African Peanut Soup Recipe

Whatever individual joys and revelations may have arisen during the Des Moines Meditation and Mindfulness Group's all-day retreat on January 16th, collective joy was revealed in the vegetarian soup served to the group for lunch.

Thanks again to Teva for preparing and serving this wonderful African Peanut Soup. In answer to many requests, here is her recipe:

Saute in peanut oil: 1 big onion and 2 cloves (or many more) minced garlic

Put the above in a BIG pot with:
1 cup diced zucchini, leave skin on
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and diced
8 cups chicken or vegetable broth (64 oz)
3 16oz cans of garbanzo beans, drained
1 tsp. cumin
1/2 tsp. thyme
3 cups thick and chunky salsa - mild, medium or hot -( ex. Pace salsa)

Cook all until the potato and zucchini are done then add:
3 cups cooked rice
2/3 cups peanut butter

Serves around 20 people

The Buddha's Path to Happiness

Out of the blue, I remembered the ascetic Bahiya, who asked the Buddha to teach him the path leading to happiness. “When seeing,” the Buddha said, “just see; when hearing, just hear; when knowing, just know; and when thinking, just think.” (Udana 1.10) It was all in how you looked at it. The Bahiya text is deceptively simple. In one sense, it means: Don’t daydream. Pay full attention to what you’re seeing. But there’s more to these words than you might think. Or maybe less.
- Cynthia Thatcher, "Disconnect the Dots" (Fall 2009)

Read the complete article here.

This quote is from today's Tricycle Magazine Daily Dharma email. The Daily Dharma is an excellent resource for meditators and Buddhists alike. You can sign-up here.

Transcending Dualistic Thinking is Enlighenment

"Every sentient being without exception has buddha nature, writes Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. So how are buddhas and fully enlightened bodhisattvas any different from the rest of us?

Sentient beings... have fallen under the power of dualistic thinking. An ordinary person's attention strays according to any movement of mind. Suddenly there is the confusion of believing in self and other, subject and object, and this situation goes on and on repeating itself endlessly. This is samsaric existence.

So what is Tulku Urgyen RInpoche's recipe for leaving samsara? Read "Taking Your Future into Your Own Hands". This excerpt is taken from an article in Tricycle Magazine.

Illusory Self Can Never Satisfy

No Satisfaction

By Ayya Khema

While we still have our “self ” intact, that’s the one we love best. We won’t find anybody who will love us as much as we do ourselves. Yet, because of our ego delusion, we believe that there must be somebody like that somewhere. In reality we should look at this search in a different way. We shouldn’t try to find somebody who will help us to support our self-delusion but rather someone who will help us to get rid of it. That can be the Buddha and his teachings, because such is the essence of the dhamma.

Introspection shows us the difficulties in making the self solid and secure. In fact, this is such a burden that we cannot be deeply happy. We can be pleasurably excited, but complete happiness is not possible with a view that needs constant reinforcement. We are not satisfied with telling ourselves how wonderful and clever we are. We need another person to reinforce and support this view.

The bigger our self-image is, the easier it gets knocked down. We often believe that it is sensitivity when our feelings are hurt, but it just means that we are self-centered and want to protect our threatened ego.

To look for total satisfaction in oneself is a futile endeavor. Neither satisfaction nor self really exist. Since everything changes from moment to moment, where can self and where can satisfaction be found? Yet these are two things that the whole world is looking for and it sounds quite reasonable, doesn’t it? But since these are impossible to find, everybody is unhappy. Not necessarily because of tragedies, poverty, sickness, or death: simply because of unfilled desire. Everybody is looking for something that isn’t available. It’s worse than looking for a needle in a haystack; at least the needle is there, even though it is hard to find. But satisfaction and self are both delusions, so how can they ever be found? Searching here and there keeps everyone busy on this little globe of ours. If we were to stop looking for satisfaction for the self, we would have an immediate lessening of dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), since dukkha arises only from wanting something. Also our self-concept would be minimized, as ego is no longer constantly in the forefront of the mind.

To get to this enormous root system that entangles us, we have to use mindfulness. The reason we find it so difficult to be really mindful is the fact that true attention shows us that there is no person, only mind and body. It is like coming up against a wall and instead of digging through that wall, the mind veers off and doesn’t want to know anything further. True mindfulness has arisen when there is only the action but no doer. With divided mindfulness we experience both, the one who is mindful and the one who is being watched. If we use precision in our attention, we see - even if only for a moment—that no person is embedded in our mind/body process. We can never forget that experience.

From Within Our Own Hearts, © Ayya Khema. Published in 2006 by the Buddhist Publication Society. Used with permission. This article is reprinted from Tricycle Magazine.