Paul Fleischman is a psychiatrist and a Teacher of vipassanā meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. He is the author, among other works, of Cultivating Inner Peace and Karma and Chaos. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I have found myself musing about nonviolence, its contributions, its limits, and its place in the Buddha’s teaching. I have also been surprised to hear many of my acquaintances confuse the Buddha’s teaching of nonviolence with pacifism … [Read more...]
Climbing to the Top of the Mountain
You have lived in a forest monastery in Sri Lanka for many years, Bhante. What brings you to America? I originally came to the U.S. to visit my father and sister. But for twenty-five years I have been afflicted with a chronic headache condition, which has resisted every type of treatment I have tried to date. My father suggested I arrange a consultation at The Headache Institute of New York, a clinic in Manhattan. Thus for the past few months I have been taking treatment at this clinic. Is … [Read more...]
The Buddha’s Last Word: Care
At BCBS, September 2004 I would like to spend some time this morning exploring a very important idea the Buddha developed—the idea of care. Now many of you may not be familiar with this particular term, at least not put this way: care. It’s usually translated... well, actually it’s not usually translated as anything, and that’s part of the problem. APPAMĀDA The word in Pali is appamāda, which is actually a negative term. The a-, as in Greek, means “not,” and pamāda translates as something … [Read more...]
Escaping the Karma of Addiction
This article is based on teachings given at BCBS in January, 2008 by Paul Simons & Gregory Bivens in a course called Working with Addiction: Spiritual Self-Schema Therapy. It might seem strange to talk about “spiritual self schema” as something to aspire to in a Buddhist context. In the psychological language of Self-Schema Therapy, it describes an alternative to the “addict self,” the type of mistaken identification with one’s negative thoughts and feelings that perpetuates a cycle of … [Read more...]
Perennial Issues
Toward the end of World War II, Aldous Huxley published an anthology, The Perennial Philosophy, proposing that there is a common core of truths to all the world’s great religions. These truths clustered around three basic principles: that the Self is by nature divine, that this nature is identical with the divine Ground of Being, and that the ideal life is one spent in the quest to realize this non-dual truth. In the years since Huxley published his anthology, the idea of a perennial … [Read more...]
Getting the Message
Ajaan Thanissaro (Geoffrey DeGraff) has been a Theravadin monk since 1976 and is the abbot of Metta Forest Monastery in San Diego County, CA. The Buddha is famous for having refused to take a position on many of the controversial issues of his day, such as whether the cosmos is finite or infinite, eternal or not. In fact, many people—both in his time and in ours—have assumed that he didn’t take a firm position on any issue at all. Based on this assumption, some people have been exasperated … [Read more...]
Deep Listening: An Interview with Gregory Kramer
Gregory Kramer is the director of Metta Foundation in Portland, OR, (www.metta.org) and teaches Insight Dialogue meditation and Dharma Contemplation worldwide. I presume you didn’t graduate high school saying to yourself, “I’m going to spend my life teaching Dharma.” Might there have been a few steps between there and here? How did you get into all this, Gregory? Actually, I did graduate high school feeling a close affinity to the internal life. That’s just how I was as a kid. I didn’t … [Read more...]
Theravada in the West
The multifaceted challenges of contemporary Buddhism were explored during an historic weekend conference—to our knowledge, the first of its kind—held last June at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Twelve leading teachers of Theravada Buddhism, equally representing the lay and monastic traditions, addressed cutting-edge issues arising from the relatively recent introduction of Theravada Buddhism to the West. Throughout its long history, Theravada Buddhism has existed in a protected … [Read more...]
An Unabashed Enthusiasm for the Here and Now
Insight: What prompted you to first go off to Asia more than 25 years ago? CT: God knows! When I was a little boy I knew I was going to be a journalist. I understood then that a journalist was somebody who made journeys. So in April 1967 I left London with about $100 and a thumb and headed East. I kept going Eastwards and arrived back in London in May 1977. I think it was a case of never look back. But, of course, the truth of the matter is that there is no going back, no going forwards nor … [Read more...]
Bursting the Bubbles
Insight Journal: So at what point did you find your work moving into what we now call socially engaged thinking? David Loy: I think that dimension was always there, but was not always the focus. Nonduality is about subject-object nonduality in Buddhism, Vedanta and Taoism. By the time it was published I was reflecting more on the existential and psychological implications of Buddhism, due to some close encounters with death: my father suddenly got cancer and died about the same time as my … [Read more...]