhp. 183

The Stoic Buddhist: https://www.quora.com/q/dwxmcndlgmobmeu ... pOR2p0uAdH
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cooran
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Re: Greetings & questions

Post by cooran »

Welcome risinglight! :group:

with metta
Chris
---The trouble is that you think you have time---
---Worry is the Interest, paid in advance, on a debt you may never owe---
---It's not what happens to you in life that is important ~ it's what you do with it ---
alan...
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Re: Greetings & questions

Post by alan... »

risinglight wrote:Hi everyone,

I recently started to explore Buddhism and other spirituality practices and am so glad I found this forum. You all seem like nice people, and I'd love to get some help from you as I'm very new to Buddhism. Some of my questions are:

Do you know of any good resources for a beginner to learn more about or practice Buddhism? I prefer books but other venues (websites, podcasts, etc.) are welcome too.
How did everyone get started with practicing Buddhism?
Do you meditate? If so, what has helped you with it and what have you found to be most difficult with meditation?

Thank you for any answers that you can give me. I look forward to learning more from this board.
welcome! As others have suggested, accesstoinsight.org is phenomenal.

good books are:

"in the buddhas words" by bhikkhu bodhi. it is a compilation of important pali texts with wonderful introduction and some commentary. it's great because other than smaller books like this, we have the pali canon (oldest record of buddhism and it's teachings) itself which is thousands upon thousands of pages and is daunting too tackle at first. although eventually it's great to start reading the nikayas themselves.

"satipatthana: the direct path too realization" by analayo. it's incredibly intellectual and DEEP which can be off putting for some (me at times too be certain :tongue: ), but it covers a really important sutta that itself covers a large part of buddhist practice. namely, mindfulness (speaking broadly). being that mindfulness and concentration are, in my opinion, the two most complicated steps on the eightfold path i feel this type of book is really important for practice. alternatively though another good one on the same topic, but more direct and less deep is "the heart of buddhist meditation" by nyanaponika thera and even more simple: "the four foundations of mindfulness in plain english" by bhante g (bhante also has one that just covers mindfulness more broadly called "mindfulness in plain english"). i've read and love them all.

"who is myself?" by ayya khema. this covers meditation from a theravada perspective. i feel this book is mostly true too the suttas themselves. however another important view is the commentary and a good book from that perspective is "focused and fearless" by shaila catherine. so that covers "concentration" more or less, at least for a beginning.



i started practicing buddhism because i got into martial arts when i was a teen and heard that meditating makes you better at it. i immediately fell in love with meditation and then buddhism as a whole. i started attending a zen temple near me and it was really wonderful. i only fell away from zen because the temple kind of had a mister myagi thing going where i wasn't sure if i was being taught by a wise teacher or someone who just didn't know how too teach or didn't care. the instruction was maddeningly vague and i spent a lot of time meditating with almost no results to speak of. i still wonder if the teachers were masters who were leading me into understanding with their minimalist instruction and i was just impatient (although i trained for years...) or just bad teachers!

after that i found theravada which is much more detailed than zen and utilizes step by step instruction and development which i find much more comfortable. i only did martial arts for a few years but have been practicing buddhism for more than a decade.

i meditate every day. it has helped me clear my mind and i've had some small realizations, nothing special, but realizations nonetheless that have made me 100% certain that buddhism is the way too see into the mind proper and ease it's suffering. oddly enough my meditation in the theravada tradition has made me understand zen meditation a lot better!

what have i found difficult?

figuring out what techniques are the correct ones!!!!! this is a personal problem since there are no theravada teachers in my area, i learn everything from books and every book has it's own spin on things. whereas if i had a teacher i would just learn from them and, when i had a question, it would be answered by them instead of me failing to find a specific answer in a book by a specific author and ending up reading a new book by a new author that answers the question but then creates new ones between the two techniques! phew!
Last edited by alan... on Mon Apr 22, 2013 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
SarathW
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Re: Greetings & questions

Post by SarathW »

Welcome!
This book changed my life.
http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/buddh ... gsurw6.pdf
-read from chapter 15
-Hardest thing for me is to practice what I learn and implement them in a day to day basis. :)
“As the lamp consumes oil, the path realises Nibbana”
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