gems from dayamati

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks to you like a nail. 

I have never minded appearing foolish to ignorant people, for it is
their way to see foolishness wherever they turn their gaze 

This is how I see melancholia. I love melancholia. It is a sadness that
stems from looking at the world and knowing it could be so much better
but for some reason is not. It is a sadness that inspires me and
sustains my practice. But melancholia is also a joy that comes from
looking at the world and knowing that it could not be much better after
all and so must be accepted just as it is. And therein lies release from
the sting of sadness and an awakening to the joys of sadness. 

The terms "buddha", "arhant", "outflows" and "nirvana" were all borrowed
by the Buddhists from Jains and Brahmins. 

Apparent joys in which there are hidden sorrows. The Buddha referred to
them as being like a razor blade coated with honey. An example of such a
joy is any kind of pleasure that occurs in the mentality of one who has
not overcome a tendency to form attachments. A sorrowless joy, by
contrast, is a moment of pleasure experienced by someone who can easily
let it go without regret when it naturally disappears. 

Get the Goat: This expression derives from an old American custom among
people who raced horses. If an owner had a very nervous horse, he would
put a goat in the stall with the horse, which had the effect of calming
the horse down so it could save its energy for a race. A rival who
wished to keep the horse nervous would get the goat from the stall. Some
meditation teachers believe in getting the goats of their disciples.
That is, they take away all external aids to ease and comfort so that
the disciple has to face his own mind without props, without external
kinds of security. The philosophy of such teachers is that the Buddha
was a puriso-damma-sarathi, a trainer of the wild beast in man. Like
some horse trainers, these meditation teachers believe in getting the
goat out of the stall and then working at the horse to break its will.
The technique works most of the time. It works just often enough that
people sometimes forget there are other methods of taming wild beasts. 

What fans? As I am sure you are aware, the word "fan" came into English
as a shortened form of the word "fanatic" (from the Latin "fanaticus",
meaning "associated with a temple"). A fanatic is one who offers
enthusiastic but uncritical acceptance. It is my most ardent hope that I
personally have the uncritical acceptance of no one, for you are right
in observing that those who offer uncritical acceptance of anyone are in
for disappointment (dukkha). 

I have written at some length about teachers in a variety of places.
There is no need to repeat that here, beyond saying that everyone,
without exception, is capable of some degree of self-deception. It is
alarmingly easy, as the Buddha often pointed out, to err on the side of
seeing oneself as more virtuous than one really is. While it is not
necessary to have a formal teacher to help one see one's own
shortcomings, it does help considerably to have a willingness to listen
to what others say about one's conduct and the effect it has on them.
Without such willingness, no teacher is likely to be of value. With that
willingness, then everyone becomes one's teacher. 

The Mongolian invasions of every part of Asia and central Asia had a
sweeping impact on Buddhist institutions and eventually on doctrines
that were invented to support those institutions. It is to the Mongols
that we owe such institutions as the Dalai Lama and other tulkus. The
threat of Mongolian invasion was of tremendous importance in Japan and
on the Japanese Buddhism of the Kamakura period. Virtually every from of
Buddhism that is still extant in Japan was founded in that very rich and
fertile period. The Mongols also had a huge impact on Buddhism in China,
Korea and Vietnam. And in Central Asia, once the centre of the greatest
Buddhist thinkers and translators, the Mongolian invasions nearly wiped
Buddhism out and ushered in centuries of persecution and ruin. I can't
think of one other series of events that has had a greater impact on
Buddhism in the world than the Mongol invasions (with the possible
exception of the incursions of Alexander the Great). 

The early Buddhist position was that pleasure is to be cultivated, but
with an awareness that nothing lasts and therefore any pleasure is bound
to be fleeting. Resisting the inevitable decay of a source of pleasure
is therefore a cause of frustration (dukkha) and disappointment. 

It might help you to study Islam more carefully. Like most products of
human beings, it is a mixture of very fine ideals and principles and
rather poor behaviour on the part of some people. My own experience with
the Muslims with whom I work is that they are among the kindest and most
ethical people with whom I work, and in the case of most of them these
qualities stem from their religious training. I have also found that as
a rule in my experience it is Muslims who have the deepest sympathy with
and understanding of Buddhism. I have had more useful and productive
discussions about my practice with Muslims than with members of any
other religion (including, sad to say, Buddhists). Islam has little to
do making North American culture such a hideous blight on this
overcrowded planet. I must say, I can easily understand why some Muslims
think of America as the great Satan. I can easily see why Muslims would
just like to be left alone and not overrun by American culture and
values. 

A few years ago, one of the people who meditated with my group every
week was a woman from Saudi Arabia. She told me once that she had heard
so much about the freedom of North American society that she was very
excited to come here to go to a major university. At the end of her four
years here, she couldn't wait to go home. She had known several women
who had been raped and badly beaten up in robberies, something she had
never experienced in the Middle East. She felt afraid to go outside at
night, even with other women, a fear she had never experienced in the
Middle East. But the biggest disappointment of all was how people used
their freedom. She said "These people have more freedom of speech than
anyone anywhere in the world. And what do they do with all that freedom?
They talk of nothing but food and sex. Every conversation eventually
turns to sex and food. What a tragic waste of freedom!" I think the
woman had a point. 

