The Bodhi Tree Grows in L.A.
Tales of a Buddhist Monk in America
by Bhante Walpola Piyananda

Mirror of Wisdom / Teachings on Emptiness - by Ven. Geshe Gyeltsen

Buddha Shakyamuni taught the Perfection of Wisdom, otherwise known as the Wisdom Gone Beyond, on Vulture's Peak, Rajgir, in what is today the Indian state of Bihar.

These sutras focus on the subject of emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality, and the Heart Sutra is one of the most significant. It is a beautifully condensed version of the Buddha’s teachings on emptiness, containing their essential meaning in only a few lines. Geshe Gyeltsen tells us that by integrating this teaching with our minds, it is possible for us to become enlightened within a single lifetime.

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Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation - Gil Fronsdal

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Several times a year Gil Fronsdal offers a 5-week instructional series for beginning meditators. These classes provide a good overview of insight meditation practice as well as many guided meditation sessions which help the student learn how to establish and sustain a daily meditation practice. The "Intro to Mindfulness Meditation" web page includes audio files in MP3 from each class and class handouts with home work assignments in PDF.

Paths to Perfection: Contemplative Practices in Christianity & Buddhism / B. Alan Wallace
Recorded at Unity Church, Santa Barbara, CA, March 12, 2008

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Jesus counseled his followers to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect, and for centuries, mystical union with God—understood as perfect love and omniscient wisdom—was the ideal of Christian contemplatives. Buddha counseled his followers to realize perfect freedom from suffering by irreversibly dispelling all the afflictions and obscurations of the mind. The ideals of personal liberation and perfect enlightenment have been pursued by Buddhist contemplatives over the past 2,500 years.

While these two contemplative traditions appear to have had little contact throughout their long histories, they did exhibit remarkable parallels as well as differences. Ideals of perfection and the means to realize it will be explored in this lecture, with the hope that the vitality of both the Christian and Buddhist contemplative traditions may be revitalized in the modern era, which could so deeply benefit from their insights and wisdom.

THE CONSCIOUS UNIVERSE

The Conscious Universe: Where Buddhism and Physics Converge / B. Alan Wallace
Recorded at Unity Church, Santa Barbara, CA , Jan. 16, 2008

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Physicists have long assumed that the universe is fundamentally composed of matter and energy and that life and consciousness are accidental byproducts of configurations of matter. But a growing number of distinguished physicists are now suggesting that consciousness may play a much more fundamental role in nature than scientists previously believed.

In this lecture Alan Wallace will review some of the most provocative theories presented by such leading physicists as John Wheeler, Stephen Hawking, and Andre Linde that challenge many of the materialist assumptions based on outdated 19th-century physics. And he will discuss how these theories may relate to Buddhist theories and practices, including those of the Theravada, Mahayana, and Dzogchen traditions.

Stroke of Insight / Jill Bolte Taylor

Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story of recovery and awareness -- of how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another. (Video recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 18:44.)

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