Sunday, February 27, 2005

Psychotherapy - Mindfulness Meditation

The Buddha teaching of Meditations & Mindfulness is
for both Physic & Physical therapy.


My observation is that Buddha teaching of Mindfulness
is further afirm his Theory of thr 4 Noble truth.

And about Birth - Growth - Decay - Death

The truth about

Birth & Rebirth for Physic & Physical.

All beings including the Billions & Trillions
or Universe
cannot escape from the truth of
Birth & death cycle.

By Mindfulness Meditations & making
peace & blessing the billions of lilives within the
Human own universe, the illness be it in Physic &
Physical matters are cease to null.

In the Buddha teaching all those Sutra aspecially
the High Blessing.. it exhibit that Buddha wisdom of
protection & highest blessing.

....By The Power of The Buddhas May All Be Well......

......By The Power of The Buddha Teaching May All Be Well...

.....By The Power of The Holy Priest's May All Be Well....



A Buddhist Approach to Psychotherapy
Story by Kathy Vozella Photo by Michelle Wilson,
Macqurie University (Australia),
Email the researcher: bkhong@psy.mq.edu.au, Oct 26, 2004

Sydney, Australia -- Incorporating Buddhist
ideas and philosophy into psychotherapy is not new -
meditation has been used for some time as a form of
relaxation and a way of helping an individual
understand the workings of the mind.

However, according to one Macquarie University
researcher, meditation can be used for personal growth
beyond therapy if it is understood against the backdrop
of the Buddha's teachings and integrated holistically
with psychotherapy.


Dr Belinda Siew Luan Khong, lecturer in the Department
of Psychology, is quick to point out that she is not
a Buddhist, but she is informed by the Buddha's
teachings. Her PhD thesis titled A Comparative Analysis
of the Concept of Responsibility in Daseins analysis and
Buddhist Psychology received a Vice-Chancellor’s
Commendation and won her the Sidney M Jourard Memorial
Student Award for outstanding research from the American
Psychological Association (APA) in 1999.

Since graduating with her PhD in 1999, Khong has been
teaching part-time at Macquarie University, operating
her own counseling practice and traveling the world
presenting papers and conducting workshops on the
integration of Buddhist psychology and philosophy
in psychotherapy. She recently returned from the APA
Annual Convention in Hawaii where she presented a paper
on Personal growth in and beyond therapy.

“I believe that the Buddha teaches an attitude
rather than an affiliation,”
Khong writes in
a chapter of Encountering Buddhism: Western psychology
and Buddhist teachings. “This state of mind can
be acquired by any individual irrespective of his or her
race, culture or religious orientation.”
Khong
remains one of the few psychotherapists worldwide to
integrate Buddhist teachings whenever appropriate into
the counseling process and beyond.

The ‘beyond therapy’ aspect is something she emphasizes,
as many of her clients say that when they finish their
counseling with her they take away a general philosophy
for life, a way of responding appropriately which they
can apply to various situations as they arise.
“Buddhist ideas and practices have been
integrated in therapy for some time,”
she says.

“However the main focus
has been on the use of meditation and mindfulness as an
adjunct to therapy.

In my clinical work I have found these practices to be
more helpful and effective when they are understood
holistically in the context of the Buddha’s teachings.”
Khong explains that the Buddha promotes an
attitude of acceptance and letting go
developed
through personal effort and taking personal responsibility
rather than through relying on an external source
or orientation.

“The human qualities and emotions that the
Buddha encourages such as love, charity, compassion,
tolerance and patience are not sectarian as they are
neither Christian, Buddhist, Hindu nor Muslim.

They come from developing the right attitude,
not the right affiliation,”
she says.

The Buddha encourages insight and understanding based
on direct experience, and this is emphasized in his
teaching of the eightfold path:

Morality Mental culture Wisdom

Right Speech

Right Effort

Right Understanding

Right Action

Right Mindfulness

Right Thought

Right Livelihood

Right Concentration


Khong explains that in this teaching, the Buddha is
describing a set of practices rather than a set of
beliefs that the individual can use to overcome his
or her own emotional suffering. “For example the Buddha
recommends that each of us take the responsibility to
cultivate an attitude (right understanding, right
thought) of seeing what is an appropriate response
(right action, right speech, right livelihood) in each
situation,” she says.

“Most of us are familiar with the power of
speech to hurt or soothe.
There will be times when friendly and meaningful
advice are helpful and other times when keeping
‘noble silence’
is appropriate.”
Two types of meditation are
commonly practiced today.

