In modern day meditation circles, different understandings of mindfulness frequently exist side by side. Finding a meaningful way of relating one form of mindfulness to another can provide a model for coming to terms with the variety of Buddhist teachings nowadays available in the West. Different Constructs of Mindfulness The theoretical construct of mindfulness and the practices informed by this notion have gone through considerable development over two and a half thousand years of … [Read more...]
Buddhism, Body, Mind-Problem?
Many of the key questions scientists will be trying to answer in this century revolve around the mind and its relation to other entities. Is the mind the brain? Is the mind the body? Is the mind the body in the environment? Or is the mind some abstract entity that lives outside space and time altogether? I believe that Buddhist philosophy can help the process of reconciling these issues. Science is based on the assumption that there is a single “real” reality that we each see through … [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...]
Back to the Source
John Peacock has been an academic and meditation teacher for 25 years, including monastic training in both the Tibetan and Theravadin traditions. He currently teaches Buddhist studies and Indian religions at the University of Bristol and leads meditation retreats both in the United States and Britain. How did you first enter the stream of the Dharma? I became interested in Eastern religions and philosophy at about the age of eleven and started reading around Indian thought, … [Read more...]
After Buddhism
A New Idiom for a Pragmatic, Ethical Culture Based on the Teachings of Gotama Stephen teaches courses on Buddhism and leads meditation retreats all over the world. He is a guiding teacher at Gaia House and translator and author of various books and articles including the bestselling Buddhism Without Beliefs, Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil, and Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Stephen's new book, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age, will be available … [Read more...]
Freedom Through Not Knowing
I was ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk in 1974, and trained in that tradition—the Geluk tradition, the more scholarly tradition of Tibetan Buddhism—for the following six or seven years. Part of that training involved dialectics, the logical and critical analysis of Buddhist doctrine. One of the assurances I was given as a young monk was that, were I to devote myself to this critical inquiry, I would come to certainty that ideas such as rebirth and karma can be demonstrated by reason to be … [Read more...]
Some (mostly secular) thoughts about Emptiness
This article emerges from a paper presented at last year's conference at BCBS on Secular Buddhism, which in turn arose from a period spent writing a book on A Philosophy of Emptiness. This entailed a largely non-Buddhist and widespread consideration of concepts of emptiness from Taoism and Buddhism, through Greek thought, Christian mystics and Romantics to the contemporary world of science, philosophy and art practice. Here I will concentrate on ideas of emptiness in Buddhist teachings and their … [Read more...]
MIT Meets the Monastery
Rajesh Kasturirangan is a faculty member at the National Institute of Advanced Studies at Bangalore, India. He has a doctorate in cognitive science from MIT. He has taught at BCBS about the overlap between Buddhadharma and cognitive science, most recently in 2009. This month, Insight Journal talks with him about a new online community he is starting to explore these issues further. In addition to the implications of its title, MIT meets the Monastery, he uses phrases like "Wisdom and Science," … [Read more...]
Secular Buddhism: New vision or yet another of the myths it claims to cure?
A hundred years ago, almost exactly, Karl Kraus, an eminent Austrian publicist and the German language's foremost satirist, famously claimed in his newspaper that Psychoanalysis is the very mental illness it claims to cure.1 Amusing and bitingly unfair, Kraus turned his violent dislike into a crafty aphorism. Today, we know how prejudiced and superficial his knowledge of psychoanalysis was when he wrote this, how personal slight rather than understanding led to what has become famous not for its … [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...]