WELCOME to 'A Single Bone'
‘You don’t have to abandon things because there is something destructive in them. There is the Buddhist story of the arhat, one of the Buddha’s disciples with self-realization, who goes to the charnel ground, a burial ground in India. There he picks up one human bone, and he ponders that. He sees that a bone comes from death, and death comes from birth, and birth comes from desire, and so on and so on. Finally he works out the whole chain of causality from this one bone. Just from this one bone, he is able to see the chain reaction of the twelve links of interdependent causality, known as the nidanas. Nidana is a Sanskrit word that means ‘cause’ or ‘source’. The twelve nidanas refer to twelve aspects of samsara, or the cycle of birth and death, often compared to twelve spokes of a wheel...the arhat is able to see the whole chain of causality of the twelve nidanas by just contemplating one bone. We could work in the same way in our own situation. We don’t have to reject or abandon anything. We could work on the creative aspect of situations’
Chogyam Trungpa
Link to my old blog here
