Welcome to Dhammalaya

The very impetus of the Buddha's teachings - the Dhamma, its fundamental reason for being, is total cessation of all that is fabricated, false, delusive, afflictive, and the full manifestation of truth and compassion in a luminous mind beyond all notions.  The very motion of our life and practice in the Dhamma is towards this liberation and awakening surpassing all constructions of the world, transcending all hedonic fixations of sentient beings.  

Dhammalaya exists to give voice to this stirring message of unfettered lucidity and freedom of awareness - a vision and trajectory of transcendence that does not deny the needs of suffering beings but ceaselessly responds to them in spontaneous altruism.  This is a vision at once personal and planetary, individual and cosmic, beyond this world yet immanently alive in this time and place.      

Our existence is currently confused, our understanding of reality vague and shadowy.  It is as if we are ensconced in a time of unheard cries, untold sadness, unchecked beguilement.  A time of tragic conflagration born of divisive human conflict and hatred.  A time of planetary damage perpetrated by recalcitrant human greed and delusion, unchallenged by religions either too self-absorbed or co-opted into economic liberalism and consumerism to act with any radical prophetic vision or honest spirituality.

Yet, it is also a time when unfeigned moral and spiritual leadership can still make a difference, but only if we draw the light out from the deepest source possible and stand together as pragmatic visionaries of universal awakening (sambodhi).

What shall we do in these times?  How can we live and flourish in dark days? Is emancipation possible?

Questions like these are not mere rhetoric of indulgence.  They are more.  Much more.  Questions - when asked from a place deep enough; when echoed in a space vast enough; and which answers are sought for in a spirit of inquiry great enough - transform themselves into sharp swords of diamond strength that cut through mind-fabricated cobwebs to reveal the pristine luminosity beyond contrivance.  

• Can we allow the vexations and contradictions of our lives to be as they are, even as we probe into their deepest nature?  
• Can we sit with pain and uncertainty while harnessing their immense power to be the One Big Koan of our time?  
• Can we seek relentlessly for the heart of wisdom with all the tenderness and passion of our hearts?  
• Can we trust the truth that whispers to us from across swirling galaxies and the cacophony of thinking and flurried emotions, beckoning us to stop our self-destructive nightmare and wake up from the holocaust of greed, pride, prejudice, and delusion?  

Dhammalaya is here to support our journey of the One Big Koan: to nourish what is as yet inchoate in consciousness so that it may form and emanate forth in blazing splendour.  What lies hidden is what frees us.  From the very ground of our being, the yearning surges up and bellows.  Yet we must not forget:  there is no ground to rest on nor is there anything to be found, for if you seek to grasp "the hidden" for any reason (however selfish or noble), you can never find it existing in any way, shape, form, or degree of ontological fixity.  

The unadorned liberation that awaits us ensues not from all manner of contriving, intellectualising, chasing after, fantasising, but from the melting away of all that is false.  This means nothing less than letting go of all that is the known, heard of and spoken about, seen and felt, tasted and aromatically savoured.  The freedom that is total liberation from confinement, suffering, meaningless petty strivings comes from the breaking down of all that is constructed.   This is a freedom that costs us not less than everything.  This is a freedom at once alone and communal, a force for goodness and a source of sagely leadership in our world.

Fearless and persistent,  we must summon energy to utterly release into the unborn, which is cessation of  the conditioned (nirodha).  
The naked and timeless is unspeakable and it is here that all things end and where all begins anew ...  

In wordless bliss and creative luminosity.

Do we dare?