London Buddhist Centre

Part 1 of Suryagupta's two-part series on the Myth of the Return Journey.

What if the spiritual path isn't a smooth coach ride to a "peace hotel" but a rough track hacked through the jungle, and that's exactly what makes it worth taking? With humour and honesty, Paramabandhu shares his own stubborn mental habits, a bodhisattva who swallows poison, and what an hour-long queue for the Bayeux Tapestry taught him about practice, offering a fresh way to walk the path by looking within, looking up and looking around.

Please note the audio of this talk cuts off at the end.

In "Seeing the Nature of Things," Maitreyabandhu emphasizes that genuine spiritual transformation relies on three foundational prerequisites: Right View, love, and confidence-trust (śraddha). By cultivating these core qualities across our whole, messy human totality rather than relying on superficial cognitive tinkering, we can systematically erode greed, hatred, and delusion to experience a wholly transformed consciousness.

In this second talk of the Urban Retreat, Jyotismati explores how human unsatisfactoriness stems from craving—the persistent thirst for more of what we want and less of what we don't.

Suryagupta kicks off our Urban Retreat with a talk called The Courage to Face Life - talking about the inevitability of suffering as an aspect of human life.