22-723: Sylvia Boorstein is an American author, psychotherapist, and Buddhist teacher. Boorstein studied with Dipa Ma and is a co-founding teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California . She is also a senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts . All four of Boorstein's grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe . She grew up in Brooklyn, New York , and attended Barnard College . After moving to California in 1961, Boorstein earned
44-512: A child. At the age of 35 Nani conceived and gave birth to her first child, a baby girl, who fell ill and died at three months of age. Four years later, in 1950, Nani gave birth to a daughter, Dipa, whereupon Nani began to be called Dipa Ma "Mother of Dipa" as her daughter's survival was a momentous event. This was followed by yet another loss of a child (her first son) at birth, the sudden death of her husband in 1957, and subsequent extreme grief and physical pains. After her husband died, Dipa Ma
66-481: A combination of these qualities arranged in space ( akasha ). The result of these qualities are the inputs to our five senses, color ( varna ) to the eyes, smell ( gandha ) to the nose, taste ( rasa ) to the tongue, sound (shabda) to the ears, and touch ( sparsha ) to the body. The matter that we perceive in our mind are just a mental interpretation of these qualities. In addition to the above four elements of underived matter, two other elements are occasionally found in
88-523: A master's degree in social work from the University of California Berkeley in 1967 and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Saybrook University in 1974. She has written numerous books such as It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness , That's Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist , Don't Just Do Something, Sit There and Pay Attention for Goodness' Sake . This Buddhist biography-related article
110-528: A tactile object both insofar as that object is tactile and that it can be sensed. In some of these schools, rūpa is not a materiality which can be separated or isolated from cognizance; such a non-empirical category is incongruous in the context of some schools of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism. In the Yogacara view, rūpa is not a substratum or substance which has sensibility as a property. For this school, it functions as perceivable physicality and matter, or rūpa,
132-461: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This biography of a United States religious figure is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Dipa Ma Nani Bala Barua (25 March 1911 – 1 September 1989), better known as Dipa Ma , was an Indian meditation teacher of Theravada Buddhism and was of Barua descent. She was a prominent Buddhist master in Asia and also taught in
154-664: Is defined in its function; what it does, not what it is. As such, the four great elements are conceptual abstractions drawn from the sensorium. They are sensorial typologies, and are not metaphysically materialistic. From this perspective, they are not meant to give an account of matter as constitutive of external, mind-independent reality. This interpretation was hotly contested by some Madhyamaka thinkers like Chandrakirti . Many Indian philosophers of both Buddhist and non Buddhist schools also heavily criticized Yogacara thinking. The Four Elements are used in Buddhist texts to both elucidate
176-565: Is generally synonymous with catudhātu , which is Pāli for the "Four Elements." In this, the Four Elements are a basis for understanding that leads one through unbinding of 'Rupa' or materiality to the supreme state of pure 'Emptiness' or Nirvana. In the Pali Canon , the most basic elements are usually identified as four in number but, on occasion, a fifth and, to an even lesser extent, a sixth element may also be identified. In canonical texts,
198-672: Is sensed, felt, perceived. The Four Elements pertinence to the Buddhist notion of suffering comes about due to: Schematically, this can be represented in reverse order as: Thus, to deeply understand the Buddha's Four Noble Truths, it is beneficial to have an understanding of the Great Elements. In the Satipatthana Sutta ("The Greater Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness," DN 22), in listing various bodily meditation techniques,
220-621: The Buddha instructs: In the Visuddhimagga 's well-known list of forty meditation objects ( kamma ṭṭ hāna ), the great elements are listed as the first four objects. B. Alan Wallace compares the Theravada meditative practice of "attending to the emblem of consciousness" to the practice in Mahamudra and Dzogchen of "maintaining the mind upon non-conceptuality", which is also aimed at focusing on
242-531: The siddhis (spiritual powers) with the Indian master Anagarika Munindra , a senior student of Mahasi Sayadaw . According to scholars, the Visuddhimagga is one of the extremely rare texts within the enormous literatures of various forms of Jainism , Buddhism, and Hinduism to give explicit details about how spiritual masters were thought to actually manifest supernormal abilities. Abilities such as flying through
