Highlights
“When Buddhists talk about expanding our sense of self, we simply mean that we take that sense of family that we have for our parents and our siblings and our cousins and our aunts and uncles, and we expand it to include all living things.”
“In order to counteract this illusion of a separate self and the problems that come with it, we must expand our selves to include those things, so that when we look at the trees, when we look at the clouds, when we look at the water, we look at them the same way we look at our own hands. And we care for them like we care for our hands.”
“As we continue to express gratitude for the things that made that food possible, that nourish our body, we gain a connection to them because we realize, again, that they are an extension of us, the same way that our mother or our father, the same way that our siblings are also an extension of us. We expand our sense of family, our sense of self to include all those things.”
Sensei Alex Kakuyo offered this talk as part of Buddhistdoor Global’s conference, Buddhist Voices in the Climate Crisis. See all videos in the series, or view a transcript of this talk.
