Posts by Doug Smith
The Parade of Horribles
Hope is both blessing and curse. It is a blessing when it gives us the confidence to act, to see beyond temporary obstacles and problems towards the greater good that stands in the uncertain distance. Hope gladdens the heart, turns our minds towards optimism and brings energy when we are low and tired. Hope can…
Read MoreCan Dependent Origination Be Saved?
Dependent origination is a conundrum, particularly in its most common and elaborate twelve link formula. On the one hand, it is both historically and philosophically central to the Buddha’s dhamma, on the other hand it is a deeply problematic attempt to reconcile kammic rebirth with a potential awakening into non-self. The subject is so complex…
Read MoreIdle Chatter About Kings: Political Speech
With the first debate last night, we’re in the thick of political season in the US, a once every four year cycle of presidential agita that dominates the news for months. It’s natural to bemoan the foolishness of it all, to wax satirical or cynical on the state of the nation, but the inconvenient truth…
Read MoreSecular Buddhism's Roots in South Asia
A recent article notes a raft of modern innovations taking place at Longquan Monastery in China, including a robot that answers visitors’ questions. These modernizations make the teaching more accessible to laypeople, and are part of a growing movement that “preaches connectivity instead of seclusion and … practical advice over deep philosophy.” Similar modernizations take…
Read MoreA Forgotten Key to Mindfulness
Days grow shorter. The small ruby-throated hummingbird that visited our feeder for sugar-water several times a day through August has decamped, beginning the first leg of his journey down to Mexico. Overhead the Canada geese flock in great ‘V’s, calling out to each other as they wing south. The sugar maple at the bottom of…
Read MoreNow is Strange
Now is strange. We only experience things in the present. Our access to past and future is through reconstruction and prediction. So much of our lives is spent in our heads, living in thinly disguised fictions of time gone and time to come. This seems obvious, and at the same time it seems so surprising. And yet…
Read MoreOn Some Criticisms of Modern Mindfulness
Is the contemporary mindfulness movement a kind of “fad” that misconstrues the essential message of the Buddha? Pieces by Edwin Ng and Ron Purser (2016a, 2016b) and Stephen Schettini (2014), not to mention the earlier “McMindfulness” critique by Purser and Loy (2013) argue that this is so. Ng and Loy take an overtly “anti-capitalist stance” in their…
Read MoreThinking and Feeling, Critically
We are deep into the political season. Looking at the Trump phenomenon, an article by Phil Torres in Salon bemoans the “anti-intellectualism that runs through the roots of American culture.” Torres notes that, “[T]he most dangerous consequence of Fox News is that it discourages that most important form of rigorous curiosity called critical thinking.” Critical thinking,…
Read MoreSkepticism, Atheism, and the Good Life
Where do we find the good life? The ancient Greeks, our earliest philosophical forebears in the West, thought the highest aim of reason was to answer just this kind of question. Nowadays we often think of reason as allied to the twin aims of (1) scientific skepticism, that is, following the results of consensus science as…
Read More"Buddha vs. Faust": Responding to Ronald Lindsay
Ron Lindsay’s recent blog post “On the Pursuit of Meditation: Buddha vs. Faust” begins as a mild critique of Sam Harris’s recent book Waking Up, and then segues into a skeptical review of meditation. Lindsay is President of the secularist/skeptic Center for Inquiry.* Although I dealt with many relevant topics at some length in my review of…
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