This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series: Chaplaincy as a Spiritual Practice and Life Path. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Susan Shannon at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, everybody. It’s wonderful to see you all. Thank you all for coming. It’s the March edition of the Sati Center’s Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series, and I’m so happy to welcome Susan Shannon, who’s joining us today. I’ll tell you a little bit about Susan, and then I’ll pass it over to her to talk to us.
Susan is an Interfaith Minister and Buddhist chaplain. She’s been married to the Dharma since the early 1970s, beginning with studies in Chinese Buddhism and then discovering her forever home with Tibetan Buddhism. Her work is based in restorative justice and emotional literacy and has included at-risk youth, refugees, the unhoused, the differently-abled, and the incarcerated. For many years, Susan has facilitated many rehabilitative groups in San Quentin, including GRIP, The VOEG, and Houses of Healing. She also served as the Buddhist chaplain to the men in the mainline as well as on death row. After her return to Orcas Island in 2019, she founded the Buddhist Prison Ministry that’s now serving tens of thousands of incarcerated people across the United States. Susan is also a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) supervisor with the Center for Spiritual Care and Pastoral Formation. She’s also a Dharma teacher at the Sukhasiddhi Foundation and The Chaplaincy Institute, and a steward to the sacred land that she inhabits.
Susan, I welcome you so warmly, and thank you for joining us today.
Thank you. That was a really good job on the introduction. Thank you. Thank you, Gil and Jennifer and Sati1 Center. I’ve always loved collaborating with Sati Center and was able to come and speak in person several times when I lived in California, always about the GRIP program, which I was pretty embedded in.
I’m really delighted to be here today. Vanessa and I tossed around some potential titles for the talk, and it landed on something that is so near and dear to me, to the profession of chaplaincy and spiritual care providing, and I hope to all of you. And that is chaplaincy as a spiritual practice and as a life path. It is my hope that by the end of our hour today, you will have a couple of things to think about that are pinging in your mind, and you will have maybe a tool or two that you can use throughout your days, both on your site, whatever it is, and in your personal life.
I’m going to start with a tool that is also a grounding meditation. This is one that I really enjoy sharing with chaplaincy students. People are trying to make sense of the world right now, and boy, oh boy, it’s a crazy world to make sense of. You all are stepping into this profession at a time when the world needs you. It’s a different stage than it would have been even 10 years ago.
I call this little grounding meditation “The Two Triangle Meditation,” and you’re welcome to adapt it in any way that works for you. It’s a meditation that we will do in a gentle, slow cadence, but I guarantee you that I myself used it many times in a heartbeat in the prison when I was knocked off my square for whatever reason.
So let’s get here. Let’s feel our feet nice and flat on the ground if you can, and really feel that surface area of the bottom of your foot as it meets our Mother Earth. Imagine you’re standing on a beach, warm sand making the perfect imprint of your foot as it goes down, down into the warm sand, making such complete contact with the energy of our Mother.
And now imagine that as all of our feet are making complete and beautiful contact with our Mother Earth, they’re also sending little signals around the planet, and they’re matching us all up in this gathering of Sangha2 this morning. Little trails from Washington State to wherever you are, and wherever you are to wherever the person next to you on the Zoom screen is, and even across the big pond over to France. We find each other, and in this moment, we are in a group, we are in sacred Sangha.
Let’s imagine that we’re bringing into our bodies the quality of equanimity that our Mother gives us every moment of our lives. We’re bringing into our bodies this nourishment, and the group that is us sits in an imaginary circle, connected, entrained.
And now we will focus on our breath. So let’s breathe from our lower belly together. Inhale… two… three… four… and exhale… two… three… four. Inhale and exhale. And really feel into those visuals of sitting in a circle, of our feet finding each other, continuing to breathe together, establishing a resonance, establishing a connection beyond time and space, which the Zoom platform automatically lends us to.
And now let’s imagine a triangle with its base against our Mother Earth and the point coming up right above your heart space. As we breathe together, we breathe in the energy, the color, the shape, whatever it might be as you visualize it, of the quality of equanimity, all the way up into your being, filling your lower body all the way up into your heart space with this beautiful Brahma Vihara3 quality of equanimity. Imagine you’re breathing in and drawing up into your body all the kinds of nourishment that your beautiful soul and spirit need today. Perhaps another color, perhaps shapes like fireflies or birds. And we breathe in all the ways that our life has been supported by our Mother. She has never left us. She has sustained us. She links us beyond time and space. And feel a moment of gratitude for that quality, so easily overlooked as we speed around through our lives.
