First Practice Principle

Caught in the self centered dream

Only suffering.

Holding to self-centered thoughts

Exactly the dream.

Each moment, life as it is,

The only teacher.

Being just this moment

Compassion's way.

Caught in the self centered dream, only suffering. Holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream. You see, these are the words that we use in the Ordinary Mind Center and you'll find other words in Zen and Buddhism which reflect the same view. Those practice principles really follow the four noble truths. They're just a sort of modern way of rewording them. There's suffering. There's a cause of suffering. There's an end of suffering. There's a path that leads to the end of suffering.

Melting the frozen block of emotion thought, talk by Geoff Dawson, March 22, 2023, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

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In his first teaching, the Buddha spoke of what is known as the "four noble truths": the truth of suffering that inexorably permeates the world conditioned by ignorance; the truth of the cause of suffering - mental confusion, negative emotions and actions with their inevitable results (or karma); the truth of cessation, which is the possibility of putting an end to suffering; and the truth of the path that leads to that cessation. "Suffering" is a broad term that includes all forms of dissatisfaction and painful experiences such as birth, aging, sickness, and death, being confronted with enemies, losing loved ones, and so on. 

Chapter 4, The Inherent Unsatisfactoryness of the World Conditioned by Ignorance from On the Path to Enlightenment: Heart Advice from the Great Tibetan Masters by Matthieu Ricard

God as the ground of being

Thich Nhat Hanh equates “nirvana” and “God” and “ground of being” when he says: 

God as the ground of being cannot be conceived of. Nirvana also cannot be conceived of. If we are aware when we use the word ‘nirvana’ or the word ‘God’ that we are talking about the ground of being there is no danger in using these words.  

For Thich Nhat Hanh, “ground of being” is the deepest expression of the reality of divinity.

Eckhart, Thich Nhat Hanh, Hildegard on God as Ground of Being

BY MATTHEW FOX

MARCH 22, 2023

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The phrase ‘the Ground of Being’ came to the attention of a number of people owing to the fact that John Robinson, then the Bishop of Woolwich, used it in his Honest to God (London, 1964) as a way of speaking of a God who is not ‘up there’ or ‘out there’. ‘Ground’ in ordinary speech certainly suggests something ‘down there’, though ‘down’ is of course as much a spatial metaphor as ‘up’. But the metaphor also seems to offer a way of talking about ‘Being’ as something in which we are somehow ‘grounded’ without having to imagine ‘a Being’ apart from the world. Paul Tillich was the philosophical theologian to whom Robinson was indebted for this way of thinking.

Emmet, D. (1998). ‘The Ground Of Being’. In: Outward Forms, Inner Springs. Palgrave Macmillan, London.

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For Tillich, God is being-itself, not a being among other beings. To describe the relationship between being-itself and finite beings, Tillich takes the word, "ground."

Being and God in Paul Tillich (1886-1965): Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology

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I find the common understanding of God to be problematic. Christian theology has to go through all kinds of contortions to explain evil in the world. With God not being a basis of their worldview, Buddhists don't have as much of a problem. A friend said offhandedly in a group that Buddhists says life is suffering. I find that a distortion as the noble truth acknowledges that there is suffering and how to resolve it. That is so much better than original sin and thinking there is a division of good and evil rather than that we are all capable of evil.