Category: Buddhism
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Further Questions About Meditation
This continues the thread begun in Questions About Meditation. Vlastimil writes, I want to ask, which meditation techniques do you practice? Or rather, do they include some specifically Buddhist ones? Even vipassana/insight practice? Some Buddhists told me that doing vipassana seriously always tends one towards Buddhist beliefs. I wonder if you agree. Or if you…
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William Empson on Buddhism and Christianity
Karl White refers us to this quotation from a John Gray piece on William Empson in The New Statesman. Empson’s attitude to Buddhism, like the images of the Buddha that he so loved, was asymmetrical. He valued the Buddhist view as an alternative to the Western outlook, in which satisfying one’s desires by acting in the…
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Easter Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 15:14: Christianity and Buddhism
Biblia Vulgata: Si autem Christus non resurrexit, inanis est ergo praedicatio nostra, inanis est et fides vestra. King James: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Orthodox* Christianity stands and falls with a contingent historical fact, the fact of the resurrection of Christ from the…
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On Desire and Aversion: Two Perspectives
When we master desire and aversion in the present we mortify what will soon be dead in any case. "That may be appropriate wisdom for you, old man, but I'm in the full flood of my youth and vigor. I love, hate, and live passionately. Why should I mortify what will be dead? I should…
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Infinite Desire and God as Being Itself
A reader from Portugal raised a question I hadn't thought of before: "Can God satisfy our infinite desire if God is a being among beings?" This question presupposes that our desire is in some sense infinite. I will explain and defend this presupposition in a moment. Now if our desire is infinite, then it is…
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A ‘No’ to ‘No Self’
Dale Tuggy is in town and we met up on Thursday and Friday. On Good Friday morning I took him on a fine looping traipse in the Western Superstitions out of First Water trail head to Second Water trail to Garden Valley, down to Hackberry Spring, and then back to the Second Water trail via…
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Thomas Merton on Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
I read the seventh and final volume of Thomas Merton's journals, The Other Side of the Mountain, in 1998 when it first appeared. I am currently re-reading it. It is once again proving to be page turner for one who has both a nostalgic and a scholarly interest in the far-off and fabulous '60s. But…
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Contradiction and Koan
What is a contradiction from one angle is a koan from another. In a contradiction, logical thought hits a dead end. Discursive thought's road end, however, may well be the trail head of the Transdiscursive.
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The Competency of Desire
Human desires regularly show themselves to be highly competent when it comes to the seduction of reason and the subornation of conscience. A man murders his wife and the mother of his child in order to collect on a life insurance policy. Why? So that he can run off with a floozie who shook her…
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Buber Contra Buddhism
The following quotations are from Martin Buber's I and Thou (tr. Walter Kaufmann, Scribner's, 1970, pp. 140-141): Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All…
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Of Body and Buddha
When functioning optimally the body can seem, not only an adequate vehicle of our subjectivity, but a fitting and final realization of it as well. Soon enough, however, Buddha's Big Three shatters the illusion: sickness, old age, and death. Everything partite is slated for partition. Shunning inanition, maintaining a wholesome spiritual ambition, work out your…
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Jack Kerouac: A Buddhist Wanderer Comes Home
Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 45 years ago today, securing his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish: The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead. …
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The Logic of Buddhist Philosophy
Beyond True and False, by Graham Priest. (HT: Allan Jackson)
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Why are the Corners of Buddha’s Apartment so Dirty?
The Tathagata has no attachments. (He has no theories about the nirvanic Vacuum either.) (I got the idea from this guy.) Related articles The 'Control Argument' for the Anatta Doctrine
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Unusual Experiences and the Problem of Overbelief and Underbelief
One day, well over 30 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person. Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!" It was a wholly spontaneous cri du coeur,…