I have never quite seen why people find it interesting to discover that
someone does not practice what (s)he preaches. After all, no one aside
from buddhas should be expected to be consistent in the application of
lofty ideals. So when someone points out that Mr X does not walk his
talk, then one is only making the trivial observation that Mr X is
human. 

Hypocrisy is pretending to have feelings or convictions that one does
not really have. There is nothing hypocritical about reading a news
group but not making contributions to it, any more than there is
anything hypocritical about reading books but never writing one or
watching movies but never making one. And there is nothing hypocritical
about saying that the quality of what one reads is generally so poor
that it does not inspire one to say anything in response. 

As a Buddhist I have tried to cultivate a habit of thinking carefully
and not making sweeping generalizations about very complex phenomena. If
one is going to open one's eyes to reality, then one should open one's
eyes to all of reality, and that involves trying to sort out the various
elements in complex issues. 

Like many products of post-Enlightenment Western society, I place a very
high value on an open society in which everyone is given free rein to
express views and present scientific findings. I am not blind to the
fact that many societies do not promote such openness, and I suppose I
would probably rather not live in a society in which freedom of speech
is severely restricted. On the other hand, I am aware of the fact that
my preference for an open society is itself a result of indoctrination
and conditioning and is by no means absolute, and I can very easily see
that if I had lived elsewhere or in other times, my values would surely
be quite different from what they are. This makes me somewhat sluggish
in finding cause to condemn others. 

During my misspent youth, I worked on a cattle ranch for about half a
year. I was appalled by the routines that animals were put through:
branding, castration, round-ups and that final ride in a crowded cattle
truck to be slaughtered. This has all moved so far away from the time
when people killed an animal in the hunt. For me this is not an ethical
issue. I have no use for arguing with people about the morality of what
they eat. When people ask me to justify being a vegetarian, I simply
tell them that I cannot stand to see anything in pain, and whenever I
can avoid being part of a process that involves inflicting pain and
death, then I avoid it. 

It's true, I am quite convinced, that human beings are built to be
omnivores, which means we are built to eat animal protein as well as
fruits and vegetables. If you look at the diets of many peoples, they
got their animal protein by eating insects, lizards and rodents. Eating
the amount of meat in a hamburger or a steak is really excessive. So if
you really want to follow the diet that you were evolved to digest, you
might swallow a couple of beetles and a horned toad very week. I don't
like to see even cockroaches suffer, so I'm willing to risk my own
health rather than terminate the lives of other critters. As I say, I do
not see this as an ethical issue but as a matter of personal aesthetics.

There are two ways of looking at karma. One way is the popular way,
which is little more than a way of frightening people and keeping them
in line. That way of looking at karma will not bear up very well at all
under close examination; it is not meant to really. It is in the nature
of inspirational fiction. There is, however, a second way of looking at
karma, and that is to see it primarily as a psychological principle.
Every deliberate action you do creates or reinforces a habit. This is
especially true of the principal kind of action, which is the forming of
intentions and attitudes. (Physical actions and speech are derived from
those intentions and attitudes.) Getting into the habit of seeing faults
makes one generally more unhappy, less resilient. Getting into the habit
of seeing virtues makes one more cheerful, patient and loving. It feels
better to love than to hate. It's really that simple. This is how karma
is discussed in classical Indian treatises on the subject. It has little
to do with ethics and justice, much to do with health and well-being.
Asking why bad things happen to good people is not the sort of question
to ask in the context of karma. A better question to ask is why do bad
things destroy some people while bringing out the best in others? There
is an Indian saying that hardship is like a grindstone. Put clay to a
grindstone, and the clod crumbles. Put gold to it, and the gold becomes
bright and shiny. If you stick around this news group, you'll witness
the crumbling of many clods. Those who crumble are those who still have
unrefined characters, which is just another way of saying bad karma. As
their attitudes improve, they become more refined, and then hardships
make them shine like burnished gold. That is good karma. And that's
really about all there is to it. 

There are quite a few of us around who feel that life really started to
get interesting when the women in our lives hit menopause, and our own
sexual desires took a dramatic decline, allowing us for the first time
to get real enjoyment out of the finer things in life. I sometimes
suspect that some women do not fully appreciate how very difficult it is
to go through a day with a body filled with raging male hormones. It's
not much more fun for men that it is for the women who have to put up
with them. 

The very first philosophers who appealed to me were the Cynics, who were
so named because they lived like dogs. There is a great deal of
similarity between the Buddhists of ancient India and the Cynics of
ancient Greece. Eventually I grew tired of the Cynics and graduated to
the more upbeat philosophy of the Stoics, whom I still admire deeply. 