SECTION 10
#1732869941160264-523: The "great" elements ( mahābhūta ) are fivefold: aether, air, fire, water and earth. See also the Samkhya Karika of Ishvara Krishna, verse 22. For instance, the Taittirīya Upaniṣad describes the five "sheaths" of a person (Sanskrit: puruṣa ), starting with the grossest level of the five evolving great elements: In the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad , the deities is identified as the source of
286-730: The Pali Canon: According to the Abhidhamma Pitaka , the "space element" is identified as "secondary" or "derived" ( upādā ). While in the Theravada tradition, as well as in the earliest texts, like the Pali Canon, rūpa (matter or form) is delineated as something external, that actually exists, in some of the later schools, like the Yogachara , or "Mind Only" school, and schools heavily influenced by this school, rupa means both materiality and sensibility—it signifies, for example,
308-659: The United States where she influenced the American branch of the Vipassana movement . Nani Bala Barua was born on 25 March 1911 in a small village in Chittagong , East Bengal , British India (now part of Bangladesh ). In her childhood she showed an exceptional interest in Buddhist rituals and preferred to study rather than play. She very much wanted to attend school but in 1923 at
330-546: The age of twelve she was married and later went to live with her husband, an engineer, in Rangoon (Yangon), Burma. He soon left to work in Burma , leaving her with her in-laws. Eventually, she moved to Burma to join her husband. In 1929 when Nani was 18 her mother died unexpectedly, leaving behind a baby boy named Bijoy which Nani and her husband took to raise in Burma, as they had not yet had
352-506: The air, walking through solid obstructions, diving into the ground, walking on water and so forth are performed by changing one element , such as earth, into another element, such as air. The individual must master kasina meditation before this is possible. Dipa Ma, who trained via the Visuddhimagga , claimed to have these abilities, but her claim was never independently verified. In 1967, she returned to India, moving to Calcutta where she taught meditation. Her first formal student
374-410: The concept of suffering ( dukkha ) and as an object of meditation. The earliest Buddhist texts explain that the four primary material elements are the sensory qualities solidity, fluidity, temperature, and mobility; their characterisation as earth, water, fire, and air, respectively, is declared an abstraction – instead of concentrating on the fact of material existence, one observes how a physical thing
396-498: The early 1980s Dipa Ma taught at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts . She died aged 78, in 1989 in Kolkata , India, while bowing before a statue of the Buddha. Mah%C4%81bh%C5%ABta Traditional Mahābhūta is Sanskrit for "great element". However, very few scholars define the five mahābhūtas in a broader sense as the five fundamental aspects of physical reality. In Hinduism 's sacred literature,
418-407: The four Great Elements refer to elements that are both "external" (that is, outside the body, such as a river) and "internal" (that is, of the body, such as blood). These elements are described as follows: Any entity that carry one or more of these qualities (attractive forces, repulsive forces, energy and relative motion) are called matter ( rupa ). The material world is considered to be nothing but
440-431: The great elements: The same Upanishad also mentions, "When earth, water fire, air and aether arise, when the five attributes of the elements, mentioned in the books on yoga, become manifest then the yogi's body becomes purified by the fire of yoga and they are free from illness, old age and death." (Verse 2.12). In Buddhism , the four Great Elements (Pali: cattāro mahābhūtāni ) are earth, water, fire and air. Mahābhūta
462-648: Was extremely unhappy. One day a doctor suggested that she learn how to meditate. She attended her first meditation retreat at the Kamayut Meditation Center in Rangoon. She soon after attended her second retreat, at the Thathana Yeiktha center, where the Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw was teacher-in-residence. There she experienced the first stage of enlightenment . In 1963 she was chosen to study
SECTION 20
#1732869941160484-415: Was her neighbor, Malati Barua, a widow trying to raise six young children alone. Believing that enlightenment was possible in any environment, Dipa Ma devised practices that her new student could carry out at home. In the 1970s, she was a teacher of Sylvia Boorstein , Joseph Goldstein , Jack Kornfield , Michelle Levey, and Sharon Salzberg , who later became prominent teachers in the United States. In
#159840