Dancing With the Benefactors: Exploring the Wisdom of the Flower Ornament Sutra
Renshin Barbara Verkuilen
The Flower Ornament Sutra contains 39 books of vast, rich, and grandiose Buddhist teaching, held in high esteem by all Buddhist schools concerned with universal liberation. It is a work of stunning imagination capable of transforming one’s perspective from concept to the immediacy of metaphorical understanding. The function of the sutra is to affirm the infinity of the path, and inspire practitioners to take up the mission of cultivating wisdom and compassion.
Renshin Barbara Verkuilen’s way of studying the Flower Ornament Sutra is centered within intuitive dialogue. She applied the innovative Enhanced Emergent Knowledge skillful means to produce a verbal depiction of the intuitive engagement with an individual benefactor’s teaching. Then, she took that information and the teachings of Visual Journaling to create collages that illustrated her visual intuition. The result is “Dancing with the Benefactors” wherein Renshin invites you to become familiar with and to participate intimately in the joyous teaching of the Flower Ornament Sutra.
In the service of translating the Dharma to the west, Firethroat Press offers Buddhist literature for contemporary Western practitioners that provides unique methods of inquiry, innovative approaches to the practices of meditation, and resourceful perspectives for blending practice and lay-life.
Firethroat Press’s focus is on “how to” books and study guides. There are many excellent compositions describing what constitutes Buddhist philosophy and practice, but few that communicate the details of the difficulties practitioners confront within the process of awakening. The “how to” emphasis attempts to respond to Shakyamuni Buddha’s affirmation, “I have taught one thing and one thing only, dukkha and the cessation of dukkha,” with novel definitions of what constitutes dukkha and the practical means to its cessation.
