Words Well Said
Andrew Olendzki
These verses were offered by Vangīsa, a monk renowned in his time for his poetic skill, after hearing the Buddha talk about the qualities of good speech. No less than seventy-two stanzas of Vangisa’s have been preserved in the anthology of monks’ verse known as the Theragāthā, more than any other monk, including Sāriputta, Ānanda, Mahā Kassapa and Moggallāna. He tells of formerly being “drunk with skill in composing poetry” (Thag 1253) as he wandered from town to town, presumably earning a … [Read more...]
Mindfulness for Children
Susan Kaiser Greenland
At what ages developmentally can kids meditate? I will be very honest with you and tell you, I don’t have a clue, but as far as I can tell, nobody else does either. I look forward to the day when some of the research scientists I work with figure this out. I am very interested in this intellectually, but what I am more interested in is teaching children how to approach experience with an open mind, with an open heart. Which brings me to the Quaker Oats box, how we start most of our new … [Read more...]
Freedom Through Not Knowing
Stephen Batchelor
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...]
Emptiness and Freedom
Leigh Brasington
About 100 AD, a man later known as Nāgārjuna was born into a Brahmin family in southern India. By the time he was twenty, he was well known for his Brahmanical scholarly learning. However, after an encounter with some serious dukkha, he began studying the works of the Buddha. Supposedly in three months he had mastered the early scriptures, but they still left unanswered questions. At that point he encountered an old monk who followed the Mahāyāna tradition. Nāgārjuna was so impressed by the … [Read more...]
Bursting the Bubbles
David Loy
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...]
The Radical Buddha
Andrew Olendzki
Every Buddha image we see reflects such calm, amused acceptance, it is not easy to appreciate just how radical a figure Siddhartha Gotama Buddha really was. Yet when we look closely at the ways he acted in the world he inhabited, and at the teachings he left behind for us all to follow, I think it fair to say the Buddha was one of the more radical humans ever to have walked the earth. The word “radical,” according to a pocket dictionary at hand, most simply means “favoring fundamental … [Read more...]