Help us to establish Drala Jong - a Buddhist Retreat Centre in Wales

Help us to establish Drala Jong - a Buddhist Retreat Centre in Wales
Help us to establish Drala Jong - a Buddhist Retreat Centre in Wales

Monday 14 September 2015

Emotional comfort

"Anyone who believes anything, at some level, makes the choice to believe. If we make the choice to believe because there’s a spiritually materialistic payoff in believing, then as soon as the payoff ceases to function we lose our belief. With rebirth, I would say that there is a grave danger of the payoff being connected with emotional comfort of some kind and that is deadly in terms of an authentic Buddhist practice. Buddhism is not actually emotionally comfortable in terms of the need to experience continuity. If we are to call ourselves Buddhists we have to accept the practice of discovering that we are discontinuous – that the ‘I’ is momentary."

Counting the cars, Ngak’chang Rinpoche, Aro Encyclopaedia