Posts Tagged ‘dukkha’
A Secular Understanding of Dependent Origination: #0 The Taints
There are three taints: the taint of sensual desire, the taint of being and the taint of ignorance. With the arising of ignorance there is the arising of the taints. With the cessation of ignorance there is the cessation of the taints. The way leading to the cessation of the taints is just this Noble…
Read MoreA Secular Understanding of Dependent Origination: #12 Aging and Death
The aging of beings in the various orders of beings, their old age, brokenness of teeth, grayness of hair, wrinkling of skin, decline of life, weakness of faculties — this is called aging. The passing of beings out of the various orders of beings, their passing away, dissolution, disappearance, dying, completion of time, dissolution of…
Read MoreA Secular Understanding of Dependent Origination: #7 Feeling
There are these six classes of feeling: feeling born of eye-contact, feeling born of ear-contact, feeling born of nose-contact, feeling born of tongue-contact, feeling born of body-contact, feeling born of mind-contact. — MN 9 translated by Bhikkhus Nanamoli and Bodhi Still in the field of sense information, here we are being asked to look at what…
Read MoreA Secular Understanding of Dependent Origination: #6 Contact
Up to this point what has been covered in the first five steps is an overview of the problematic situation as it’s given to us.The model for what’s going on in these first five steps is a well-known origin myth that gets referred to in various different places in the suttas: the story of the…
Read MoreA Secular Understanding of Dependent Origination: #2 Sankhara
In the last post I offered a fairly plain description of what was meant by “ignorance” in the first link in the chain of dependent arising. It is ignorance of what dukkha is, how it comes about, that it can come to an end, and the way to do that. I said that dukkha is…
Read MoreWeekly Practice (Dukkha, or Suffering)
We’ve covered a lot of ground in these Weekly Practices, and now you should have a good idea of what mindfulness and concentration are and how meditation develops both. We’ve also looked closely at the impermanence of everything, including the five aggregates that we tend to mistake for a static self. Lastly, we took a good look at craving and attachment.
This week we’ll examine dukkha, often translated as suffering. Dukkha is also the third mark of existence and the subject of the noble truths.
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 MoreThe Three Characteristics of Existence (Noah Levine)
In this talk, Noah explain the three characteristics of existence and how it relates to our every day lives.
Read MoreThe Suffering Self (David Loy)
The Suffering of Self In contemporaty terms, the self is dukkha (suffering) is because it is a psycho-social construct that can never feel secure. It is haunted by a sense of lack that we usually misunderstand.
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…
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