Summary by David Yin
The Shurangama retreat was the first 2-week Dharma practice and study retreat organized by DRBY. Focusing on Vol 4 of the Shurangama Sutra - It consisted of three lectures and a nighttime discussion every day. The participants were presented with a variety of topics: the creation story of Buddhism, karma, 8th consciousness, 5 skandhas (form, feeling, cognition, formation, consciousness), emptiness, morality, principles, wisdom, and compassion.
For many, this retreat deepened their perceptions of Buddhism. People who have grown up with a Buddhist background realized how everything fit together. Others, not so familiar with all the terminology, still got a taste of the holistic view of reality presented by the Buddha. Although this was not an entry point for a person unfamiliar with Buddhism, DM Heng Chih made the material comprehensible for as many people as possible. Complex ideas were further elaborated upon by analogies and were followed by lengthy question and answer periods.
For the first week, David Rounds made the teachings practical and personal. Using his strong background in philosophy, he was able to compare the teachings of the Buddha to western philosophers and ancient scientific philosophies. The first major insight he gave was that we should not read the Sutra as a scientific text. The Buddha was using the concepts at the time to illustrate his point. Therefore, the fallacies in the science the Buddha was using shouldn't cause any problems. We, as readers, however, must go in ourselves and understand what the Buddha was really teaching with the beliefs of the time.
Ron Epstein led the discussion for the second week. His first item of business was similar to David's-he went first to challenge our own beliefs and axioms. In our modern age we have three conflicting worldviews. One is a romantic belief in the progress of science solving all of our basic problems. Another is the view presented by science--that in reality, we are just infinitesimal little specks living on a tiny dot circling around a relatively ordinary star. And third, despite what science tells us about our own significance, we still function from a perspective that "we are the center of the world." How these three mesh together and work themselves out is something that he wanted us to investigate.