In one of his essays on ethics, Aristotle has a long discourse on
friendship. One of the legitimate kinds of friendship he recognizes is
one based on an exchange of pleasure for money. When one considers what
a huge percentage of the economy in modern affluent societies is based
on the payment of money for pleasure and entertainment (professional
sporting events, films, theatre, art galleries, universities and so on),
it seems silly to single out the selling of sex as somehow
reprehensible. We're all whores here. 

In affluent consumerist societies it is rare that ANYTHING is pure and
fair and without exploitation. Drugs, poverty and pimps are part of the
very fabric of every consumer economy. (I am reminded of William
Borrough's brilliant observation that heroin addiction is the most
fitting metaphor for explaining the dynamics of capitalism. A market is
created by getting people addicted to what they do not really want or
need and then raising prices when demand increases. That's how
capitalism works. End of story.) I do not believe in morality. It is an
outmoded idea that I find increasingly useless and cumbersome, so I am
not inclined to agree that capitalism is morally wrong. I do, however,
find it disgusting. I would rather live somewhere where it didn't exist.

A series of practices that obtain conditions for growth is not morality.
It is prudence. The difference, as I see it, is that morality pertains
to making value judgements about what is good and what is evil. Prudence
pertains to making observations about what works, that is, what leads to
a given set of specified desiderata. Not harming others a good strategy
to avoid what one does not wish to desire, namely, to have unpleasant
experiences. So it is about prudence, not about morality. 

As you know, the word "martyr" derives from the Greek word for
"witness". A person who died from the kingdom of earth to show others
the way to the Kingdom of God was called a "witness" in early
Christianity. The whole point of being a martyr was to emphasise the
distinction between the two kingdoms and to show the superiority of the
Kingdom of God. There was no better way to show one's conviction in the
superiority of the Kingdom of God than to give up one's life in the
kingdom of earth. That, as I understand it, was the principle of
martyrdom. A bodhisattva is someone who will stop at nothing, even his
or her own death, to help deliver others from pain and suffering. Unlike
the martyr, the bodhisattva does not seek death; he is merely willing to
accept death if that is what is required to help others. 

As I understand it, to undertake a training principle is to see that
principle as important enough that one will make a serious effort to
follow it. Failing in that undertaking is not at all the equivalent of
breaking a formal vow. If a monk breaks a paraajika rule, he stops being
a monk by the commission of the action he had vowed to abstain from. But
he does not stop being a Buddhist. He does not stop going for refuge. He
does not stop making progress towards liberation. When a Dharmachari
fails to follow a precept, he makes public confession and resolves to
make a strong effort not to break the precept again. This is similar to
what a bhikkhu does when he breaks any of the vinaya rules except for
the four paraajika rules. (Those are the four rules that, if broken,
result in the bhikkhu being excommunicated from the bhikkhu-sangha for
the remainder of his life.) 

There is an old saying in Biblical studies circles: "A text without a
context is a pretext." It is vital to recall the contexts in which
things are said. 

The best advice I ever heard was something my late Uncle Alden said to
my pappy. My pappy was arguing with somebody who kept twisting
everything he said. It was obviously getting pappy down. So old Uncle
Alden pulled gently at my pappy's sleeve and said "Don't bother trying
to reason with this man. He's an idiot." As you know, I don't believe
much in mantras. But I have found this mantra saves me a lot of time,
not to mention affliction. Say it a few times and see if it words for
you. "Don't bother trying to reason with this man. He's an idiot." 

All four of the noble truths are clearly developed and influenced by the
unexamined social prejudices of the time in which they were formed. 

Living when and where he did, the recluse Gotama could probably not even
conceive of a society in which women would be honoured as the social
equals of men. Nor could he easily imagine a society that would accept
women leaving the household life to become recluses. Depriving
households of their women would be perceived by mainstream culture as
such an outrageous and socially destructive move that many people would
immediately label the Buddha's movement as dangerous and seditious and
would not support them with alms. Without alms the bhikkhu-sangha could
not survive. And without the bhikkhu-sangha there is no Buddhism. So the
recluse Gotama had no choice but to follow what he knew were the
prevailing social attitudes of his day. This whole episode shows two
things: 1) Gotama the recluse was limited by the social conditions of
his time, and 2) followers of the Buddha need not be limited by the
social conditions that prevailed at the time of the Buddha. 

I would suggest trying to find a copy of a beautiful story written by
Elizabeth Coates called "The Cat Who Went to Heaven." It was written in
1935 but has been reprinted often. It's a booklet for children. It's
about an artistic monk who befriended a cat. Everyone was scandalized,
of course, because cats are usually considered symbols of selfishness
and pride in Buddhism. According to the traditional story, when the
Buddha died, all of nature wept and wailed, except a cat. The cat just
licked its paws and remained unmoved. So it's traditional in Buddhist
art to depict cats in very negative ways, almost as demonic creatures.
So when this artistic monk befriended the cat, everyone was shocked.
Coates tells a wonderfully moving story of overcoming prejudice with
love. If you have any heart at all, be prepared to cry. 

