Practicing Extreme Joy

A teaching from the Avatamsaka, or "Flower Ornament" Sutra, encourages us to cultivate extreme joy and to practice the precepts. Extreme Joy, in the Buddhist context, entails helping suffering beings with specific tangible remedies AND a commitment to end the root of suffering. Helping others is always extreme joy when practiced with no view of a separate self.

If you are very thirsty and give yourself a drink of water, isn’t that extreme joy? If you are not separate from others, when you act to relieve their suffering, your suffering is relieved also.

The Avatamsaka Sutra tells us that in the dimension of true extreme joy, great vows arise: vows to honor buddhas; to teach and save all beings; to completely awaken. And engaging these vows increases the joy. One way to engage these vows is to practice the precepts. Our precepts, such as not killing, not stealing, not misusing sexuality, are invitations to enter into the Bodhisattva path as best you are able. We can do this while knowing that many causes and conditions have shaped our so-called deficiencies, the ways we don't measure up - if we were measuring. The invitation is also to stop measuring, and remember that there are other causes and conditions available to shape and support us on the path of true happiness. Not the least of which is the sangha - the community of enlightening beings. So, I invite us to practice extreme joy together, as a sangha. Consider giving to ourselves, to others, to the earth itself. Remember that the root of the practice of many of the precepts is "being satisfied with what I have."

-Guiding Teacher Sosan Theresa Flynn