Now, without letting go of that visualization, let’s imagine another triangle, this time with the base up in the heavens and the point coming down and intersecting with the Earth point in your heart space, creating a diamond. The base of this triangle opens up like a funnel, and above it are all your wisdom teachers, all the Bodhisattvas4, the Dakinis5, the ancestors of blood or spirit, your beloved pets crossed beyond, your totem animals of spirit. All are there, and they are pouring down into this triangle, this funnel, pouring down their gratitude to you for focusing on your spiritual life through the lens of altruism. And you imagine that quality of gratitude coming down into your being, filling your entire upper body.
And they pour down the quality of courage. And this comes into your being, and courage, because it’s a tough job being a warrior of the heart. We need courage. We need courage to be strong, and maybe most importantly, we need courage to be weak and vulnerable. And so they pour their qualities of courage into you, and you sense it coming down into your being.
And then they pour the qualities of guidance. Guidance for times when the path gets foggy, guidance when words fail and silence prevails. Guidance that allows you to know what doing when in alignment with spirit looks like.
And finally, they’re pouring down their protection, so that we stay on the path, so that we understand the disguises of the pitfalls of spiritual bypass, of fixing and helping versus serving. And all these qualities come down and they merge into the diamond in your heart, along with the Earth quality of equanimity and nourishment and all that has sustained us.
And the diamond in your heart gets so bright, and the light from that diamond shines out and finds each other on this screen, merging with their light. And in this way, we create a matrix, a tapestry by which we can infuse our aspiration for this morning.
So now we collectively feel into what that diamond of your heart feels like as it’s magnified with the light of all your fellow travelers. And ask yourself, what do I personally hope to gain, hope to hear, to feel into in this next hour and a half? And if you can feel a phrase or feel the energy of a phrase, just simply allow it to be, putting it into the light that is our tapestry.
And then think, what is my aspiration for serving my communities or learning professional spiritual care? How might I apply what I learn, what arises in my own realization? How might I apply it to my communities? Just feel into it without trying too hard. And if something comes up, allow it to be gently merged with this light matrix.
And then finally, ask yourself, how might my living into this vehicle of being a spiritual companion, how might this serve our ailing world? With all humility and with all aspiration, with all courage, allow that phrase, if there is one, to just be felt. And once again, allow it to go into the matrix of light that we have created in these few moments. And that is how we set our aspiration for this meeting.
So I ask you to come back into that diamond in your heart and imagine the matrix of light that is us, this Sangha of Saturday morning. And let’s breathe together silently seven times, starting with an inhale that I will count, and then six on your own. So let’s inhale… two… three… four… and exhale… two… three… four… and six more on your own. That light becomes brighter with every inhale, and with every exhale, it magnifies the strength of our Sangha’s aspiration.
As you approach and complete your seventh breath, feel your feet on the ground again and move your toes a little bit. And bring forward that image of the two intersecting triangles and hold that image as one that you will return to. Because in this way, you are in spiritual alignment with the Earth, with all the heavens represent, with your own Buddha nature, and with presence. And from this point, we will begin.
Thank you all for participating in that. That is a really, really useful exercise that you can put in your chaplaincy toolbox whenever you need to align, whenever you walk into crisis, when somebody begins to act out, when you are finding yourself going, “Oh, blank, what do I do now?” Bring forward that visualization, and it will, like a chiropractic adjustment, put you right back into your spiritual alignment. And when you’re in your spiritual alignment, your actions of body, speech, and mind are vibrating with the presence that is in that pastoral connection that you are participating in with your client, with your patient, whoever it is that you’re serving.
I wanted to divide the talk today into a few different points. First, I wanted to start with, what is chaplaincy all about anyway? I know you guys are pretty far into your program, and you’ve heard probably so many things about this. But what has really come forward for me in the last bunch of years is that we are in an era of human history where awakening is accelerated. And it’s quite likely that many of you found your way to this profession through the ripening of your own awakening, recognizing the truth of disconnection, the truth of suffering, recognizing our world is in deep, deep trouble, and feeling the call to come forward and to serve. And that is a very noble call. Noble, from the Buddhist perspective, not noble like a king or royalty, but noble in the sense that the vibration of the people who are called to serve in this way is one of a more realized kind of worldview.