The first type, known as concentration or
tranquility meditation, encourages the
individual to let go of negative thoughts that impinge
by concentrating on one neutral object to the exclusion
of all others. This is a popular tool used in
psychotherapy to help the individual to quieten down
the mind and to relax. The second type, known as insight
meditation or mindfulness practice, is unique to Buddhism
and is often used to complement concentration meditation.

Dr Belinda Khong, explains that once you calm down the
mind you still need to deal with the feelings and
emotions that come up. Mindfulness practice encourages
the person to be mindful of whatever enters the mind.

“Mindfulness helps us to look at all the feelings
and emotions as they arise, to name them, to see anger as
anger and sadness as sadness without judging them or
repressing them or carrying on an internal dialogue
(‘Why do I feel like this’, or ‘I shouldn’t feel so angry’).
The practice of mindfulness teaches the art
of acceptance and letting go, the key elements in the
attitude that the Buddha encourages,” Khong says.

“Through mindfulness
you can see what is really triggering off your own
feelings and emotions without allowing them to spiral.
“ When you are not mindful you react.
When you are mindful, you respond.


This kind of attitude is the most powerful tool my
clients take away from counseling because it gives them
choice – when you are mindful you can choose when you want
to be angry or depressed because it gives you the emotional
distance from the problem before you become reactive,”
she says. The distinction between responsibility and what
Khong refers to as ‘respond-ability’ is an important one.

Responsibility is usually associated with roles and positions,
and is commonly perceived in terms of duties, obligations
and accountability. Respond-ability, she explains, refers
to our internal ability to respond appropriately and
skillfully to what is required in each unique situation.
It involves the capacity to be mindful and to see and
understand things as they really are. “The idea
of learning to respond appropriately lies at the heart
of the Buddhist approach to responsibility,”
she says.

Having experienced the powerful transformation of many
clients by using a combination of counseling and
mindfulness practice to various psychological concerns
including the prevention of the relapse of depression,
managing stress, interpersonal relationships and
personal growth, Khong is keen to integrate eastern
philosophies into more areas of western psychology.


In June next year, she will present a paper on
Complementing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy with Buddhist
Psychology
at the IX World Congress on
Constructivism in Sweden, where his Holiness, the Dalai
Lama and Professor Aaron T Beck, the originator of
cognitive behavioral therapy, will be keynote speakers.

One of her current research interests involves extending
the work of colleagues and researchers in the US, the UK
and The Netherlands who are studying the
emotional and brain functioning (via functional MRI imaging)
of people using mindfulness practice. Khong is looking
at possible counseling applications and at ways of helping
individuals improve their general sense of well being.



“When mindfulness is practiced alongside other
complementary therapeutic approaches, the result is an
incisive and powerful tool for empowering clients to
understand and deal with their problems with less reliance
on the therapist,”
Khong Says.


Monday, February 21, 2005

A Buddhist Perspective on Vegetarianism - No Killing Please!!

This Article contains many informations about Buddhist
& Merits of Be A Vegetarian.

To sum up, Buddha Teaching
is No Killing!!


Any form of Killing would generate bad Karma for one life.

As reported in many recent research reports, mice..dog..
cat..pig do shares the origin of Human DNA.

So What Buddha have teach us some 2,5XX years ago on the
truth of animal can rebirth to Human, & Human Can Rebirth
to Animal is something really unbelievable, consider at
the time without the modern sciences & technology.


A Buddhist Perspective on
Vegetarianism

by Lin Ching Shywan, International Vegetarian Union, http://www.ivu.org/religion/articles/buddhist.html,

San Francisco, USA -- I have been a strict vegetarian for
more than four years now. When I first gave up meat, quite
a few of my friends and relatives expressed concern; most
people seem to have the idea that vegetarian food lacks
adequate nutrients.

And being vegetarian can be a more than minor inconvenience
with the amounts of meat and fish that people now eat.
Chinese have a traditional notion that foods that are
"warming" in nature,
like meat, are important for building up physical strength;
so in the minds of some of the older generation, one could
not possibly get all the nutrition one needed form the
"cool" bean greens,
white radishes, and so forth that vegetarians favor.
In their book, the only things that strengthen the body
are foods like tiger phallus, snake blood, stewed chicken
and crab in wine.

Before taking the big step, I didn't give nutrition,
convenience, or building up physical strength a second
thought, since my reason for becoming vegetarian had
nothing to do with any of these. I became vegetarian
because of my belief in Buddhism.

Why do Buddhists advocate vegetarianism? The main reason
is "mercy", and because we
"cannot bear to eat the flesh of living creatures."

