Posts Tagged ‘Pali canon’
The 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 MoreBatchelor's "After Buddhism": A Review
With After Buddhism, Stephen Batchelor continues his project of cultivating a secular dhamma. Batchelor’s book is structured as an exegesis of the Pāli Canon, focusing almost exclusively on this early material to reconstruct what might be termed a secular Buddha. This is a Buddha who followed a kind of Pyrrhonian skepticism about truth, who declined…
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 MoreCompassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation: A Review
Having experienced for myself the difficulty of understanding Gotama’s teachings on both compassion and emptiness based on a reading of the Nikaya texts, I was excited to see Anālayo’s new book, Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation. The book comes out in print in October 2015, but is available now in a Kindle edition.…
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 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…
Read MoreOn Conventional and Ultimate Truth
One of the most famous Buddhist tropes is the distinction between “conventional truth” and “ultimate truth”. While these terms never appear in the Nikāyas, and so cannot be traced back to the Buddha himself, they do trace to the abhidhamma period, perhaps as a potential explanation for the copious and problematic use of “self” talk…
Read MoreEscaping Dispute
The Gratification of Dispute How often do you engage in disputes over your views and opinions? Dispute and argument are an integral part of many secular philosophies, maybe even their most prized practice. Science itself functions around the adversarial methods of dispute, debate, and peer review. The difference between “natural philosophy” and what we consider the science of today…
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