Buddhist Romanticism. Buddhist Romanticism is a result of a very natural human tendency: When presented with something foreign and new, people tend to see it in terms with which they already are familiar. ... these are among the most consistently Romantic in their own thought—misunderstand Romanticism to be nothing but anti-scientific ...
The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism. Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, ego-transcendence. ... largely because they were adopted by the discipline of psychology and translated into a vocabulary that was both more scientific and more ...
Questioning Buddhist Romanticism. Many Westerners, when new to Buddhism, are struck by the uncanny familiarity of what seem to be its central concepts: interconnectedness, wholeness, spontaneity, ego-transcendence, non-judgmentalism, and integration of the personality. ... At the same time, knowing the latest scientific findings about external ...
them with more reliable, scientific notions of human action and the metaphysics of personal identity—we're in a better position to drop the idea of rebirth and reshape the Buddhist tradition so that it focuses more clearly on the Buddha's central insight and the main purpose of his teaching: the ending of suffering in the here-and-now.
A Buddhist Monk Looks at Positive Psychology Thanissaro Bhikkhu "This is the way leading to wisdom: when visiting an awakened person, to ask … 'What, when I do it, will be for my long-term welfare and happiness?'" —The Buddha, Majjhima Nikaya 135 By Buddhist standards, Western psychology is just beginning to get wise.
demands, this is one of Buddhism's most attractive features. It's especially appealing to those who—in reaction to the demands of organized religion —embrace the view of scientific empiricism that nothing deserves our trust unless it can be measured against physical data. In this light, the
There are many cases where people do begin to come to meditation because of scientific articles, but there's the question of which articles you can really trust. In America, the National Institute of Health, a government agency, gave a lot of grants for mindfulness experiments, and then after several years, they had someone do an analysis of ...
There is just Buddhism, and as far as the academy is concerned, Buddhism is a tradition whose story is all about being adaptable over time and finding enough followers to accept the adaptations. Small wonder, as we will see in the next chapter, that exponents of Buddhist Romanticism use these Romantic arguments from the academy to lend academic ...
meditation. If you stick with the breath, even in the midst of the pleasure, the pleasure keeps on coming. If you get more skilled in how you stay with the breath, the pleasure increases. Even when you don't wallow in it, it's still there, doing its work for your wellbeing. And you're allowed to enjoy the pleasure
we may be coming from a modern, Western, scientific attitude, a materialist attitude. And something deep down inside us insists that Buddhism bend itself in order to meet what we think is right or wrong. Or we feel that we're abandoning our identity, we're abandoning our background, our family, if we adopt Buddhist beliefs.
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1 : Questioning Assumptions. Rebirth has always been a central teaching in the Buddhist tradition. The earliest records in the Pāli Canon (MN 26; MN 36) indicate that the Buddha, prior to his awakening, searched for a happiness not subject to the vagaries of repeated birth, aging, illness, and death.One of the reasons he left his early teachers was because he recognized that their teachings ...
Faith in Awakening. The Buddha never placed unconditional demands on anyone's faith. For people from a culture where the dominant religions do make such demands, this is one of Buddhism's most attractive features. It's especially appealing to those who—in reaction to the demands of organized religion—embrace the view of scientific empiricism that nothing deserves our trust unless it ...
The Science of Meditation June 14, 2012 When you meditate, whether you realize it or not, you're actually making some assumptions: that the mind can be trained, that your actions can actually make a difference, and that it's worthwhile to train the mind, because the mind is what determines what actions you're going to take.
Patience & Curiosity January 23, 2008 Patience is one of the most misunderstood teachings of the Buddha. He put it at the very beginning of one of his most famous talks, the Ovada Patimokkha: Khanti paramam tapo titikkha, patient endurance is the foremost austerity—austerity here in the sense of something that burns away bad qualities in the mind and generates energy to the practice.
