This presentation was made at the BCBS Forum “Buddhist Responses to Violence, ” on September 11th, 2005. The verbal component of the Buddha’s teaching is preserved in an ancient Indian vernacular known as Pali, which was the colloquial, street Sanskrit of the era around 600 BCE. Although particular components of the Pali texts can be questionable as to whether they truly represent the teaching of the Buddha, the Pali Canon as a whole presents a unique implosion into the human condition of a … [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...]
Very Good Dharma Friends
Stephen Batchelor and Martine Batchelor, both with extensive backgrounds in monastic Buddhism, are currently lay dharma teachers, practitioners and authors of a number of important books. Naming only a few, Martine has written Walking on Lotus Flowers: Buddhist Women Living, Loving and Meditating; and has co-edited Buddhism and Ecology. Stephen has written Alone with Others, Faith to Doubt, and The Awakening of the West; and they have cooperated on The Way of Korean Zen. They live in South … [Read more...]
Secular mindfulness: potential & pitfalls
This article is based on a presentation at last year's conference at BCBS on Secular Buddhism. Introduction Imagine for a moment that you are a health & fitness trainer—you work with people who go the gym regularly and work out daily, to support them in their efforts to cultivate a perfectly-toned body. Over the past few years you've noticed that many other people in society are beginning to do some exercise—they don't work out daily, but perhaps they attend a weekly yoga class or go … [Read more...]
The Evolving Sangha
Jay Michaelson holds a Ph.D from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a J.D. from Yale. He is currently a visiting scholar at Brown University, where he is an adviser to the Varieties of Meditative Experience project. Jay is affiliated with the Practical Dharma movement and the Contemplative Development Mapping Project, and has done a number of long-term vipassanā retreats in the United States and Nepal. He is the author of five books, most recently Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism and … [Read more...]
Awareness of Thinking: Recollective Awareness Practice
Jason Siff, a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka in the late 1980's, has been teaching meditation in the United States since 1990. He is the founding teacher of the Skillful Meditation Project in Los Angeles. He will teach Awareness of Thinking at BCBS August 13-17. Insight Journal: We heard something about your upcoming book, Thoughts are Not the Enemy, about a year ago. Are you getting any interesting reactions to the ideas in the book? Jason Siff: The book will be released in October, though I … [Read more...]
Natural Buddhism
Note: This article was developed from one of 20 presentations made at the BCBS conference on secular Buddhism held in March of 2013. Gil Fronsdal is the primary teacher for the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California; he has been teaching since 1990. He has practiced Zen and vipassanā in the U.S. and Asia since 1975. He was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985, was ordained as a Soto Zen priest in 1982, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission from Mel Weitsman. He received a PhD in … [Read more...]
How is the Medium Changing the Message?
Although we think of technology as a new influence, in fact, markets, technologies, and the teachings of the Buddha have shaped each other in complex reverberations since earliest times. At the conference on secular Buddhism held at BCBS one year ago this month, Ken McLeod led the assembled scholar-teachers through an exercise to examine Western Buddhism through the lens of Marshall McLuhan's "four effects" from McLuhan's Laws of Media. Insight Journal asked McLeod to expand on these ideas about … [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...]
New rivers, new rafts: The Secular Buddhism Conference
Here some clansmen learn the Dhamma—discourses, stanzas, expositions, verses, exclamations, sayings, birth stories, marvels, and answers to questions—and having learned the Dhamma, they examine the meaning of those teachings with wisdom. Examining the meaning of those teachings with wisdom, they gain a reflective acceptance of them. They do not learn the Dhamma for the sake of criticising others and for winning in debates, and they experience the good for the sake of which they learned the … [Read more...]