According to the Buddha’s teachings, death is not the final chapter of life, it merely marks the end of one life and the beginning of another. The Buddha teaches us that life is without beginning and without end. Life is the culmination of causes and conditions and, as such, it is continually changing. Like the water in a fast-running river, it is never the same water.
Love and affection are infinitely valuable. There are various levels of love and affection that we can aspire to. Some people describe how people love this way: Young people love with their words, middle-aged people love with their actions, and elder people love with their hearts. This means that as we age, our love matures. Spiritual development also deepens and expands our love.
Harmony and beauty within our lives and within our communities often fail due to our insistence on the duality of self and others. When we maintain the duality of self and others, we develop disproportionate levels of love and hatred, attraction and repulsion for other people, which throws our relationships out of balance; the capacity for affinity becomes dormant. We judge everyone around us, putting people into categories such as good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, worthy and unworthy.
Most of us have an idea of what constitutes the space outside us; it is the environment in which we live. This includes the house we live in, the city we live in, or even the world we live in. Just as we need to skillfully manage our relationship to others, to the environment, and…
Our emotions are a very important part of our everyday life, and they star in a leading role on the stage of relationships. The ability to feel and our freedom to act upon these feelings give us both joy and sorrow, and it is imperative that we maintain our emotional well-being to minimize the potential…
If we want to understand what the Dharma teaches us about building affinity and living in harmony with others, we must first understand the four great all-embracing virtues. The Buddha teaches that for us to realize our true capacity of connecting with and serving our fellow citizens, we have to first build a good rapport,…