Posts by Stephen Schettini
So What?
—On Glenn Wallis and Speculative Non-Buddhism (provoked by Wallis’s article, On the Faith of Secular Buddhists) The hardest thing I ever did was walk away from Buddhism. It had saved my sanity and my life. After decades of self-destructive behavior, I’d found myself at home in the arms of the Tibetan Diaspora. After years of…
Read MoreGood Faith, Bad Faith
While watching the Dalai Lama on YouTube the other day I was struck by a strange sensation. I was bored. Now don’t get me wrong. I like this ‘simple monk’ as Tenzin Gyatso likes to call himself. I had a long private audience with him years ago in Dharamsala that left me flying high for…
Read MoreThe Double-bind of Guru Devotion
Stephen Schettini was asked by a correspondent about his insights on the guru-disciple relationship and the suitability/pitfalls of such a model in the modern age. He was asked, “How did you cope with rejecting those relationships in your own life; and now with your role as a teacher how do you approach this?” First, the…
Read MoreGautama Buddha: Man or God?
Vishvapani Blomfield’s Gautama Buddha: The Life and Teachings of the Awakened One is one of a new breed of Buddha biographies. For centuries there was really only one. Ashvaghosha’s epic poem Buddhacarita (Acts of the Buddha), written some three hundred years after the Buddha’s death, paints the Buddha myth familiar to generations of Buddhists. A…
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