And our belief in karma tells us that we must eventually
suffer the consequences of our evil actions. A Buddha sutra
says: "The bodhisattva fears the original action; the myriad
of living creatures fear the consequences."

This means that the bodhisattva knows the seriousness of the
consequences and does not do evil things; neither does he
think about the causes of bad consequences. Finally, I also
believe that a vegetarian diet better enables one to keep a
pure body and mind and this purity is an important foundation
of self-cultivation. My conversion to vegetarianism was based
on these three considerations.

"Mercy" is an
important way of learning to be a better person. Being
without mercy is simply incompatible with being a Buddhist.
Having a merciful and compassionate heart will show up in
all aspects of one's life; but the simplest and most
direct way is to follow a vegetarian diet. Think of the
intense pain of accidentally stepping on a nail is. So
how can one have the heart to eat the flesh of creatures
who have suffered the pain of being slaughtered, skinned,
dismembered, and cooked? Being unable to bring ourselves
to eat the flesh of these poor creatures is an expression
of mercy.

The pain of creatures on the road to our table is not
some fanciful concoction; it is excruciatingly real.
Let us cite the cooked live shrimp and crab that are so
popular today as an example. Meeting their end by being
cooked in water is like being sent to a boiling hell.
Their desperate but doomed efforts to crawl or jump out
betray the unbearable pain they experience.

Finally they give their life in sorrow as they turn bright
red. What a painful end!

Frogs are put through even more suffering than shrimp and
crabs. From the first made in their bodies to the time
they are swallowed they go through the equivalent of
eight different hells:

1. Decapitation;
2. Skinning;
3. Removing the legs;
4. Slitting of the belly;
5. Frying or boiling;
6. Salt, sugar and seasoning;
7. Chewing; and
8. Digestion
9. Excretion.


Anyone who put himself in take place of a frog would
be unable to ever stomach another one.

Among the different kinds of suffering the human race
can experience, the most intense is certainly that of
war. Documentaries of the Nanking massacre and the
Nazi holocaust leave few people unmoved and dry-eyed-and
most indignant. But humans can go for years or decades
without war; animals face suffering and death every day.
For meat eaters, every banquet means the death of hundreds
and thousands of animals. Is this any different from
human war?

Preventing the suffering of living creatures by not
using their flesh to satisfy our tastebuds and hunger
is the minimal expression of compassion we can offer.
We choose not to kill out of kindness, and not to eat
out of compassion.

I felt deeply moved upon reading two stories on the theme
of mercy; they will be etched forever in my memory. One is
recorded in the book "Record of Protecting Life":

When a scholar named
Chou Yu
was cooking some eel to eat, he noticed
the one of the eels bending in its body such that its
head and tail were still in the boiling point liquid,
but its body arched upward above the soup. It did not
fall completely in until finally dying.
Chou Yu
found the occurrence a strange one, pulled out
the eel, and cut it open. He found thousands of eggs
inside. The eel had arched its belly out of the hot
soup to protect its offspring. He cried at the sight,
sighed with emotion, and swore never to eat eel.

This story tells us that the myriad living creatures
are not without feeling and intelligence.

Another story in recorded in Buddha sutra.

A king of heaven was stalemated in a war with a demon,
and neither side emerged as winner. As the king of heaven
was leading his soldiers back, he saw the nest of a golden
-winged bird in a tree by the roadside. "If the soldiers
and chariots pass by here, the eggs in the nest will
certainly fall to the ground and be scattered," he
thought to himself. So he led his thousand chariots back
the same road by which they came. When the demon saw
the king of heaven returning, he fled in terror.

The sutra's conclusion was that
"if you use mercy to
seek salvation, the lord of heaven will see it."

This story tells us that mercy may not seem like much
at first glance, but it is in fact extremely powerful.

The Buddha sutras frequently mention "the power of mercy,"
from this we know that mercy is indeed a potent force.
If a Buddhist wants to learn to use this strength of
mercy, he must be like the king of heaven in this story,
and be ready to change the route of a thousand chariots
rather than let a nest full of bird eggs fall to the ground.

The Surangama Sutra tells us
"if we eat the flesh of
living creatures, we are destroying the seeds of
compassion."
That is, if we do not eat the flesh
of living creatures, we are cultivating and irrigating
the seeds of compassion," and to "cultivate a
compassionate heart," I chose to become a vegetarian;
and this is my main reason for doing so.