A common theme in the Pali canon is a set of four virtues called the 4
sangaha-vatthuuni, a set of four characteristics that when cultivated in
a monk or a lay person attract others to the Dhamma. They are daana
(generosity), peyya-vajja (kindly and pleasant speech), atthacariyaa
(purposeful, useful livelihood) samaanattataa (impartiality, treating
others as on a par with oneself). 

When I was first attracted to Buddhism, I went for the purely
rationalistic variety that existed only in the minds of 19th century
European admirers of Buddhism. I hated Vajrayana and Mahayana and
pretended that Theravada was very different from how it actually is. As
time went on, and as I meditated more, I found myself opening up to all
the forms of Buddhism. And also to many forms of Christianity, Judaism
and Islam. Paradoxically, the deeper my appreciation of Buddhism has
grown, the more respect I have for other systems of doctrine and
practice, both "religious" and "secular" (two terms that have nearly
lost their meaning for me). Perhaps what has most swayed me has been the
fact that I was been fortunate to meet a lot of very fine human beings
in this life, and they come from every religious and non-religious
tradition that samsara has to offer. 

"Siila" means "habit, custom". What Buddhism cannot exist without is
susiila (good habits). It cannot survive for long in dussiila (bad
habits). 

It would be difficult to distinguish a Buddhist from a materialist who
advocated moderation. 

Religion is best described as the systematic science of self-hatred. So
if a person is not filled with deep self-loathing, then he or she is not
practising religion correctly. This is certainly true of Buddhism. It's
all about despising the self from beginning to end. And Mahayana
Buddhism, with that bodhisattva ideal, is about hating oneself Big Time,
turning self-loathing into a cosmic dance. For me, the best antidote to
the Bodhisattva Malaise has been to read a bit of Chinese literature. I
love Chuang Tzu and some of the fellows reported by Huai Nan Tzu, such
as the guy who said "If I could save the entire universe from suffering
by plucking out a single hair, I would not do it" and "What difference
does it make whether one is good or bad, wise or foolish? The corpse of
a good sage stinks just as much as that of a foolish scoundrel." That
helps provide a bit of balance to the sometime sickening piety and
cloying goodness of Buddhist propaganda. 

The wise speak because they have something to say. The foolish speak
because they have to say something. 

Buddhist observations about conduct have nothing to do with morality.
They have everything to do with finding strategies for having one's
desires come true. 

If one has no alternative but to act in a given way, then that way of
acting is not heroic at all. It is merely necessary. 

99% of Buddhist practice involves what is called smrti, which literally
means remembering, although it is sometimes mistranslated as
"mindfulness". What is one supposed to remember? Past actions, past
mental states, past thoughts and their eventual consequences. Why does
one bother to remember such things? In order not to repeat unprofitable
patterns in the present and future. Right remembering of the past is
indispensable for right resolve for the future; both of these are
inextricable from the Eightfold Path. So forget this New Age Pseudo-Zen
"Live in the moment" crap. Buddhism, by way of contrast, is not about
going out of one's mind, but using the mind well to deal with whatever
arises without prejudice, sentimentality, dogmatism, attachment and
clinging. 

The fourteen unanswered questions are not called unanswerable
(avyaakaara.niiya) but unanswered (avyaakata). The reason they are not
answered by the Buddha is that the answers do not have any bearing on
the four noble truth and the eightfold path. This is the reason that he
himself gave for why he did not answer these questions. Instead of
saying that nirvana is inexplicable, which is contrary to anything found
in the suttas or abhidhamma, say what the Buddha himself said, which is
that knowing what happens after the death of an arhant has no bearing
whatsoever on the fact of dukkha, the cause of dukkha, the elimination
of the cause of dukkha and the method of eliminating the cause of
dukkha. 

One does not cling to hypotheses. One tests them. That is how they
differ from dogmas, which are held with a clinging attitude, a refusal
to let go, and a need to regard all as fools who are not similarly
afflicted with the blight of dogmatism. 

The whole point of practice is that, as time goes on, your mentality
rarely or never has negative and harmful characteristics, such as lust,
anger, confusion, pride, dogmatism, irresolution, laziness, anxiety,
shamelessnesss and lack of conscience. Whether the wholesome mentality
is achieved by following the breath or other methods, such as performing
rituals or studying abhidharma or worshiping buddhas and deities, does
not matter in the least. What matters is the result, not the method of
achieving it. 

you can lighten a cart by removing the wheels, but it won't be easier to
pull. 

News groups have some potential of intelligent discussion, but they are
not very well used for that sort of thing yet. They remind me of what it
might be like to discuss dharma in a strip club while a very loud band
is playing; the task is not entirely impossible, but the potential for
distraction is present. 

Jesus died young. Had he lived to be an old man, he might have become
more wise. Judging only from what is reported of his words and actions
in the Bible, I would say that Jesus was a brash, loudmouthed,
opinionated, argumentative young pup, filled with adolescent
misunderstandings of the religion of his fathers. Had he lived to full
manhood, he might have come to see some of the wisdom in the traditions
of the Pharisees, from whom he stole much thunder without ever learning
to make rain. If Paul or Tarsus had not mistakenly identified Jesus as
the Messiah (as the concept had been redefined by Paul himself), Jesus
would have been a very minor player upon the stage of world history. 