Perennial Issues. Toward the end of World War II, Aldous Huxley published an anthology, The Perennial Philosophy, proposing that there is a common core of truths to all the world's great religions. These truths clustered around three basic principles: that the Self is by nature divine, that this nature is identical with the divine Ground of Being, and that the ideal life is one spent in the ...
scientific theories. I am simply pointing out similarities as a way of helping to make those teachings intelligible in modern terms. The study of complex nonlinear systems is one of the few modern bodies of knowledge that have worked out a vocabulary for the patterns of behavior described in Buddhist
This is what's scientific about meditation. We have some of the same assumptions that a scientist brings to an experiment: that you have free will, the ability to choose how you're going to design your experiment; and that you have to change things in order to learn about patterns.
This is the foundation for a really scientific attitude toward the meditation. Sometimes you hear of specific methods as being scientific, that they've worked everything out, all the steps, and all you have to do is follow the steps. They even have all the questions and answers on cards; they have standard meditation talks.
It's in this way that Buddhism is like a science. Sometimes that analogy can be overdone, but there are some important parallels. On the one hand, science is partly an issue of technique: how you go about trying to test a thesis, the proper steps and scientific procedure.
In terms of habits and practices, each side can be very insistent that the way they draw inferences about the world is "scientific"—as they define the term—and that they know for a fact what ways of behavior are actually valid in the context of their worlds. From the Buddha's point of view, though, all these ways of clinging are ...
Buddhist Romanticism by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu. "Even though I was endowed with such fortune, such total refinement, the thought occurred to me: 'When an untaught, run-of-the-mill person, himself subject to aging, not beyond aging, sees another who is aged, he is repelled, ashamed, & disgusted, oblivious to himself that he too is subject to aging, not beyond aging.
At the same time, there is no way that a fair assessment of the powers attainable through meditation could be made by anyone who has yet to master meditation. It would be like a future race of philosophers trying to assess modern scientific discoveries without having mastered the scientific method themselves.
There's a common belief that the early Romantics were anti-scientific, that they rejected the rationalist scientific approach promoted by the 18th century Enlightenment in favor of a more introspective, poetic approach, privileging the importance of their own emotions and imagination over the hard, dry facts of the material world.
All these are talents you're going to need in the meditation. After all, not everything is explained. Sometimes you'll hear of different meditation methods where they've got everything all laid out and they say it's all very scientific because everything is explained and mapped out. But that's grade school science. Real
I'm going to talk about knowledge—the highest level of knowledge, not ordinary knowledge. Ordinary knowledge is adulterated with a lot of defilements and mental fermentations, and so it's called heṭṭhima-vijjā, lower knowledge. Lower knowledge is something everyone has, Buddhist and non-Buddhist alike: the various branches of worldly knowledge that people study from textbooks so as ...
The writer, as a psychologist, was claiming to be morally neutral, which is supposedly scientific, but there was no consideration at all that your search for happiness might harm others or yourself. So I pointed that out: that from a Buddhist point of view, this was a huge gap, and a huge missing part of the equation.
This connects with a second irony: Although most of the scientific and philosophical underpinnings for the twenty points have since fallen away, the points themselves have continued to exert influence over Western views on religion in general, and Buddhist Romanticism in particular, to the present day.
More importantly, because it explains meditation in the same terms that the Canon uses to explain the process of dependent co-arising, and because this process is supposed to be discovered in the course of meditation, the canonical description is an aid to liberating insight. ... receptive to scientific or objective Truth—he took up the ...
Another famous annihilationist was a prince named Pāyāsi. DN 23 states that he held a materialist view similar to Ajita Kesakambalin, and that he used his power to execute criminals as an opportunity to conduct gruesome, quasi-scientific experiments to test whether any part of a human being survived death. He reported these experiments to one of the Buddha's followers, a monk named Kumara ...
The Samaṇa philosophers were trying to find a way of life and thought that was in tune, not with social conventions, but with the laws of nature as these could be directly contemplated through scientific observation, personal experience, reason, meditation, or shamanic practices, such as the pursuit of altered states of consciousness through ...
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This connects with a second irony: Although most of the scientific and philosophical underpinnings for the twenty points have since fallen away, the points themselves have continued to exert influence over Western views on religion in general, and Buddhist Romanticism in particular, to the present day.
"Really, we shouldn't neglect the study of idleness so criminally, but make it into an art and a science, even into a religion! In a word: the more divine a man or a work of man is, the more it resembles a plant; of all the forms of nature, this form is the most moral and the most beautiful.
