5 Buddist Practices to Live By
Important notes from Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Bachelor
1. Be understanding
Letting go begins with understanding: a calm and clear acceptance of what is happening.
Understanding matures into letting go; letting go culminates in realization; realization impels cultivation.
A compassionate heart still feels anger, greed, jealousy, and other such emotions. But it accepts them for what they are — with equanimity, and cultivates the strength of mind to let them arise and pass without identifying with or acting upon them.
2. Let go of cravings
Letting go of a craving is not rejecting it but allowing it to be itself: a contingent state of mind that once arisen will pass away.
Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is.
Just as we need to know when and how to give ourselves fully to a task, so we need to know when and how to stop and rest.
3. Embrace your path
Awakening is no longer seen as something to attain in the distant future, for it is not a thing but a process — and this process is the path itself.
Dharma practice: understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path.
4. Consider death
By meditating on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life.
Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?
5. See different perspectives
To escape this trap is not to pretend to feel otherwise but to start looking at things differently. We are free to choose how to perceive the world.
Does this perspective affect the way you feel about each person? Are you able, even for a moment, to witness these people in all their autonomy, mystery, majesty, and tragedy? Can you see them as ends in their own right rather than means to your ends? Can you notice the restrictive and selective nature of the image you have formed of them? Can you let go of the craving to embrace the friend and banish the enemy? Can you love the stranger?
But there is another choice: we can continually question the assumption of a fixed, immutable nugget of self at the core of experience. And we can persistently challenge the validity of the emotionally charged images by which we define others. Through both disciplined meditation and ongoing reflective inquiry, we can loosen the grip in which habitual perceptions of self and others hold us.
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