About Buddhism
What's It All About?
What Is Buddhism?
The Path
Buddhism is a non-theistic spiritual path that helps us cultivate more positive mental states, including our natural awareness and emotional warmth. This allows us to live more meaningful and fulfilling lives.
Buddhism's ultimate goal is 'Enlightenment' or waking up - direct insight into the nature of reality. It gives us a tried and tested set of practices and teachings that help us move towards Enlightenment by a process of spiritual growth.
Buddhist practices like meditation are means of changing yourself in order to develop the qualities of awareness, kindness, and wisdom.
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The basic tenets of Buddhist teaching are straightforward and practical: nothing is fixed or permanent; actions have consequences; change is possible.
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It teaches practical methods which enable people to realise and use its teachings in order to transform their experience and be fully responsible for their lives.
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The Role of Community
The Sangha
Buddhism emphasises the need for a community of kindred spirits to help us along this path - without the support and inspiration of like-minded people, it is almost impossible to make much progress.
So, with the West Wales Buddhist Group, one of our aims is to create a spiritual community that helps us all fulfil our spiritual potential. In a world of increasing cynicism and individualism, many people feel a deep need for such contact.
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Our Tradition
Triratna Buddhist Community
West Wales Buddhist Group is part of the Triratna Buddhist Community.
The Triratna Buddhist Community aims to present a form of Buddhism that is grounded in the core teachings and practices that underlie all the different ethnic schools of Buddhism, yet is accessible to us, here and now in the 21st century.
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The Triratna Buddhist Community was founded in 1967 as the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) by Urgyen Sangharakshita, a Londoner who realised at the age of sixteen that he was a Buddhist. He became ordained as a Buddhist monk in India and spent twenty years practising and teaching Buddhism in the East. In 1964 he returned to Britain and saw the need for a new kind of Buddhist organisation - a community of Buddhist practitioners committed to living a Dharma life, who were neither monastic nor lay.
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Despite feeling that he was not the ideal person to found such a thing, he felt it was needed and so he founded the FWBO in 1967 and a year later, the Western Buddhist Order. It was renamed the Triratna Buddhist Order in 2010, as it had grown beyond the West, and is now represented on all the world’s inhabited continents.
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Try It Out
For Yourself
For thousands of years, people have found that the practices of Buddhism really do work, leading to better mental states, clearer vision, and the ability to live more authentic lives. But the Buddha himself said: don't take my word for it - try it for yourself. Judge by your own experience and see if it works.
Take a look at our Events page to see what's on this month, and feel free to contact us if you're not sure which event would be best for you.
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You can also try the guided meditations and listen to recorded teachings on the Audio page.
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Butterfly Spiral ©Stephanie Phillips 2023.