For the new practitioner. Where to start when nothing has started yet.
Taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha is the formal entry into the Buddhist path. The three jewels — tiratana in Pali, triratna in Sanskrit — are what the practitioner relies upon when the conditioned world will not bear weight.
The Buddha's first teaching after awakening — delivered at Sarnath to the five ascetics — laid out the diagnosis of suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the path that leads beyond it. Every later teaching is a commentary on these four.
The fourth of the Four Noble Truths is the path itself — eight interrelated factors grouped under wisdom, ethical conduct, and mental discipline. It is the Buddha's prescription for the ending of suffering.
Five voluntary trainings undertaken by every lay Buddhist: to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, false speech, and intoxicants. They are the minimum architecture of ethical life and the foundation on which all higher practice rests.
The Birth.
A discourse on the place of Nepal in the unfolding of the Buddhist tradition, delivered in Kathmandu before a Newar and Tibetan audience. The first of a two-part teaching by one of the rarest and most uncompromising teachers in the Khyentse lineage.
On the necessity of dharma education for laypeople — not the preserve of monastics alone, but the inheritance of every person who walks the path.
The opening episode of a serial reading and commentary on the Dhammapada — the Buddha's collected sayings, the most widely-read text in the Theravada world, rendered into a daily contemplation.
