Articles
"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…
Read MoreMeditating With and For Each Other
While meditation retreats have always been challenging, rewarding, and in some ways, deeply moving experiences for me, I believe that they don’t sufficiently foster two key aspects of our practice: our ethical, socially-conscious engagement in the world and our active participation in sanghas. In a previous blog post I raised concerns about the negative effect…
Read MoreLovingkindness 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 MoreSecular Meditation: A Review
When I reviewed Sam Harris’ book, Waking Up, in these pages, I lamented that the book failed to live up to its subtitle, “A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.” Indeed, there are a growing number of volumes, from writers like Harris, Stephen Batchelor and others, that discuss the philosophical underpinnings of living a spiritual life…
Read MoreKeeping Your Meditation Resolution
Is starting a regular meditation practice on your list of New Year’s resolutions? Congratulations! Making time for daily meditation is powerful act of self-compassion. As the Dhammapada tells us, not even one’s mother or father can be of greater help than one’s own well-cultivated mind. However, if starting a daily practice were easy, we wouldn’t…
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 MorePali Intensive Course Offered Online
There are some exciting things happening in the world of Buddhist studies. There is one in particular I’m familiar with that I thought you might like to know about, because – especially at this moment in time – you don’t need to be either a monastic or a student at a university, or a big…
Read MoreThe Importance of How We Translate: The End of Suffering
How readers understand Buddhism depends a great deal on how it is presented to us. This should be obvious. Though Buddhism teaches us to see for ourselves whether what we learn applies to our lives, how we practice, and what we look for when we practice is going to be affected by how…
Read MoreIs Donald Trump a Psychopath and Should We Love Him Anyway?
Religious Buddhists are serious about universal love. Even Psychopaths Need Love, Lodro Rinzler writes. Lama John Makransky writes in Awakening Through Love: “Those who point to Hitler as reason not to cultivate all-inclusive love, insisting that people who are that evil should never be included in such a wish, do Hitler honor by imitation. To believe that…
Read MoreBatchelor'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…
Read More