Awakening unfolds as we orient ourselves through view, rest in awareness through meditation, and allow wisdom and compassion to express themselves naturally in how we live together.
Buddhism is often described as a path of awakening, but at its heart it begins with a simple and compassionate insight: our deepest nature is already whole. Even though our lives may feel fragmented by worry, loss, and uncertainty, Buddhist teaching points to a ground of being that has never been broken. Practice does not begin by fixing ourselves. It begins by learning to trust what is already present.
In the Buddhist Faith Fellowship, our path is traditionally expressed through three interrelated dimensions: view, meditation, and conduct. View gives us orientation, meditation deepens and embodies that understanding, and conduct is how realization takes form in daily life. Together, they describe not a theory, but a living process of awakening that unfolds within ordinary human experience.
For readers new to Buddhism, it may be helpful to say this plainly. Buddhism is not primarily about believing in doctrines or withdrawing from the world. It is a way of understanding life that helps us see why we suffer and how wisdom and compassion can grow in the midst of ordinary experience. It offers a path for living with clarity, care, and responsibility, rooted in a deep understanding of reality.
This understanding is called view. View is closely related to Right View in the Noble Eightfold Path. It is not merely a philosophy or a set of beliefs, but an orientation of the heart and mind that gives direction, much like a map helps us navigate unfamiliar terrain. At first, view begins as an intellectual understanding. We learn about impermanence, interdependence, karma, and the reality of suffering and its causes. Alongside these, we are introduced to emptiness as a preliminary insight: the recognition that things do not exist as fixed, independent entities.
At this stage, emptiness functions much like impermanence or karma. It loosens rigid views and self-centered assumptions. We begin to see that what we cling to as solid is, in fact, changing and relational. This understanding already brings some freedom, but it is still largely conceptual.
Over time, view matures through practice. What begins as an idea gradually becomes lived experience. We do not only think about impermanence; we feel it in our bodies and relationships. We do not merely accept interdependence as a teaching; we recognize how deeply our lives are woven together with others. In the same way, emptiness deepens from a concept into a direct insight. It comes to mean not nothingness, but openness: the absence of fixed essence that allows life to be fluid, responsive, and alive. Because reality is empty in this way, it is also capable of wisdom and compassion.
The Mahayana sutras express this confidence clearly. The Mahaparinirvana Sutra states, “All sentient beings without exception possess Buddha-nature.” From this perspective, awakening is not something added to us. It is the revealing of what has always been present. This recognition gives rise to bodhicitta, the aspiration not only for our own awakening, but for the awakening and well-being of all sentient beings. From this perspective, practice is never a solitary project; it unfolds within a shared world, and its fruit is inseparable from the lives of others.
Because Buddha-nature is formless and beyond conceptual grasping, Mahayana traditions also speak of it through skillful means. In the Pure Land and Shin traditions, Buddha-nature is encountered through Amida Buddha, the Buddha of Infinite Life and Light. Amida is understood not as something separate from our true nature, but as its compassionate personification, a way the formless ground of awakening becomes accessible through trust and relationship.
Meditation is where view is tested, refined, and embodied. It is not a technique for achieving a special state, nor a means of escaping the difficulties of life. Meditation is a contemplative practice of recognizing natural awareness, the ever-present Buddha-nature that is empty of fixed identity yet complete in awakened qualities.
As meditation deepens, emptiness reveals its fuller meaning. It is not a blank void or dead space. It is the open field of vitality and creativity in which thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise and dissolve. This openness is not bound by time or location. It is atemporal and nonlocal, allowing each moment to appear fresh, workable, and alive. In resting within this openness, we discover that awareness itself is stable, spacious, and caring.
In Shin Buddhism, this recognition is expressed in a distinctive and deeply relational way. It is not that we meditate in order to uncover our true nature. Rather, our true nature uncovers itself. We come to see that it is the Buddha who seeks us, reaches toward us, and comes to rest within our own minds and hearts. As this happens, we entrust ourselves to that innate wisdom and compassion.
This entrusting is known as shinjin, the entrusting heart or mind, and it is expressed through the nembutsu, the simple recitation of “Namu Amida Butsu,” which means “I take refuge in Amida Buddha.” The nembutsu is not a practice we perform to generate awakening. It is a response to being met by great compassion, the living activity of wisdom already at work in our lives. Through this entrusting, the vitality of emptiness becomes personal and intimate, shaping how we understand ourselves and others.
Conduct is how realization takes form in daily life. As view matures through meditation, it naturally manifests as lived experience in our relationships, choices, and actions. Ethical living is not imposed as a moral burden, nor is it something to be accomplished through willpower alone. Like meditation, it arises from recognition.
When we recognize emptiness as openness and nonduality, conduct takes on a new meaning. Care becomes the appropriate response because we understand that helping another is not separate from helping ourselves. When self and other are no longer seen as fixed and separate, compassion is simply how wisdom moves in the world.
This expression of wisdom is traditionally described through the six paramitas. A paramita is a “perfection” or a “crossing over,” a quality cultivated on the bodhisattva path that carries insight beyond suffering into lived experience. Among these qualities, the paramitas of patience and perseverance are especially revealing, because they show how awakening is sustained within the conditions of ordinary life.
Patience allows us to remain present with difficulty, uncertainty, and difference without closing the heart or retreating into resentment. Perseverance sustains practice over time, not through force or ambition, but through trust in the path itself, especially when clarity feels distant or life feels demanding. Together, these qualities reflect a way of living that is steady, responsive, and grounded in care.
In this way, conduct is not separate from emptiness or awareness. It is emptiness expressing itself as care in the world, the living activity of great compassion taking ordinary form. When wisdom is no longer abstract and awareness is no longer confined to meditation, compassion becomes how understanding moves through speech, action, and relationship. Awakening is revealed not apart from life, but within the shared work of meeting suffering with patience, perseverance, and care.
Within the Buddhist Faith Fellowship, this integrated understanding of view, meditation, and conduct is explored through meditation practice, Dharma talks, and shared study and courses. Again and again, we return to the same movement: orienting ourselves through view, resting in awareness through meditation, and allowing insight to shape how we live.
The path does not ask us to escape the world or perfect ourselves. It invites us to trust what is already true, to entrust ourselves to the wisdom and compassion that seek us, and to live from that recognition with patience and perseverance. In this way, wisdom and kindness are not distant goals, but qualities that grow quietly, imperfectly, and faithfully in the midst of ordinary life.