In Buddha teaching, volume upon volume has been written
regarding cause and consequence, but the basic concept
is a simple one. "Good is rewarded with good; evil is
rewarded with evil; and the rewarding of good and evil
is only a matter of time." Viewed from this concept,
we will have to pay for every piece of flesh we eat
with a piece of flesh, and with a life for every
creature's life that we take.

Viewed over the long term, eating meat is an extremely
frightening prospect. Before their death, living
creatures experience not joys, and not fear, but anger;
not complaint, but hatred and resentment. And who
receives the "reward" for taking these lives?

It would be difficult to try to prove the existence of
this concept of cause and consequence, and it may even
sound a bit farfetched. However, in terms of this life,
the negative consequences of eating meat include arterial
sclerosis, heart disease, high blood pressure, encephalemia,
stroke, gallstones, cirrhosis of the liver and cancer.
In all these diseases, a link has been established to
animal fat and cholesterol.

So the consequences of eating meat are in fact immediate
and in clear view. But even if you could still make it
from day to day eating meat, the other advantages of
being vegetarian-promotion of good health and being
free from worry about future negative consequences-to
me fully justify the decision to be vegetarian, and
constitute my second main reason for doing so.

My third reason is to "purify body and mind." This one
might seem to escape logical explanation. An American
vegetarian physician summed it up well when he said that
"It's good not having to worry about the conditions under
which your food died." This statement points out that
animals are not always healthy themselves, and before
death, they secrete toxic substances. When we eat the
flesh of animals, we also ingest disease-carrying
microorganisms and toxins.

According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, our bodies
contain uric acid and other toxic waste products which
turn up in our blood and body tissues. Compared to the
65% impure moisture content of beef, protein obtained
from nuts, beans and legumes is markedly purer.

Vegetarian food is indeed much cleaner than meat, and
it also retains its freshness better than meat.
Vegetarian food is in every case cleaner and purer
than meat with comparable nutritious value. We know
that meat spoils easily, and fish and shrimp begin to
become putrid after being left out for just half an hour.
Meat and meat products begin to decay after one hour.

Vegetables, on the other hand, can usually e kept for
three to five days. Although beans become rancid
relatively quickly, the deterioration is very easy to
detect and recognize.

One problem with vegetable foods today is contamination
by pesticides; but even so, they are still much cleaner
than meat. A person who habitually eats pure food keeps
his body and mind in a pure state; this follows of course,
and is beyond argument.

Another question that vegetarians are frequently asked is,
"Why can't you eat scallions, chives, onions, and garlic?"
This again relates back to purity. The Surangama Sutra
says: "All living creatures seek the 'three kinds of
wisdom,' and should refrain from eating the 'five pungent.'

These five pungent foods create lust when eaten cooked,
and rage when eaten raw." It goes on to say that "Even
if someone can recite twelve sutras from memory, the gods
of the ten heavens will all disdain him if he eats pungent
foods in this world, because of his strong odor and
un-cleanliness, and will give distance themselves far
from him."

This means that pungent foods arouse lust, and give one
an explosive temper and one's body a bad odor. These foods
are unclean, and if a person's body and mind are not clean,
how can he succeed at purifying himself through Buddhism?

This is why yet another sutra says: "That which has blood
and flesh will be rejected by the gods and not eaten by
the saints; all in heaven distance themselves far from one
who eats meat; his breath is always foul...meat is not
a good thing, meat is not pure, it is born in evil and
spoils in merit and virtue; it is rejected by all the
gods and saints!"

In recent years, I have spent much time thinking about
what I eat; in fact I don't have many great insights on
vegetarianism. However, the three reasons I just stated
are sufficient to make me feel confident about my choice.
Issues like whether a vegetarian diet is more nutritious,
whether there is great merit in following a vegetarian
diet, whether it can promote world peace, and so forth,
are all secondary.

What I strongly believe is that if a person wants to
take joy in the Buddhist way and enter into the mercy
and knowledge of the Buddha, he must begin at the dining
table. There is a British promoter of vegetarianism
named Dr. Walsh who once said that
"To prevent human bloodshed
one must start at the dinner table."


Turning back to Taiwan today, one banquet takes a
thousand lives; clothing oneself requires minks and
silk spun by worms; shoes are made from alligator skin
and leather; and lust and luxury are carried to
extremes.

To begin one's enlightenment of mercy and cause of
consequence at the dinner table in this kind of an
environment is perhaps more than a little difficult.
The prospects for long-term peace and prosperity
here are indeed cause for concern.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005


Thousand Hands & Thousand EyesGoddess of Mercy  Posted by Hello

Monday, February 07, 2005

Buddha's Tao

Today, I announce the Birth of this Blog.

Buddha's Tao



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