a fellow Buddhist

There's a woman in my book club, run by the school my son go to, and she's from Sri Lanka. So we had a conversation. She likes Buddhism because it gives an ethical foundation. She doesn't meditate, and she doesn't go to the temple, but she has a Buddhist necklace. She runs a summer camp where the monks teach and play with the children. I'm going to see if I can get my kids to go to that. I found it interesting that she find the ethics to be the most important thing about Buddhism.

I was listening to a patient the other day, and he'd cleared the decks ethically, so to speak, and he was feeling good. It reminds me that in the path of ethics, meditation and insight, we need a grounding in doing well in life, to move on further. I read once, perhaps I'm misplacing it, but "the gladdening". You just get happy because the clouds have parted to a certain degree and there's a new level of clarity.

Another patient of mine has gone on such a spiritual journey, but he's fickle, he flits from one path to the other, and has chosen paths that were more short cuts. It confirmed me with sticking to my tradition, now renamed.