Family

Doug takes up three passages that seem to pull against one another: the Mettā Sutta's image of a mother's love for her only child as the model of boundless kindness, the Buddha's words to a grieving grandmother that those with a hundred…

What is the hardest Buddhist practice, particularly for us laypeople? I'll give you a hint: it has to do with family. I'll provide some keys that might help make it all easier and more straightforward.

We'll take a look at some of the stories around the Buddha's family, his wife and child, and whether they may have been constructed out of whole cloth. Then we'll turn to look at the tension between family and practice in the early…