Listen to the Suttas! – Audio Recordings of English Translations of the Pali Canon Suttas

Listen to the Suttas! Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtTMiZHe8419vKGsORMb1ow/videos   Example Video: The Sammaditthi Sutta (The Discourse on Right View, MN 9)   For those who have difficulty with written text (or Pali), there are few quality, widely-available audio recordings of English language translations of the Pali Canon Suttas. Our own Community Director, Jennifer Hawkins, who developed…

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3/25 Practice Circle: Mindfulness of Feelings

I’ve been reading Beth Ann Mulligan’s The Dharma of Modern Mindfulness, which is impressive for the way she uses anecdotes from her secular MBSR course to illustrate basic Buddhist principles. In that spirit, when Practice Circle meets again this Sunday, March 25, at 6 p.m. Pacific, 8 Central and 9 Eastern, we’ll continue our four-part…

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The Dharma of Modern Mindfulness: A Review

One of the most common misunderstandings about MBSR and the other mindfulness-based interventions is that they consist of meditation techniques that have somehow been extracted or divorced from their original context in traditional Buddhism. From this standpoint, critics have referred to mindfulness as “Buddhism lite,” as a simple gimmick to reduce stress and, therefore, a…

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What Might the Buddha Say About Secular Buddhism?

What might the Buddha have thought about secular approaches to Buddhism? We will take a look at arguments found in a couple of early texts, the Apaṇṇaka and Sandaka Suttas, as jumping-off points. Our trip will take us through perhaps the earliest known materialist philosopher, as well as Blaise Pascal’s wager for the existence of…

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Practice Circle: Make Practice Your Whole Life

Those of you who have joined us at Practice Circle lately know that we have been working with the Tibetan Lojong text, fifty-nine slogans that present seven points of training the mind. There have been countless commentaries on the Lojong text; the one we’ve been working with is Norman Fischer’s wonderful Training in Compassion: Zen…

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Batchelor's Ten Theses of Secular Dharma

All of the discussion on this website can be said to revolve around a single question: What is Secular Buddhism? How is it secular, and how is it Buddhist? What can we take from the traditional texts and practices, and what ought we leave behind? How does the dharma fit in with our knowledge from…

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On Cessation

The Third Noble Truth is the truth of the cessation of craving; that there is a method by which craving can come to an end within a human lifetime. As such it is a rather spare truth: the content of that method awaits the Fourth Noble Truth for its elaboration. What is the cessation of…

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Scenes from a Mindfulness Retreat: The Work

Part two of a four-part series.  You can read the introduction here. One of the things I think those of you who have been on more traditional retreats would find most unusual about the mindfulness retreat is how interactive it was.  There were no long periods of silent meditation, broken by occasional meals, dharma talks…

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Stephen Batchelor and Don Cupitt — The Future of Religion: a Dialogue

The following is a transcript from a May 20th, 2012 dialogue between Stephen Batchelor and Don Cupitt, entitled The Future of Religion: a Dialogue, chaired by Madeleine Bunting of the Guardian. Photo credit: Martin Zetter. James Blake, co-director of London Insight Meditation, writes: “This is a very lightly edited transcript of the dialogue between Stephen…

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