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 […]
Category: Scholarship
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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 […]
Buddha-Stiftung, a Secular Buddhist organization in Germany, will be hosting two online events with Stephen Batchelor on the topic of Human Flourishing. From their email:
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¿Is Vedanā Interoception?
Is vedanā interoception? Or is interoception vedanā? In a 2018 talk on Vedanā (link) @MartineBatchelor referred to @LisaFeldmanBarrett’s book, How Emotions Are Made. She described interoception and asked, “…the question is, is she talking about the same thing [as] me?” [4:29] Here’s my take: In HEAM, Barrett says: “Simple pleasant and unpleasant feelings come from […]
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 … […]
Comparing Charles Duhigg’s and Judson Brewer’s positions on the Habit Loop and Habit Change.
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 […]
This talk was made available by Audio Dharma; the talk is available here: Buddhism Before the Theravada Part 3. If you’d like to explore further, we’ve produced a podcast episode about this talk (Episode 4, if you’re already subscribed). I’d love to hear what you think! One more thing… a friend of mine said that […]
I’m in the midst of producing several Buddha Bites podcast episodes on Vedanā (aka Hedonic Tone). It’s been challenging; following are some deets about the process. As I wrote back in March, a 2019 retreat led by Akincano Weber and Dr. Judson Brewer hooked me on the implications of Vedanā. When I talk about Dharma […]
This post accompanies a podcast episode and a transcript of Peacock’s talk. I’d love to hear what you think. Happy reading! It is a lovely July morning. BooBear kisses me farewell and I, grinagog, board the Greyhound bus which is to spend the day ferrying me from Baltimore, MD to New York State. I trot […]
This talk was made available by Audio Dharma; the talk is available here: Buddhism Before the Theravada Part 2. If you’d like to explore further, we’ve produced a podcast episode about this talk (Episode 3, if you’re already subscribed). I’d love to hear what you think! Okay, okay. One more thing… I made a very […]
This talk was made available by Audio Dharma; the talk is available here: Buddhism Before the Theravada Part 1. If you’d like to explore further, I’ve also written a commentarial blog post about this talk and we’ve produced a podcast episode on it (Episode 2, if you’re already subscribed). I’d love to hear what you […]
This talk was made available by Dharma Seed. Re-contextualising Mindfulness. Sati in Buddhist Psychology, sati in Mind-development, Images of sati. Establishing the Fourfold Mindfulness: (satipaṭṭhāna) as map and as four channels of experience. Insight Meditation Society — Retreat Center : Mindfulness, Insight, Liberation: The Foundations of Mindfulness-Based Modalities and Research. This is the time when one of us […]
Frequently Akincano refers to what he calls “Buddhist Psychology”. I’m curious if this is a phrase used across the Bodhi College team? For myself, as I explore these disciplines of Mind and Human Flourishing (that is: Cognitive Science, Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience, and Contemplative Practice), I find it increasingly important to select the most appropriate (dare […]
Dharma PhD 