You have been called. There is a frequency, like a radio frequency, that is not heard by a whole lot of people. It’s heard by you. You’ve been called to serve, and that’s a beautiful thing. And that is where chaplaincy becomes a life path. Because you could be a car mechanic and be called to serve and still employ that aspiration that we put forward in the beginning of that grounding meditation.
The idea of being a chaplain or providing professional spiritual care is one that I feel is the ripening of a stage of life, a stage of life in the continuum of life and death and life and death. It’s a stage in that realization of the continuum of our mindstream. A lot of times in chaplaincy, especially beginning students, they don’t really know where they’re going to serve. The other thing that’s really common is people come to CPE or they come to seminary, and like me, I thought I was going to do hospice. And I realized early on, by way of several friends dying while I was in seminary and me having to be in hospitals all the time, I don’t want to be in a hospital. That’s not where I’m going.
The road forks many times. So what do we do with that? Well, what we do is we come back to this place where we realize that it’s not about who, it’s about being of service. This is the warrior of the heart. This is the Bodhisattva, the heart hero. It doesn’t matter who you serve. It matters that you are aware of your interconnectedness and that you step into that in every moment, even if you do not leave your house.
The paramitas6 can be practiced in your own home. The great Kalu Rinpoche, when he embarked on his long retreats, many years if not decades, he was asked afterwards, “Well, what did you, you know, tell us about it?” And he said, “Well, I was able to serve the ripening, the realization of infinite sentient beings through doing my mantra.” The bugs, the birds, the wild animals, the trees. Recognizing your interconnectedness with all forms of life. That fly in the window that has annoyed you becomes your practice of the paramita of generosity. And as you let it out, there’s a prayer, “May all beings be free of illusion.” But then you take it a little further and you realize that fly is your spiritual teacher right in this moment. That fly has just provided you with an opportunity to practice generosity. And so you recognize the interdependence of the teacher-student relationship, and that all things are your teacher.
This is how chaplaincy becomes a way of life. Driving down the road on the way to your clinical placement, whatever it might be, and you see a deer in the ditch. And that deer is your spiritual teacher. That deer evokes in you prayers for its spirit journey. That deer becomes that rare, rare, rare being. If you think of all the animals who have ever died in a ditch without the benefit of a human being saying prayers for its spirit journey, that is incredible. That is a sacred intersection. That is being a chaplain as a life path.
One of the favorite meditations that I have has become a favorite among some of my chaplaincy students, but more so community members here. I call it the “grocery store meditation.” You use these moments where normally you might be just spacing out or scrolling through your phone or thinking about what you’re going to have for dinner. The grocery store is a perfect place for that. And look around and you see, “Ah, somewhere in here, someone is having a birthday.” Breathing deep. “Somewhere here, someone just got a difficult diagnosis.” Breathing deep, sending love, feeling the connection of just simply being a human. “Somebody in here has anticipatory grief for their aging pet or their parent with dementia.” And just keep going with this and feel how every moment stitches you in such a beautiful way in the ultimate role of being a chaplain. Every moment. And in this way, this work will become sustainable for you. In this way, you’re here for the long haul. And that’s what we need right now, people who can withstand the pressure.
This idea of being a hero of the heart or even a Bodhisattva, it’s tricky for us Westerners because we live in this fishbowl of striving and consumerism and spiritual commodification. We have all these beautiful spiritual practices that we love from the Eastern traditions that come from a whole different fishbowl. And here we are, taking them into our fishbowl of striving and shoulds and shouldn’ts. If you grew up with things like confession or rigid family of origin traditions, there’s a lot of shoulds and shouldn’ts that open up little fissures where shame can come in, and where “not good enough” can come in, and where guilt can come in.
So it’s really hard for us as Westerners to expand into this idea that is beyond the bookends of our life and our death, this idea of the continuum of all of our incarnations, our mindstream, where we’ve probably taken this Bodhisattva vow dozens, if not hundreds and millions and trillions of uncountable lifetimes. And we’re just remembering it. We’re not taking it from this moment onward. I’m not assuming that all of you have taken the Bodhisattva vow, but I know you’re here to serve, and that is the essence of the Bodhisattva vow.
