Illumined by the Limitless: Shinran and re-imagining ‘practice’ **Order Retreat**
With Maitrisiddhi
October 3 - 12, 2025
What if we re-imagine ‘world’ as sacred, as ‘Buddha’, as compassionate towards us? What if we meet ourselves with total honesty, as flawed, karmically conditioned beings? What if we allow ourselves to deeply realise the ego’s failure to ‘manufacture’ awakening, no matter how hard we try? What if, instead, we entrust ourselves to our connection with the Dharma, and simply live our relationship with the sacred – with “Amida” or ‘the limitless’? And what if we awaken into knowing our finite selves to be illumined by the infinite?
With his radical teaching of entrusting to Other Power, Shinran explored the path of faith to its fullest extent in twelfth century Japan. He overturns conventional tenets of Buddhism – and blows wide open our assumptions about how to live the Dharma life. Yet he is simply drawing out and taking to their furthest limits some essential teachings of the Buddha, and, later, Bhante.
Leader
I first got involved with the Triratna Buddhist Community in 2005, when I was living in Sheffield, working as a physiotherapist and doing a lot of rock climbing and mountaineering. It was when I was on a trip to the Andes when I was 25, that quite by chance I picked up my first book on Buddhism, and thought: ‘This makes so much sense!’ I’ve been practising meditation and the Dharma (the teachings of the Buddha) ever since. I moved to Taraloka Buddhist Retreat Centre in 2009, drawn by a desire to integrate meditation experience more fully into my daily…
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