Anger is a very taboo response in Buddhism. To show any anger at all, or
even any irritation, invites people to say "Why, my darling, don't you
know that anger is one of the three poisons?" So when a person's ego
decides it is a Buddhist ego, it cannot admit that it feels anger. So
anger goes into the shadow. It still works, but only on an unconscious
level. It comes out, but always in veiled ways. Buddhists learn to be
very sneaky in their anger. They learn to veil it in the clothes of
Compassion. 

It is a delusion to say that life has a meaning that we discover in it.
It is also a delusion to say that life cannot be given a meaning. Life
has meaning only when we, the living, give it one. And each of us gives
it the meaning that best suits us. During the course of a lifetime, many
of us give life several meanings, often diametrically opposed to other
meanings we have given it before. The act of giving a meaning to life is
what I call mythology. A myth is a story we tell about our experience to
make it meaningful. It is useful to realise that experiences can be
given meanings in a multitude of ways. One can superimpose Buddhist
myths upon them, or Christian myths, or Bahai myths, or Subud myths, or
Islamic myths, or Taoist myths, or Vedic myths, or Upanaishadic myths,
or Puranic myths, or Teutonic myths, or Voodoo myths, or Hopi myths, or
Gnostic myths, or any combination of the above. The result of imposing a
mythic framework onto experience, if it is done mindfully, will be
twofold: 1) One will have made life meaningful, and 2) one will be
tolerant and accepting of others who make it meaningful in different
ways. If myth-making is not done mindfully, then one gets swallowed by
one's own stories, and the result of myth-making will be less joyful;
one will probably become rigid, inflexible, dogmatic, intolerant,
belligerent and (if I may use a technical term from Buddhist theory)
stupid (mudha). [The correct spelling is actually mu.dha, but spelling
Sanskrit correctly drives some people around the bend.] There is an
important different between being stupid (mudha) and joyous (mudita). 

They are both quacks in search of a duck. 

when you finally live up to this glorious description you give of
yourself, you will have earned my highest respect. Meanwhile, I take
what you say as a statement of your noble intentions. 

An incompetent teacher always blames his students. 

Human being are human beings, and Buddhists are not on the whole any
better or worse than anyone else. 

Which is worse: to be enlightened and not to know it, or not to be
enlightened and believe that one is? 

The Buddha never spoke in terms of enlightenment. He spoke in terms of
cultivating a healthy mind(kusala-citta) and attaining an end of mental
afflictions(kilesa-nirodha). The kilesas are traditionally numbered at
ten. They are: greed, hatred, delusion, conceit, dogmatism, doubt,
mental rigidity, anxiety, lack of conscience and shamelessness. Every
single one of these ten afflictions is psychological in nature. NIrvana,
also known as kilesa-nirodha, is an end to psychological afflictions. 

you must get it out of your head that Buddhism is a religion. It has
nothing to do with rituals, rites, metaphysics, creeds, doctrines and
superstitions. It is not at all a religion. It is a system of
psychotherapy. And it works. 

I think Buddhist practice does work. I think it works best when it is
kept pure, by which I mean free from religious notions, such as the
transcendental, enlightenment, mysticism and various other Western ideas
that have been superimposed upon Asian Buddhism as it has come West. 

What it is good to know is how much needless suffering there is in the
lives of people with whom one has regular contact. What is even better
is to have some idea of how to go about reducing this suffering. What is
best is to have the energy and the will to actually do some of the work
necessary to reduce that suffering. Compared to those matters, the issue
of enlightenment is pretty well a side-show. Funny how so many Buddhists
get distracted by the side-show and therefore never manage to find their
way into the Big Top. 

desire is conscious mental activity, but not all conscious mental
activity is desire. Stopping all thinking to avoid desire is a bit like
an alocohlic sawing off his legs to prevent himself from walking into a
liquor store. 

there is nothing that surpasses the elimination of the ten kilesa:
greed, anger, delusion, pride, views, doubt, sloth, anxiety,
shamelessness and immodesty. Even reducing them significantly brings
great joy. 

So when we focus on people and how they relate, we are engaged in
ayoniso manasikaara (careless thinking); careful thinking (yoniso
manasikaara) is focussing the attention on impersonal and fleeting
episodes of greed, generosity, hatred, love, delusion, insight, pride,
humility, cruelty, compassion, sadness, joy, irritation and equanimity
that fade away in the very moment they appear. 

All Buddhism need tell us is how to break the habit of ungrounded
thinking (ayoniso manasikaara) and to cultivate careful thinking (yoniso
manasikaara) so that we can engage in wholesome actions without any
thought of reward. 

Those who do not undertake the study of Pali are at the mercy of
translators. Such people are left to guess and to speculate about what
the text might be saying, could be saying, should be saying. It is no
wonder that such people often give up on texts and join the modern cult
of "personal experience". (The same thing happened in China, resulting
in the emergence of an impoverished sect known as Chan. History is
repeating itself. It is a history of laziness and contempt for
intellectual effort.) 