We’re here to serve. We’ve been here to serve. We’ve had to be on the forge and will continue to be on the forge, forged into a way of being where our afflicted emotions, our kleshas7, are known to us. And we unpack the three fingers pointing back. One of the great teachings is when you have one finger pointing out, you have three pointing back. So when we find ourselves triggered, we unpack our fears, our hurts, our shames, our traumas. When we find ourselves in a hospital room or at the bedside with somebody who reminds us of our mother who betrayed us, or our father who, fill in the blank. As my CPE supervisor always said, “We never meet anybody new.”
We are always in alignment somehow, even in the great picture of the human condition. We’re always quivering somehow in alignment, whether it be transference and projection or counter-transference, whatever it might be. With whoever it is we serve, they are a facet of us, we are a facet of them. And so it’s our work to know that this path of chaplaincy demands that we’re constantly doing our inner work. And coming back to the very first point I made, that we are awakening together. We might be more aware of that than our patients and our clients who have a great deal, often, of identity around their suffering, around the identities that they have held that are now dissolving. The mandala of them is dissolving, and they are clinging.
Is this not a great opportunity for us, or a great blessing, I should say, for us to go, “Ah, yes, the Four Noble Truths.” If we can establish a relationship with them where they might be able to have a future that involves a path out of their suffering, then we can move ahead. For us to continue to do our work on our inner being allows us to be that empty vessel that can continue to meet these stories that are unfair, they’re unjust, they’re unconscionable.
In Buddhist Prison Ministry, we get letters every week that are unbelievable, the extent of suffering. And certainly, I saw it in my years in the prison, and certainly I saw it on death row, where the entire lifetime has been intervals of suffering to the point where what I call the “Fifth Noble Truth” of “hurt people hurt people” erupts into violence. The truth of disconnection, the truth of so much suffering without meaning that a person just can’t handle it anymore, and they hurt somebody else.
Though most of us are likely not to be working in such a setting, the stories people carry… there’s no big ‘T’ and little ‘t’ as we used to say in the prison in terms of trauma. One of the men I worked with the longest in the prison said that his original pivot away from his heart came when he was eight years old and his hamster died. He and his mom cried, and his mom’s boyfriend beat him and beat him and beat him to where he still has scars, because “boys aren’t supposed to cry” and “it’s just a hamster.” And in that moment, boom, separated from his heart. In that moment, criminal thinking, or disconnection, took over. And it wasn’t until way into a 24-year sentence that he was able to come back and find his heart. The journey from the head to the heart is the longest, hardest journey, whether we’re working with inmates or veterans or people in hospice or memory care.
It’s really important to have a strong, exploratory, out-of-the-box relationship with the idea of boundaries. Let’s look at boundaries for ourselves, and then boundaries in our work, and boundaries with our clients. With ourselves, you know, this striving of “I can do it” is great. It might have gotten you into seminary, it might have gotten you into chaplaincy. But sometimes you can’t do it. And it is really important to realize that and give yourself that.
In terms of staying in spiritual alignment, what’s important is that you can build your resonance like a hollow drum with the human condition. And you’re not going to be able to really do that if you push away your deepest emotions, if you push away your deepest fears, if you don’t let yourself grieve, if you don’t let yourself feel injustice. And let’s flip it. If you do feel your deepest emotions and you do allow yourself to grieve and you do allow yourself to feel injustice, you might be calling in sick. You might be lying on the floor weeping. You might be just a puddle, curled up with your puppy or your kitty. And let yourself do that. Let yourself grieve. Let yourself emote to the very degree that you need to.
And then when it starts to pass, invite in all the people in the world who are sharing that same feeling with you right now. Invite them in. Let them lay down on your floor with you in the fetal position. Bring them in and know that in your inviting them in, in your resonance with them, in being able to feel the deepest you can, that informs and enhances the quality of your presence. And then as you feel yourself finally being able to get off the floor, you can state a prayer for all the beings who are maybe almost ready to get off the floor themselves. “May all of us find the courage to grieve. May we all find a way to integrate this crazy life into meaning.” In this way, you have a very realistic, honest, vulnerable, strong boundary with yourself.
