Many thanks to the extraordinary Pilar Puig Cortada for this one. Can you imagine showing up to a retreat and we’re all wearing this? The teachers would be so pleased/horrified. :)
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Talk Dhamma to Me
Author: Shannon M Whitaker
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The Best Thing That Can Happen…
The best thing that can happen to a human being is to find a problem, to fall in love with that problem, and to live trying to solve that problem, unless another problem even more lovable appears. ~ Karl Popper
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Kalyāṇa-mitta Wanted
Greetings, Friendlies! Please excuse the radio silence; I’ve been on the road since 03Mar. Back in the US today, though not yet home, and just beginning to touch the internet. I received an email from Cloud Mountain Retreat Center; they have two openings for full-time residential positions. If you know of the right candidate, do […]
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On Maps and Terrain
When the map and the terrain disagree, trust the terrain.
Earlier this week I was chatting with a friend and the Five Precepts came up. (Because that’s the kind of Dharma Dorks we are…) They said the Fourth Precept, “I undertake the training-precept to abstain from false speech”, is the most important. Because, they said, if you behave according to all the other precepts, you’ll […]
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Parsing MN 9 – Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta
I thought about titling this post “If You Think This Post is Long, You Should Try Reading the Sutta”, but the SEO would be lousy. Anyway. Greetings! I’m still working on MN 9 for the Bodhi College CPP homework. After building the comparative translation spreadsheet it was a bit easier to parse the content of […]
Greetings! For the Bodhi College CPP February homework (they don’t call it homework, but it’s totally homework), we were invited to read Majjhima Nikāya 9, the Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta, “Right View”. (I shudder at that translation, but let’s go with it.) As with MN26, I’ve built a table comparing the Pāli and five English translations. You’re […]
Greetings! For those of you with the fortitude to get to The Netherlands in March, Bodhi College will be hosting a retreat at ITC Naarden titled “The Practice of Human Flourishing“. It will be co-taught by Stephen Batchelor and our man John Peacock. The description on the Bodhi College website: This retreat will focus on […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Episode 8 is ready for you. Jeff helps me with my CPP homework on MN26, the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta. It’s not a deep dive like in this post; instead we talk about what it might look like to apply the theme of the sutta in daily life. As always, send us a line; we’d […]
Greetings! I’m currently participating in one of Bodhi College’s long courses, the Committed Practitioners Programme. Every month we are offered a “Continuing Investigation”. For January we were invited to read Majjhima Nikāya 26, the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, typically translated “The Noble Search”. Since I’ve not made it very far in my Pāli language studies, I built […]
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More Dhamma, Less Drama
Happy 2022, Friendlies! May your New Year be full of the same.
Courtesy of our friend, John Peacock.
Greetings, Friendlies! Episode 7 is ready to go. I’m super excited about this one because two things: Thing one, this is the _final_ in Peacock’s series Buddhism Before the Theravada. Can you believe it? The end of an era. Thing two, I’m excited because we are finally starting to talk about taṇhā, upādāna, and models […]
This is one of a series of transcripts of contemporary talks which have particularly resonated with me. This talk was made available by Audio Dharma; the talk is available here: Buddhism Before the Theravada Part 6. Insight Meditation Center 0:00 The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California please […]
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Dharma PhD on Somebody Else’s Podcast
Greetings, Friendlies! I was recently interviewed by the extraordinary and delightful Ruriko Watanabe on her podcast, “自灯明法灯明 Be the light for yourself, let the Dharma be your light“. Ruriko is working to introduce Secular Dharma (Secular Buddhism?) into mainstream Japanese culture. She is currently interviewing participants from Stephen Batchelor’s 2021 12-week course “After Buddhism and […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Super fun news. Leigh Brasington, a meditation teacher best known for teaching jhānas, released a new book over the weekend. If you don’t already know him, Leigh is quite a character. Rather than going through the trouble of releasing through a publisher, he decided to self-publish and the ebook is available for dāna. […]
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Models of Perception
Sometimes a random note in a pile of paper opens up the most delicious rabbit hole. I offer you the fruit of an evening’s fall in to, and subsequent scramble out of, said hole. You’re welcome! [28DEC2021 Note: I mistakenly understood the Pāli word “Viññāṇa” to be translated as “Perception”. Today I realized I had […]
January Practice Daily 0.5-1.0 hour metta practice (TWIM-esque). As we prepare to move and upend our life, I’m finding my mind quite unsettled. For a few days I only practiced guided body scans; I found I needed the support of someone talking me through it. But eventually I was able to get back on the […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) As promised, a new episode of Dharma PhD (the podcast) posted today. Nominally Episode 6 continues our discussion of John Peacock’s series “Buddhism Before the Theravada, Part 5”, but this episode was all over the map. So I took the liberty of diverging in this episode. We are still talking about Paṭiccasamuppāda […]
This is one of a series of transcripts of contemporary talks which have particularly resonated with me. This talk was made available by Audio Dharma; the talk is available here: Buddhism Before the Theravada Part 5. AudioDharma.org 0:00The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit our website […]
Intro Preparing for Dharma PhD (the podcast) Episode 6 I started in to my dictation software, “Today we’ll be talking about Paṭiccasamuppāda, sometimes translated ‘Dependent Origination’. Paṭiccasamuppāda is…” Pause. “Wait. What is Paṭiccasamupāda?” This is why it takes so long to produce a podcast episode. Wikipedia says Paṭiccasamupāda “is a key doctrine in Buddhism … […]
In Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, the penultimate chapter, “Imagination”, begins with a quote by Richard Rorty: “[A] talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.” This is what Dharma PhD is all about, learning how to speak differently.
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We’re Back!
Greetings, Friendlies! BooBear and I have settled(ish) on the West Coast of the US. The cross country trip was _amazing_; Five Stars. Highly Recommend. This is just a quick touch to report that we’ve landed and that the Independent PhD progresses by leaps and bounds. Thanks to all of you who reached out; I can […]
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DharmaPhD is on Vacation :)
Greetings, Friendlies! Jeff and I are still in the process of relocating from the East Coast of the US to the West Coast. But I want to send out word that all is well; as soon as I stop galavanting and unpack household goods, we’ll get back into the business of broadcasting. In the meantime, […]
Comparing Charles Duhigg’s and Judson Brewer’s positions on the Habit Loop and Habit Change.
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Life Is a Bridge
Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it. ~ Jennifer Louden
I’ll be attending Stephen Batchelor’s upcoming seminar series, hosted by Bodhi College, “After Buddhism and Beyond”. It is a twelve-part series, run in two semesters from February through the end of June. My understanding is that the series will consist of 3-hour course blocks of seminar, provided via Zoom. According to the series website, “Each […]
Dharma PhD podcast Episode 5, hit the airwaves this morning. Yay! Come and have a listen while Co-host and I talk about John Peacock’s “Buddhism Before the Theravada, Part 4”. We talk about how, in Buddhist traditions (and maybe our own psychological traditions?) human experience is playing out on a backdrop of misunderstanding how our […]
This talk was made available by Audio Dharma; the talk is available here: Buddhism Before the Theravada Part 4. If you’d like to explore further, we’ve produced a podcast episode about this talk (Episode 5, if you’re already subscribed). I’d love to hear what you think! Okay, okay. Just one more thing. A friend of […]
Dharma PhD 