Different people are bound to have different ways of saying things.
Different people will have different experiences. Different people will
find that different techniques of meditation work best for them. This
variety is quite natural and expected. That is why I tend not to be
impressed when people try to reduce the entirety of Buddhism to one
simplistic principle and then go around saying that everyone else is
wrong because they are not liberated. 

It is no accident, I think, that many words for soul are connected with
the breath. The word "aatman" means breath, as does the Greek "psuche"
and the Latin "spiritus". When one sees the changes that immediately
overcome a living being when it stops breathing, it is no wonder that we
say "The soul has left the body". It is really just another way of
saying "The body has stopped breathing and can no longer sustain
consciousness". 

People who live in areas where many languages are spoken quickly get
used to the plain fact that they cannot understand everything perfectly,
even if they learn a dozen languages. 

It is important to emphasise that study of languages and texts is not
necessary for progress. What I find unfortunate is when people go
further than that and make the claim that the study of languages and
texts is an obstacle to progress along the path. It is one thing to say
"Given my situation and aspirations, I don't need that", but it is quite
another to say "Nobody needs that, and in fact having that is an
impediment." It is when one says the latter that the mind- door begins
to slam shut. 

If one wishes really to eradicate the kilesas, it is more useful to 
engage in various kinds of wholesome thinking: thinking clearing about 
the experience of the past and the present, seeing patterns in them 
and then making a firm resolve to eradicate the troublesome patterns. 
This firm resolve is called Right Resolve, and it is the second item 
on the Eightfold Path.

The question whether a Buddha dies is NOT one of the unanswered 
questions.  The answer to this question is most definitely Yes.  
Everyone dies, without exception.  The unanswered question is: when a 
Buddha dies, does he enter into a different sort of existence, or does 
he stop existing altogether?  This question is not answered for the 
reason that the answer does not matter at all.  Whether or not a 
Buddha continues to exist or stops existing, discontent (dukkha) 
occurs and has as its basis craving (tanhaa) rooted in misconceptions 
(avijjaa).  In other words, the four noble truths remain unaffected by 
the answer to the question of what happens to a Buddha (or anyone 
else) after death.  There is no element whatsoever of faith in this 
"stock" answer; it is quite a sensible recognition that some 
questions, whether or not they can be answered, are irrelevant. 
Nirvana does not defeat death.  What it does defeat, however, is the 
fear of death, the dread of mortality.  It is this dread of dying (and 
of all change) that makes people ask such questions as "What happens 
to a Tathaagata after he dies?  What happens to an arahant after he 
dies (or an arahatii after she dies)?" To a person whose passions have 
been extinguished (cf. nibbuta- kileso), such questions are not in the 
least interesting, except as idle curiosity.  Such questions come to 
have no more urgency than the question "What sort of bird is that over 
on the juniper tree?"  As a practical matter, when a person still 
finds that the question "What will happen to me when I die?" causes 
anxiety or fear or hope or any other kind of heightened interest, then 
one still has some kilesa to get rid of.  And the task at hand is to 
work on getting rid of those kilesas, not to engage in speculation and 
elaborate theorising (papanca).

I think of pretending to be good as a necessary step to take on the 
way to actually being good.  If one pretends long enough, it becomes 
quite genuine.  (Think of a toddler when it takes its first two steps 
and then falls down.  All the adults in the room clap their hands with 
joy and say "Oh look!  Baby is walking now!  Of course we all know 
that baby is not genuinely walking yet, but we also know that if baby 
does not keep taking a few step and falling down, baby will never 
become a genuinely mobile biped.) 

Being aware is not always sufficient.  One must also be sufficiently 
horrified by the contents of one's mind that one takes steps to 
changing one's mentality for the better.
 
What virtue is there in having an original thought if it is a stupid one?  

Memory is invariably faulty.  People remember what makes an impression 
on them, and what makes an impression on them is usually something 
that reinforces a prejudice of some kind---or something that strongly 
challenges a stereotype that one has allowed to build up.  People 
remember what they need to remember to make sense of the present, and 
when the present demands an embellished story, memory provides one.  
This is very true of me; I freely admit that my memory is almost 
completely fictitious.  It is, I suspect, equally true of most people 
who are honest with themselves.  It is, I think, a very naive person 
who takes his or her personal memory at face value. 

It amazes me how obsessed people have become with youth and how 
unwilling they are to accept age gracefully.
 
Can you think of a better way to stop suffering than to become
contented with it?
 
Surely dreaming puts one in touch with many important things that one 
would otherwise miss.  I would never give up dreaming, imagining and 
fantasy.  Of course, I do them all quite mindfully. The present is the 
mind dreaming. Present perceptions are dreams. 

Did you know that the word "religion" is said by some to come from the 
Latin verb meaning "to reread"?  Reading something again and again is 
the very heart of being religious.

When some people look at the full moon, they see only the dark spots.

There are two kinds of duality: useful, wholesome ones and pernicious, 
unhealthy ones.  There are two kinds of dichotomy: true ones and false 
ones. The Buddha made it very clear that the task of being free from 
those nasty afflictions is not to get rid of ALL duality (which is 
impossible and absurd on the face of it) but only of BAD duality. 