But there's more to the house than just the bedroom. There's also an exercise room, a kitchen, a woodshop, a scientific laboratory. In other words, it's a working home, a craftsman's home. What this means is that you learn how to use the concentration not just as a place to rest, but also as a place to do your work.
Or you can make another comparison with equipment you use in a scientific experiment. If the equipment is placed on a table that wobbles, or if an earthquake happens and knocks everything to the floor, the measurements that come out of that equipment are worthless. ... And if it wants to run around, there is that role for it in the meditation ...
of the sun, measuring the orbits of the planets, running scientific experiments: If you desire things to come out in a certain way and you skew the results in that direction, your desires are going to ruin your chances to actually see the truth about these things. But there's another kind of truth, truths of the will: things that will become
Make your mind like earth. That was the Buddha's first meditation instruction to his son. Earth doesn't react. You throw disgusting things on the earth and it doesn't get disgusted. The image of the earth is used both in teachings on patience and in teachings on goodwill. The two have to go together. You try to make your
The meditation gives us tools to overcome that ignorance and craving. That's what we're basically getting victory over. We do this by seeing through these things and understanding why we're doing them. We think we can get some pleasure out of them, but we have to look very carefully at that pleasure, to see why we're so attached to it.
It's like scientific equipment: If you put it on a wobbly table, then no matter what it's measuring, you can't really trust the measurements because the wobble is in there as well. But if the equipment is on a table that's solid, and the table is in a building that's solid, then you can get precise measurements.
Everything Gathers Around the Breath November 10, 2011 There's a phrase in Thai, lak wichaa, which means the basic principle of a skill you're trying to master, or the principal thing you're trying to master in a skill.
breath, or focus on buddho, or whatever your meditation object is. You find the mind slipping off but you bring it back. It slips off and you bring it back. There's kind of a rhythm to it, like music: You play a musical phrase, and then you pause; another phrase, and then a pause. But there's enough continuity so that
In chaos theory they call this "scale invariance": the patterns on the large scale, on the macro scale, are the same things happening on the micro scale. And you've got the micro scale right here. On the macro scale you see that even scientific theories keep changing — sometimes very fast.
suggesting total non-reactivity in meditation. He's calling for the patience to stay with things and watch them. The steadier your gaze, the more reliably and clearly you can see things. It's like running a scientific experiment. If the equipment for the experiment lies on a wobbly table, or the table is in a wobbly building,
Then of course, with meditation: Sitting here with your eyes closed, you're not harming anybody, but more importantly, the fact that you're trying to get your mind under control is going to be good for you and for the people around you. You're going to be less prey to your greed, aversion, and delusion—because an
universe: by experimenting. Sometimes you see some Buddhist meditation methods taught as being very scientific, but they're very much a rote kind of grade school science. You simply memorize the rules and follow the rules. But that's not how science develops, that's not how scientists gain new knowledge. They experiment.
they try to make scientific studies of pleasure or pain, they have no way of measuring it. They can ask you to measure your pain on a scale from one to ten, but that's pretty ... He had probably heard that Buddhism talks about suffering—because just out of nowhere he turned to us and said, "I don't have any suffering in my life." Then he
The analytical mind, all too often, gets a bad rap in Buddhist circles, especially Western Buddhist circles. But many times that's simply an excuse for laziness and mediocrity, not wanting to think, saying that thinking is bad. Actually, thinking has its place in the meditation, and your powers of analysis have their place, as well.
Your Mind is Lying to You September 15, 2010 There's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin's sitting on a sled at the top of the hill and he's thinking, "Go ahead, go down the hill, you won't run into that boulder, you won't run into that stream, it's not
has to be done by the scientific method. That's the trust, that's what holds it all together. And the same with the Buddha's teachings. You look at the suttas and they seem to be all over the place: Sometimes they talk about the aggregates, sometimes he talks about sense-media; sometimes they stress equanimity, other times they stress effort.
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Two terms need to be explained here. One is singleness—in Pāli this is ekaggatā—and the other is jhāna.. The word ekaggatā can be broken down into three parts: Eka means one, agga can mean either summit or gathering place, and then the -tā at the end indicates that this is a noun. So you have either one summit or one gathering place for the mind.
