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Discourse Scholarship

“On Reading the Suttas”, Marc Akincano Weber

Akincano is sharing his essay “On Reading the Suttas”. Dharma PhD approved!

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Discourse Scholarship Teaching

MN 139, Part 5: Subhūti

Maybe it’s not really about Subhūti?

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Discourse Practice Scholarship

MN 139, Part 4: On Political Discourse

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 […]

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Discourse Scholarship Teaching

Unpleasant Vedanā and Hangry Bacteria?

Bridging anthropocentricity, one bacteria-laden blog post at a time.

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Discourse Scholarship

MN 139, Part 3: Safety of the Other

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 […]

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Discourse Meta Scholarship

Thinking about Awakening, Part 2: All the Words

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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Scholarship

MN 139, Part 2: Synopsis

Cultivating oneself, communicating with others, and seeking out good influences so as to avoid conflict. Sounds reasonable.

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Scholarship

MN 139, Part 1: How to Not-Conflict

Playing around with different translations for the sutta title. Parsing Pāli for fun and profit…

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Discourse Scholarship

Conditionality (Idappaccayatā) vs Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda): Part 2, Conversations with Leigh Brasington

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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Discourse Scholarship

Now Get On With It.

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Discourse Practice Scholarship

Transcendent vs Imminent Nibbāna. Is this a thing? And how does it impact practice? (Part 1)

Part 1 – Are there two Nibbānas?

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Discourse Practice Scholarship

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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Scholarship

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 […]

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Practice Scholarship

Stephen Batchelor on Human Flourishing – Upcoming Online Events

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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Discourse Scholarship

¿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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Scholarship

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 […]

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Scholarship

MN 9 – Comparing Translations – Sammādiṭṭhi Sutta

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 […]

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Discourse Scholarship

Study Retreat – The Practice of Human Flourishing

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 […]

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Discourse Practice Scholarship

Dharma PhD (the podcast) Episode 8

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 […]

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Scholarship

Sutta Comparative Translation, MN26, Ariyapariyesanā Sutta

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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Discourse Scholarship

Dharma PhD (the podcast) Episode 7

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 […]

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Scholarship

John Peacock, Buddhism Before the Theravada Part 6, 2011-09-04

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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Discourse Scholarship

Leigh Brasington’s New Book on Dependent Origination (Paṭiccasamuppāda)

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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Scholarship

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 […]

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Discourse Practice Scholarship

Dharma PhD (the podcast) Episode 6

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 […]

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Scholarship

John Peacock, Buddhism Before the Theravada Part 5, 2011-09-04

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 […]

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Discourse Scholarship

Parsing Paṭiccasamuppāda (Dependent Origination)

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 … […]

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Discourse Scholarship

Fight or Fall Away? Two Views on Habit Change.

Comparing Charles Duhigg’s and Judson Brewer’s positions on the Habit Loop and Habit Change.

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Discourse Scholarship

Stephen Batchelor’s Upcoming Series: After Buddhism and Beyond

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 […]

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Discourse Scholarship

Dharma PhD (the podcast) Episode 5

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 […]