Know the venue that you can serve. Know your capacity. I could never do, for example, NICU chaplaincy or even hospital chaplaincy. But people would say to me, “Oh my God, I don’t know how you could go into death row for 10 years.” Well, that was spiritually easy for me. I don’t know how some people can go and be a chaplain to parents who just lost their babies. I couldn’t do that. Know what you can do. Know what you can’t do. If you can’t do on-calls because you’re a single mom or because of your own disabilities or different abilities, find another place. The world has got enough places for you to serve. You don’t need to power through this. Find a place where you can give your gifts now.
We don’t know how much time we have. In the Buddhist sense, as they say, you don’t know what’s going to come first, your next meal or your next life. And yet here we are, living in this crazy time where the reality of impermanence is looming in different ways. So now is the time. And boundaries of connection are way healthier than boundaries of armoring.
It’s really important to understand the various roles that people play. If you’re working in a clinical setting, the social worker has a role, the doctors have a role, the nurses have a role. And not everybody understands the role of a spiritual care provider. This leads me to the last point I wanted to make, which is the importance of professional training. You guys are all in this wonderful Sati Center, but hopefully after you graduate, it won’t be the last of your professional training.
Let’s come back to awakening for a moment. Buddhism doesn’t have a corner on the market for vocabulary around awakening. It’s really important that you have an interfaith understanding. It’s really important that you can at least rub shoulders with what spiritual ripening looks like in different faith traditions. It might be easiest to start with some of the mystical ones, like the joy of Hafiz. It might be more akin to you to study the qualities of Kundalini rising. But whatever you do, realize that Buddhism doesn’t have a corner on the market of awakening. It’s just another system, another scaffold. Find your way in.
Awakening has to do with our nervous systems refining. In the old days, the tapas from the Hindu traditions, the fasting and the austerities, it was not so much about going without stuff as creating the causes and conditions for our nervous systems to refine so that we can raise our vibration to these different fields of energy that allow us to have pastoral alignment with others, to allow that which wants to become visible in the field between us and others to become visible, to allow healing versus curing from the spiritual companionship perspective. So do what you need to do: yoga, acupuncture, Qigong, whatever it is that allows the channels to open and keep them open, especially if you are working with a lot of grief.
Energetic protection is really important. We’re empaths if we’ve been called to this line of service. We resonate with the ills of the world and we want to step in. And yet, there’s a whole lot that can seep in that can be a deterrence to our light. So it’s important that we have some kind of energetic protection, an energetic boundary. Before I even get out of bed in the morning, I do some prayers in my mind. As soon as I know I’m waking up, I’ll do some prayers. But then I imagine myself encased in a womb of light that then aligns me with spirit, similar to the two-triangle meditation. And I’m aligned in body, speech, and mind. And I remind myself of this as I go throughout the day.
In this way, I will precede my day. What you don’t really want to do is wake up and let the secretary of your life be meeting you at the edge of your bed with the list of all you have to do today. Set that North Star before you let the list come in. Set that North Star of spiritual alignment. You can use the two triangles. Just remember that you have chosen a path that is quite difficult in the long term, and that you are committing to your own awakening, and that you are committing to walking in alignment so that awakening can continue to unfold.
Energetic protection allows you to be in alignment so that that light, that quality of presence, can emit through you as an empty vessel without agenda, in just the right ways it needs to, without taking in the vicarious trauma, the vicarious drama, the illnesses of others. Boy, oh boy, did I ever see it in the prison. San Quentin has so many wonderful programs for rehabilitation, and almost all of them are built on restorative justice and emotional literacy. One would expect that the people who are brought in who are facilitating these programs are really solid in those two qualities. And yet, what I saw over and over again is this intoxication of seeing what real transformation looked like, mistaking seeing it for doing it. What ended up happening is the leadership structure of many of these groups began to erode. People got sick, they got burnt out. There were cases where the inmates themselves had to hold restorative circles for the outside facilitators.
This is not unique to prisons. Hospitals are a whole different experience of that because you have all these disembodied energies. You walk in there without energetic protection, and you are a petri dish for any hungry energy that wants to come in and have you as the host. It might not be right away, it might be one year, two years, three years, four years, but it’ll catch up to you. And it’s not pretty when chaplains burn out. It’s really not pretty. It’s hard, it’s sad to see chaplains become bitter and indifferent and disconnected from their own spiritual practice.
