Posts by Doug Smith
Lovingkindness Now and in the Past
In contrast to the dominant role that mettā (lovingkindness) and the other Brahmavihāras (compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity) play in contemporary Buddhist practice, they seem to have played a relatively minor role in the earliest tradition. One looks in vain for much elaboration on mettā’s dhammic role; largely it seems to have been seen as…
Read MoreOn Materialist Disenchantment
In Buddhism there are two main unskillful approaches we may have towards the world: greed and aversion. Most contemporary dhamma discussions tend to revolve around mitigating aversion. To do that, we practice mettā, the other Brahmavihāras, and learn to accept and embrace the world with kindness and compassion, just as it is. So for example…
Read MoreAt Cātumā: the Fallibility of Human Perfection
What is the aim of practice? Following right effort, it is to emphasize the skillful and deemphasize the unskillful in thought and action. So we aim in meditation to become more directly aware of the real character of our minds, and particularly our motivations. In so doing we begin to see how the pain that…
Read MoreNationalism and Engaged Buddhism
Walpola Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught was one of my first, formative introductions to the dhamma, and it remains one of my favorites. So it was with some interest that I ran across a copy of an earlier volume by Rahula, The Heritage of the Bhikkhu, at a library sale last summer. In this book, Rahula…
Read MoreA Few Words on Bodhi and Batchelor
I would like to have more time to respond to Bhikkhu Bodhi’s recent piece on Secular Buddhism over at Secular Buddhism New Zealand, “Facing the Great Divide”, as well as to Stephen Batchelor’s lengthy response in the comments. Unfortunately time is short so I will be necessarily brief. Bhikkhu Bodhi Bodhi’s essay is something of an…
Read MoreOn the Skillfulness of Refined Taste
On the first day of a course in wine appreciation I was presented with two samples and asked to describe their aromas. They both smelled like wine. There was nothing else I could say about them. I remember thinking that that would change, and that by the end of the course I would be able to…
Read MoreCultivating Wisdom in an Era of Technological Change
My grandmother grew up in the era of the horse and buggy, but lived to see a man set foot on the Moon. When I was a kid growing up in New York we had rotary dial telephones. Personal computers were just being introduced, with green phosphorescent screens and weird command-line interfaces. The first office Xerox…
Read MoreOn the Path
The Fourth and last Noble Truth is the most complex and important. In the suttas the Buddha gives many different understandings of the Path to nibbāna, but of those the one most associated with the Fourth Noble Truth is the Eightfold Path. This is the path of right view, right intention, right speech, right action,…
Read MoreOn 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…
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…
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