Articles
Gautama 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…
Read MoreBuddhism Before the Theravada (Audio, John Peacock) & Comments
I’ve listened to the first audio recording of a series of six talks called Buddhism Before the Theravada, speaker John Peacock, held at the Insight Meditation Center. This talk is fascinating! John Peacock gives a really great history of the times Gotama lived in, and additionally he relates the importance of that history as context…
Read MoreThe Ethics of Impermanence
At the end of his very useful and somewhat demanding book, The Bodhisattva’s Brain, philosopher Owen Flanagan poses a dilemma: . . . I still do not see, despite trying to see for many years, why understanding the impermanence of everything including myself makes a life of maximal compassion more rational than a life of…
Read MoreThe Buddha On Love
“Suppose, bhikkhus, a man loved a woman with his mind bound to her by intense desire and passion. He might see that woman standing with another man, chatting, joking, and laughing. What do you think, bhikkhus? Would not sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair arise in that man when he sees that woman standing with…
Read MoreAtheism, Existentialism, and Buddhism's Reasons for Living
Recently I got an email from a listener of the podcast, asking some very well put questions about atheism and Buddhism as it relates to existential thought.
Read MoreThe Secret of Happiness
by Mark Knickelbine In The Goal of Practice and elsewhere, I have argued along with Stephen Batchelor that the goal of secular dharma practice is not a final cessation of suffering (regardless of how many thousands of times the Pali canon says otherwise). As Batchelor points out, the word commonly translated as “suffering” in English…
Read MoreLetting Go of the Raft
*~*~* “I shall show you how the Dhamma is similar to a raft, being for the purpose of crossing over, not for the purpose of grasping…” *~*~* [MN 22.13 All translations of the sutta in this post are by Bhikkhu Bodhi] *~*~* The Buddha’s simile of the raft gets a lot of use lately…
Read MoreWhy Scientific Scrutiny is Vital to Buddhist Practice
In secular Buddhist practice, it’s essential that we welcome scientific scrutiny on our practices, and that we approach our own practices with skepticism and scientific methodology. So much of our practice involves subjective experience, and experimentation therein. Science has shown repeatedly how incredibly easy it is to fool oneself, and to create experiences derived of…
Read MoreFour Truths, Four Vows
This is another in my series of discussions of ideas Stephen Batchelor has been presenting in dharma talks since late 2010. You can hear them at dharmaseed.org. One of the attractive ideas to come out of Stephen Batchelor’s recent teaching is a mapping of the Four Noble Truths onto the Four Bodhisattva Vows of the…
Read MoreThe Goal of Practice
This simple approach leads to some startling possibilities, the most significant of which is a radical change in the goal of dharma practice.
Read More