Skip to content

The Daily Dharma – October 21, 2021

Photo by Jan Canty

Buddhism, it its most subtle and sophisticated expression, is not a tradition that seeks to provide answers to life’s questions or dispense “wisdom” to allay our fundamental angst. Rather, it challenges us to look beyond any and all answers that we may have found along the way, to meet ourselves in a naked, direct, and fearless fashion. Not providing answers, as Stephen Batchelor has shown us, Buddhism instead proposes a process of radical questioning. In fact, it challenges us to question everything that we think and feel about ourselves and our reality – all our most basic beliefs, all our assumptions and preconceptions, even the way we habitually see, hear, and sense the world. We must be willing to let go of everything we have believed – every answer that we have come up with down to this moment – in order to find out the final truth of who we are.

Reginald Ray
from Touching Enlightenment; Finding Realization in the Body
Chapter: The Ultimate Challenge of Buddhism