Greetings, Friendlies. :) As an extension on last week’s OG-awakening-as-recorded-in-the-Suttanipata, I’d like to highlight a sliver from Rob Burbea’s 2019 “Stream Entry – Conceptions, Value and Realisation“. [1] Burbea describes the entire body of Gotama’s teachings as “set within the cosmology of rebirth”. He invites us to suspend our current operating frame and submit, in […]
Category: Scholarship
Greetings, Friendlies. :) With all this talk of awakening, I should probably check with the OG; what do the suttas have to say about Gotama’s awakening? [1] I was surprised not to find a definitive list of all the mentions of G’s awakening in the Sutta and/or Vinaya Piṭaka. If you know of such a […]
Greetings, Friendlies! (Parts 1, 2, 3.) The sense I have, and I could be very wrong about this, is that between Watts and Buddhadāsa we have a range encompassing all the other versions of awakening I’ve heard. In Ingram’s list, for example, the Psychological Models and the Nothing to Do Schools fall into Buddhadāsa’s range. […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) (Part 1, Part 2.) Quick refresh: we are looking at subjective experiences of awakening. Last time Alan Watts’ This is It. This time Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu’s Nibbāna For Everyone. Buddhadāsa speaks of a “Nibbāna instinct”, a drive egging us to find relief from the irritation of craving and aversion. [1] I think B […]
Greetings, Friendlies. :) (Part 1 here.) I’m going to offer three descriptions of awakening that fit on a sort of spectrum running from more common, everyday, temporary experiences, to (perhaps) the full monty. The descriptions come from Alan Watt’s This is It, Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu’s Nibbāna For Everyone, and a quote from Kitaro Nishida. We’ll start […]
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PPP, Part 24, Avijjā Revisited
Greetings, Friendlies. :) Just before the PPP, I wrote about Avijjā (mis-understanding) as the polestar of practice and offered an interpretation of the term. Though the general shape is the same I’d like to offer today’s, maybe more nuanced(?), understanding: First: the concept of Avijjā is empty. How we understand it at any point depends […]
Greetings, Friendlies! One more round in Make-Believe Land before returning to complete faith and reverence. (Maybe.) An hour into that fateful saṅkhāra talk I asked something to the effect: “I get confused when people say: that’s a sankhāra, also, that’s a sankhāra, and that other thing. Also a saṅkhāra. Listening to this talk, I’m wondering, […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Continuing from last time in our Neighborhood of Make-Believe… Akincano Weber began that Saṅkhāra talk: The word “karoti” means “making”. “Saṅkharoti” means “making things together”, means compounding things, forming things, processing things with each other. …the noun saṅkhāra is applied to basically three aspects of a dynamic sequence. [1] It is applied to […]
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Avijjā as Mis-understanding
Greetings, Friendlies. :) For your consideration: what about translating Avijjā as “Mis-understanding”? “Ignorance” seems a little pejorative, “confusion” a little apathetic. Mis-understanding may sound odd at first, but in dhamma circles we do something similar when we speak of dis-ease. We are not speaking of illness, we are speaking of _not being at ease_. In […]
Previously we proposed that chemotaxis may be a precursor of vedanā and that holding this view (lightly) may contribute to a more embedded/interconnected understanding of human-beingness in the spectrum of life. This time I’d like to play with the idea that infusing an understanding of vedanā with a sense of taxis/movement can more coherently embed […]
Articulating an idea in the vedanā discussion: Sometimes dharma teachers note that a precursor of vedanā may be observed in organisms as simple as single-celled bacteria. These organisms move towards food (that which is beneficial) and away from toxins (that which is harmful). The term for this movement is “chemotaxis”. “Chemo” from the Greek “khemeia”, […]
Perhaps. Some dharma teachers claim there is no English equivalent for the Pāli “vedanā” . Although I do not know a word in common usage, there has been a word used in psychology since the 1930s, “valence”, that I think will do the job very well. [1] In (the HIGHLY recommended) How Emotions Are Made, […]
Perhaps. Regarding Viññāṇa, I first heard the phrasing “Consciousness Of” from John Peacock’s “Buddhism Before the Theravada” series (Part 5, 53:45): “…consciousness is always a consciousness of…” something. That is, Gotama spoke of consciousness always having an object. (MN 38) “Consciousness is reckoned according to the very same condition dependent upon which it arises. Consciousness that […]
Greetings, Friendlies! Leigh Brasington recently self-published a new book on the Gradual Training; it is available on his website (dāna basis): http://gt.leighb.com/. If you didn’t know, along with _Right Concentration_ (on the sutta jhānas), Leigh published a book on Dependent Origination, also available on his website: https://www.leighb.com/sodapi/index.html. With friendliness!
