Posts Tagged ‘craving’
4/22 Practice Circle: Mindfulness of Dharmas
When Practice Circle meets again this Sunday, April 8, at 6 p.m. Pacific, 8 Central and 9 Eastern, we’ll conclude our four-part examination of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness by examining the Fourth Foundation, mindfulness of dharmas. The word dharma, or dhamma in Pali, has a number of meanings, but in this instance it refers…
Read MorePractice Circle: Trust Emergence
When Practice Circle meets again this Sunday, 7/12/20, at 8 pm Central, we’ll work with a practice called Insight Dialogue. To prepare, I thought I’d share this essay we originally published in 2015. At Practice Circle, we’ll be working with an interactive mindfulness practice developed by Gregory Kramer called Insight Dialogue. In this practice, we…
Read MoreWhy We Can't Have Nice Things
We all like nice things, but our pursuit of them has important drawbacks. We’ll look at some of those here, as well as evidence of a transmission fluid leak that I’ve been dealing with for the past year. Oh well.
Read MorePractice Circle: Stay Close to Your Resentment
One of the interesting things about working with the Tibetan Lojong slogans is the way they so often seem strangely counterintuitive. The slogan we’ll be working with this week at Practice Circle is a good example: “Stay Close to Your Resentment.” What? As good Buddhists, aren’t we supposed to be releasing our clinging to illusory…
Read MoreWhat Is Dependent Arising?
By Linda Blanchard I said that dependent arising is both very simple, and very complex, but always helpful, and worth the effort to understand. Let me start with the very simple. It Really Is Simple Dependent arising says that we come into the world with certain drives that cause us to build a view of…
Read MoreYes, Dependent Origination Can Be Saved
This post is going to get personal. It can’t be helped. I’ve looked for some other way to write it, but there isn’t one in which I can be straightforward and tell the truth. I’m not going to attack anyone. I might — oh, okay, I will — argue against methods and conclusions, though. But…
Read MoreOn Craving
Last time we looked at the Noble Truth of suffering, of dukkha. As we saw, it is not easy to understand precisely what “suffering” amounts to in the Buddha’s dhamma, and part of what we need to do to understand it is to see how it is produced, how it relates to the Second Noble Truth…
Read MorePracticing Non-Self, Part 1
This is the first of three articles on applying the principle of anatta, non-self, to our dharma practice. The articles support the next few sessions of the SBA Practice Circle, which meets via online video conferencing at 8 pm Central on the second and fourth Sundays of each month. If you’d like to come experience…
Read MoreA Secular Understanding of Dependent Origination: #8 Craving
There are these six classes of craving: craving for forms, craving for sounds, craving for odors, craving for flavors, craving for tangibles, craving for mind-objects. — MN 9 translated by Bhikkhus Nanamoli and Bodhi What is being defined by “craving for sense-objects” is actually far more complex than the simple words of the sutta indicate. This…
Read MoreA Secular Understanding of Dependent Arising: Table of Contents
Americans seem to use “dependent origination” as the most common translation of paticca samuppada, but I don’t think we’re talking about “origination” so much as about what is arising, so I prefer “dependent arising”. (For the sake of search engines, I used “dependent origination” in the title of each blogpost, but a rose by any…
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