The human psyche has no fixed age. We carry with us all the traces of 
things we did and thought as wee babes, and we carry within us all the 
tendencies that made it possible for our ancestors to evolve from a 
blob of mucus in the ocean to the most complex and dangerous animal 
that has ever stalked the earth. A human body may be a particular age, 
but the soul within it can be all ages at once. Its age can never be 
accurately assessed.

If you don't trust what I say, then you will think about what I say, 
which is much better than believing it.

I am quite comfortable with the fact that I am getting older and have 
few years of life left in me. The passage of time has never bothered 
me in the least. On the contrary, I rather like it, because I love 
change and variety. So I have no need to pretend that time is an 
illusion. 
 
That is a fundamentally flawed doctrine for which I have yet to 
discover a practical use. But if you find it useful, then I rejoice 
for you. 

Yes, it has been a pleasant moment. But now it has slipped into the 
past. Perhaps a similar event will occur in the future.

I have run into quite a few people over the years who state in no 
uncertain terms that they are fully enlightened and have a capacity to 
see the folly in everyone around them.  They all exhibit an 
interesting pattern of behaviour. They attack others for being fools 
and slaves to tradition.  They immunize themselves against all 
criticisms by saying that people who are still deluded cannot grasp 
the mentality of someone who is fully enlightened.  And the more they 
are tested, the more vicious and punitive they become in responding.  
In the end, the effect they have on most people is that people 
conclude "If that is enlightenment, I'd rather not attain it."  Of 
course, when people do conclude that, it only reinforces the 
"enlightened" person's view that deluded people love to wallow in 
their delusion and do not even have the ability to recognise True 
Enlightenment when they see it.

Forgive yourself, and you'll find that you can more easily forgive 
others.

Anything that is effective at all can be abused in the wrong hands. 
The only way to make any method of training failsafe is to make it 
completely ineffective. 

You find others to be inadequate and flawed.  Just out of curiosity, 
how much does this phenomenon that you observe all around you deviate 
from what you expect and hope to see?
 
The only wasted time is that not spent dying. 

The principal failing of modern Buddhism is that most modern Buddhists 
fail to realise that monks are meant to set the standard of conduct 
for all people.  So anything that is addressed to a monk is addressed 
to everyone, not necessarily as a commandment that must be a obeyed, 
but as a piece of advice that if obeyed would lead everyone to greater 
peace and happiness.

In the Anguttara-nikaaya [the Buddha] says that for anyone to cut a 
limb from a tree that has provided shade is a shameful act of 
ingratitude.

In the Vinaya there are elaborate guidelines for where a monk may make 
a dwelling.  He is not to cut down any living trees or shrubs but can 
make a shelter only from fallen branches.  He is not to build a 
dwelling in a place that will disturb small animals, birds, ants or 
other insects.  He is not to dig the earth, lest it kill worms or 
disturb larvae.  He is not to irrigate, lest it drown small creatures.  

Buddhism in India had relatively few followers among the agricultural 
classes.  It appealed mostly to brahmins (who worked as teachers) and 
to merchants.  It has been estimated that one of the biggest factors 
in the spread of Buddhism was the fact that so many of its followers 
were traveling merchants. 

My favourite translation for the word "dukkha" is "disappointment." 

There are no bad events. There are just events. When people do not 
like what happens, they call the events bad. Bad things happen to 
people because people do not accept what happens.

According to the insights of the Buddha, when you say "Something 
happened" you are less likely to experience dukkha than when you say 
"Something happened TO ME."

I make tentative hypotheses and hold them until evidence from personal 
experience comes along to prove the hypothesis false. 

I have known thousands of people, not one of whom was infallible. It 
is not, therefore, unreasonable to hold the view that no one is 
infallible.

Moreover, infallibility is not at all necessary for the task set by 
Buddhism. All one need know is the nature of dukkha and the means of 
eliminating its causes. That takes very little knowledge. It 
apparently requires a certain amount of courage, but even that 
appearance is deceptive. How much courage does it take to let go of 
something that is causing you pain and harm?

One does not need to meet a Buddha in person to know what causes 
dukkha and how to eliminate it. That is quite enough knowledge for me. 
Anything more would be superfluous.

there is suffering, and there is a cause thereof. When the cause is 
removed, the effect is also removed. 

When one is deeply contented, then one has no need for any living 
presence other than one's own mind. Anything more would be an excess. 

What difference does it make to you whether it is a religion or a 
philosophy? Obviously these words, "religion" and "philosophy", have 
significance to you, and they evoke emotional responses and carry all 
kinds of associations that trigger approval and disapproval in you. 
But Dharma practice is still Dharma practice, no matter what you call 
it. It is something to do, not something to put labels on. 

One way to do Dharma practice is to become more mindful of the effect 
that various labels have on you. One way to practice mindfulness might 
be to try to figure out what in your particular conditioning leads you 
to favour thinking of Buddhism as a philosophy rather than as a 
religion. What is lost for you when you think of Buddhism as a 
religion? What in your background makes you think and feel this way? 