In the Metta Sutta (Snp 1.8 and Khp 9) there is a line Gil Fronsdal translates “As a mother would risk her own life to protect her child, her only child”. The Pāli here translated as child is “putta”. John Peacock has said that this more accurately translates to “son” (see 1:11:22). My knowledge of Pāli […]
Dear Friendlies, Greetings! Some of you will appreciate the pleasant vedanā I feel reporting that on “Discuss and Discover” (the Sutta Central Forum) Ajahn Brahmali is posting about his translation of the Vinaya Pitaka. He has also put out a request for comments on a draft of the introduction to the Bhikkhuvibhaṅga: I am currently […]
In Bhikkhu Bodhi’s essay on the Upanisa Sutta (SN 12.23), he writes this about the Pāli word “Nibbidā”, often translated “disenchantment” or, less to my taste, “disgust”. the word’s literal meaning [is] “finding out.” Maybe everyone already knew this. It was news to me. What? “Finding Out?” DuckDuckGo unearthed a 2003 article by Andrew Olendzki […]
Akincano is sharing his essay “On Reading the Suttas”. Dharma PhD approved!
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MN 139, Part 5: Subhūti
Maybe it’s not really about Subhūti?
Continuing to unpack MN 139, On Avoiding Conflict (Parts 1, 2, 3)… recently Ajahn Nisabho gave a bonzer talk, Culture War Pacifism: The Dhamma of Dolly Parton. He spoke about engaging skillfully in political discourse, about not being caught up in the collective papañca of the culture wars. Might this bit in MN 139, about […]
Bridging anthropocentricity, one bacteria-laden blog post at a time.
MN 139, on avoiding conflict, could be divided into three themes: cultivating oneself, communicating with others, and seeking out good influences in one’s life. I didn’t catch this at first, but now I see in this second theme, Communicating With Others, Gotama encouraging us to speak in such a way that we allow our interlocutors […]
Greeting, Friendlies! Part of the tangle of ideas I spoke about in Part 1 comes from reading or hearing teachers or practitioners* use words in contexts such that I think they are referring to a territory near(ish) to Awakening. In this post I’d like to acknowledge these words and ask the hivemind what others might […]
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MN 139, Part 2: Synopsis
Cultivating oneself, communicating with others, and seeking out good influences. All this in the service of avoiding conflict. Sounds reasonable.
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MN 139, Part 1: How to Not-Conflict
Playing around with different translations for the sutta title. Parsing Pāli for fun and profit…
Edit: If you want to start with Part 1, that’s here. The meditation teacher Leigh Brasington wrote a book on Dependent Origination which he self published and made available for Dāna on his website. He kindly (and enthusiastically!) read my previous post on DO and Conditionality. With his permission, here’s an image we cobbled together: A few […]
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Now Get On With It.
Part 1 – Are there two Nibbānas?
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On Anurodha, “Liking”
In your day-to-day, off-the-cushion experience, what part of the 12-link Dependent Origination cycle (12-nidanas) do you notice most readily? I ask because I think it may be the case that many of us spend our days “liking” stuff or “disliking” stuff. But liking/disliking is not in the 12-nidanas. When I first began learning about Dependent Origination I was surprised to […]
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MN 122 – Translation Comparison
Greetings, Friendlies! This month’s homework for the Bodhi College CPP is MN 122, The Longer/Greater Discourse on Emptiness. As previously, I’ve compiled a spreadsheet comparing translations between Sujato, Ñanamoli, and Ṭhānissaro: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1J23pjMQkIRkus0LOthLGtHriaZA6Pq4UTwjVaD0umlo/. Exciting stuff. Structure The sutta is not divided into chapters but seems to discuss 9(ish) different things: Mendicants should not allow themselves to […]
Dharma PhD 