So my last point is, what is spiritual practice anyway? One of the things spiritual practice is not is static. You might do the same thing every day for a few weeks, but we all know people who say, “Oh, I’ve been meditating for 35 years,” and they’re still super annoying people and you don’t see that they’ve changed. We’re here to transform. That’s what it’s all about. So fluff up the pillow on your practice, you guys. If you find yourself doing something over and over again and it really serves you, and you can look back and see that you’re changing, well good, keep it going. But add something new. Do it longer, do it shorter, do it in a different place. Quit doing it and see what happens. See where shame comes in.
A quick example for me: I really love the offering of the water bowls in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. For years, I did it every single day. I’d fill the water bowls and I’d imagine I was making offerings to all the enlightened beings. And then at the end of the day, I would empty them, all with prayer and reflection. Then I realized that I started to forget, and there were my bowls on the altar, and they were not empty, or even worse, the water had evaporated out of them. And I was like, “Oh my God,” and then all that guilt that I had growing up as a Catholic came in. I was filled with this guilt, and I realized, “Wow, Susan, that’s the practice, is dealing with the guilt.” So I completely quit doing the water bowls. I cleaned them all up, I put them nice and straight on my altar, and I just quit doing them for a long time and put something else in place.
The idea is you shake up your spiritual practice. You fluff up that pillow. It’s your favorite pillow, but every morning, fluff up that pillow of your spiritual practice. Make it new. Because if you’re really on this path, you will not be the same person you were yesterday. You will never read the same text in your life. Even if you just read the Four Noble Truths every day, it’s always going to be different if you’re changing. And that’s the idea of awakening.
With that, I want to just really thank you guys and bless you. If I can be so bold as to offer blessings for all of you and all the people that you are going to serve. Maybe we can just take a moment and bring back that visualization of being together in Sangha, in a circle with our matrix of light. And now we can dedicate. The two bookends of the Mahayana8 practice are aspiration and dedication.
So let’s bring back that idea of the diamond of our heart shining, magnifying off everyone. And let’s bring in the image of all the beings who you have served in your role as a spiritual care provider. And let’s imagine so many more: their family members, their community members, people you will serve in the future. And let’s bring forward, as our walls expand, anyone who has ever stepped on this path in the past, and all of their patients, clients, people they’ve served, animals served in this big aspiration of awakening. And then their family members. And pretty soon, it looks like Woodstock. There is just this endless sea of beings.
And let’s imagine now that we’re dedicating any positivity of this last hour to all of those beings, including all of the future. And in this moment of dedication, our light, our aspiration, our dedication gets joined with the greater energy of awakening of the universe, that Bodhicitta9. And like holding on to a ski rope too tight, it’s just magnified and blasted into the universe with light that circles all of existence. And the energy of that comes down into you to fuel your own spiritual awakening and realization and ability to serve yourself, our communities, and our world.
So thank you all so much. I really appreciate it.
Sati: A Pali word meaning “mindfulness” or “awareness.” It is a key element of Buddhist practice. ↩
Sangha: A Pali word that can mean “community” or “assembly.” In Buddhism, it traditionally refers to the monastic community of monks and nuns, but is often used more broadly to refer to the community of all Buddhist practitioners. ↩
Brahma Vihara: A series of four Buddhist virtues and the meditation practices made to cultivate them. They are also known as the four immeasurables. They are: loving-kindness (metta), compassion (karuna), sympathetic joy (mudita), and equanimity (upekkha). ↩
Bodhisattva: In Mahayana Buddhism, a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings. ↩
Dakini: A type of female spirit or deity in Hinduism and Buddhism. In Tibetan Buddhism, they are energetic beings in female form, evocative of the movement of energy in space. ↩
Paramitas: In Buddhism, the perfections or virtues that a Bodhisattva practices on the path to enlightenment. The six main paramitas are generosity, morality, patience, energy, meditation, and wisdom. ↩
Kleshas: In Buddhism, the mental states that cloud the mind and manifest in unwholesome actions. Kleshas include states of mind such as anxiety, fear, anger, jealousy, desire, depression, etc. ↩
Mahayana: One of the two main existing branches of Buddhism and a term for classification of Buddhist philosophies and practice. ↩
Bodhicitta: In Mahayana Buddhism, the compassionate wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. ↩