Register and learn more about Bhikkhu Anālayo's upcoming online lecture series on The Nibbāna Sermons. Insight Journal: Bhante, you’ve done a number of online programs over the years. How have you chosen what topics to cover, and why now choose to work with Ven. Ñāṇananda’s Nibbāna Sermons? Bhikkhu Anālayo: My primary consideration is trying to make an academic understanding of Buddhism available to a wider audience. I realized that my own writings were rather academic and inaccessible. So I … [Read more...]
Cutting the Stream: The Shorter Discourse on the Cowherd (Majjhima 34)
This verse comes at the end of the Shorter Discourse on the Cowherd (Majjhima Nikāya 34), where the Buddha develops the simile of a herd of cows getting safely across the ford of a raging river. The strong old bulls plunge straight in and show the way to the others—these are likened to the arahants who make their way across the flood of death to the safety of the further shore. The other members of the herd also make their way across according to their capabilities, from the heifers and young … [Read more...]
A Verb for Nirvana
Back in the days of the Buddha, nirvana (nibbāna in Pali) had a verb of its own: nibbuti. It meant to “go out,” like a flame. Because fire was thought to be in a state of entrapment as it burned—both clinging to and trapped by the fuel on which it fed—its going out was seen as an unbinding. To go out was to be unbound. Sometimes another verb was used—parinibbuti—with the “pari-" meaning total or all-around, to indicate that the person unbound, unlike the fire unbound, would never again be … [Read more...]
Attached to Nothing
This is an archaic poem in the Sutta Nipāta, and the language is thus rather compressed. Existing translations vary widely, and this is my best attempt to make sense of the verses while matching the traditional meter’s eight syllables per line. I think Posāla is a yogi of the old school, skilled in attaining formless states of consciousness through intensive concentration practice, including the seventh of the eight stations of consciousness known as “the sphere of nothingness.” This is a … [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...]
The Essence of Dhamma
This month's Insight Journal includes both an article by Ajaan Thanissaro, "The Essence of the Dhamma," and a brief interview with him about the article. The article challenges us to re-examine the way we look at the Dhamma through eyes conditioned by the 18th century Enlightenment, along with the modern and post-modern attitudes it has spawned. We have been brought up in a bifurcated culture. On the one hand, modernism assumes that knowing the world through science will make you happy. On the … [Read more...]
Mindfulness & the Cognitive Process
If sati, mindfulness, is not there in ordinary life, it is not working. If it is only there on retreat, and absent in your daily life, this is also problematic. What makes this integration so difficult is that taṅhā, desire or craving, is not just something added to our experience: It is literally built into our cognitive process. We are, if you will, born with the pathology of desire. Part I: The Pathology of Desire Craving, or taṅhā in Pali, is the central problem identified by the … [Read more...]