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He who, having traversed this miry, perilous,
and delusive round of existence,
who has crossed over, and reached the other shore,
who is meditative, calm, free from doubt,
and, clinging to nothing, has attained to nibbāna:
him do I call a holy one. (Dpd 414)
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Sati really does mean ‘memory’
“Mindfulness” as we now understand it is the result a history of semantic change. This began in ancient times with the Pali word sati, which…
Consciousness in the EBT
Dhammānupassanā Series Thus, Ānanda, for beings hindered by ignorance and fettered by craving, kamma is the field, consciousness the seed and craving the moisture for…
The Buddha as Biologist
Dhammānupassanā Series The Buddha taught suffering and the ending of suffering. His teachings were stringently parsimonious and practical. It made sense that he would teach…
Dhammānupassanā
Seeing through the eyes of the Buddha Samādhi (concentration) is the dominant factor of the higher training toward awakening in the early Buddhist texts (EBT),…
What is the Eye?
Dhammānupassanā Series The eye seems like a commonplace enough and useful thing. Who would imagine that it would be so implicated in the human pathology,…
Am I my five khaṅdhas?
Dhammānupassanā Series One day, the awakened nun Vajirā Bhikkhunī, having returned from Savatthi with her daily alms, having eaten and having settled down in the…
Theravāda and Mahāyāna Need Each Other (2/4)
Myth 2: Mahāyāna as higher teachings Theravāda has been remarkably orthodox historically, although it did undergo some further development from the early Buddhist texts (hereafter…
Theravāda and Mahāyāna Need Each Other (1/4)
The gap in the Buddha-Sāsana (S: Śāsana)[i] between the Theravāda and Mahāyāna traditions began in India as doctrinal differences, but came to be India itself,…
Buddhist-Rohingya Relief
I am soliticing donations on behalf of people recently displaced by violence in Rakhine State, Myanmar, and particularly the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees…
Those Self-Absorbed Buddhists
A few months ago I gave a talk to some seminary students who wanted to learn about Buddhism. After the talk, after the Q&A that…
The Case of the Missing Sangha
a selective review of Stephen Batchelor’s After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, 2017, Yale University Press. Other reviews of this work have…
Sangha
This essay is updated from the chapter “The Buddhist Community” in my book A Culture of Awakening: the life and times of the Buddha-Sasana. When…
Take Seriously but Hold Loosely: perspectives on Secular Buddhism (3/3)
Sorry for the delay; I changed my mind a couple of times in writing this. So far, in parts 1 and 2, I have argued…
Take Seriously but Hold Loosely: perspectives on Secular Buddhism (2/3)
The previous episode (1/4) demonstrated that the teachings of Buddhism provide a support for practice and have no other function, in particular, no function in…
Take Seriously but Hold Loosely: perspectives on Secular Buddhism (1/3)
Recently someone compared my writing to that of Stephen Batchelor, the most prominent and perhaps most articulate proponent of the new Secular Buddhism movement. I…