The question of what the Buddha taught is just about impossible to 
answer. There are so many claims made by so many Buddhists. Those who 
worship the Buddha in ways that may strike some people as being 
similar to how some people worship some gods do so on the authority of 
texts that they believe came directly from the Buddha. So in their 
view they are indeed following the teachings of the Buddha. Why 
dispute their claim? Perhaps they are not following the teachings that 
inspire you personally. But that is not something that need concern 
you. All that need concern you is what teachings you find helpful and 
inspiring in your project of reducing the amount of avoidable dukkha 
in your world.

Most people who are attracted to Buddhist teachings recognise in the 
teachings something so familiar that they feel they have been 
Buddhists all along. It is more a matter of discovering that they are 
already Buddhists rather than becoming Buddhists. 

It would be better to discover for yourself what is true than to agree 
with anyone. It is only my opinion, but I think that anyone who tells 
you that you have an obligation to believe anything is a person from 
whom you should walk away, slowly but deliberately.

The Middle Way, I think you'll find, is a pretty broad avenue. All you 
really need to do is stay out of the gutters.  

I think it goes without saying that some people misunderstood what the 
Buddha said. I think it also goes without saying that the Buddha said 
some things that were false. He was a human being, and no human being 
is infallible. What this means to me is that I am condemned to 
discovering the truth for myself, that I can rely on no one at all to 
show me or tell me the truth. I also take it for granted that I will 
fail, as everyone else has always done. But I hope to become a better 
man through my many inevitable failures.

It has never occurred to me to question it seriously, perhaps because 
I frankly have no vested interest in whether the theory is true or 
not.

The people who are unambiguously described as being liberated by their 
devotion to the Tathagata were people who developed the habit of 
imagining that the Buddha was with them at every moment of the day. 
Imagining themselves in the presence of the Buddha, they were mindful 
and very well behaved. According to the traditional commentaries, it 
was their good behaviour that made it possible for them to be free of 
guilty consciences, and their clean consciences that made it possible 
for them to be fully honest and therefore capable of being mindful, 
and their mindfulness liberated them. So ultimately it is mindfulness 
that liberates. But it may be imagining the Buddha's presence that 
makes mindfulness possible for some. So does imagining the Buddha's 
presence make one free, or does mindfulness make one free? I would 
answer that with a question: Do you walk on your right 
leg or on your left leg?

If one is interested in biology and neurology, it would be daft to 
stop at the 7th century. If one is interested in bringing an end to 
the kinds of frustration that arise from unrealistic expectations, one 
need go no further than the sixth century BCE. Nothing of importance 
about the human condition has been discovered since then.

It is quite easy to know what the Buddha would have thought about 
cognitive neural science. He would have seen it as an irrelevant 
distraction from the task at hand. One can solve the problems he was 
interested in solving quite easily without having recourse to 
cognitive science. Of course, if you find philosophy of mind 
fascinating, then be fascinated by it. There is no harm in that. But 
neither that fascination nor what comes from indulging yourself in it 
is likely to further you long the path to the goal of eliminating 
desire-fueled dukkha.

as long as I have work to do within my own mentality, someone else's 
attainments, whether real or imagined, are of no interest to me.

Telling fools to go away is like shooing flies off a fresh turd. As 
soon as one is dismissed, ten more take his place.

If Buddhism does not appeal to you, don't practice it. Practice what 
you find helpful to yourself. Don't expect everyone to be attracted to 
the practices that attract you. No need for criticism. No need for 
objections. It's really that simple.

The Buddha readily acknowledged that women can 1) fully understand the 
Dharma, 2) attain full liberation from the passions, and 3) be 
excellent teachers.  His reluctance to let them join the sangha was 
not a reflection of their ability.  He never suggested that women 
could not practice Dharma.  Rather, he said that women should not 
renounce the household life.  To be more accurate, he said that if his 
Sangha allowed women to join it by renouncing the household life, then 
his vinaya-dhamma would not last as long as it would if only men 
renounced the household life.  I think this shows that the Buddha 
realised that society can easily do without men, but it crumbles 
without women.  Men are dispensable, but women are not.  

whether the Buddha himself actually taught something does not matter 
at all.  What matters is whether it is true.  How do you know what's 
true?  By testing everything you hear, including the things supposedly 
taught by buddhas and prophets and sages and kings. Would the four 
noble truths be false if they were spoken by Smokey the Bear instead 
of the Buddha? The Four Noble Truths are the only part of Buddha-
vacana (the words of the Buddha) that really matter.  And it makes no 
difference at all who said them.  That they are true is something we 
all verify daily by craving and being unhappy until we finally figure 
out that we'll be truly happy only when we stop craving. 

Hindu is an Arabic word for people who live in India.  The Buddha 
lived in India.  He is bound to sound like a Hindu.  How could he not? 
"Hinduism" was a name given to Indian religions by invading Arabic 
Muslims. The term was used to distinguish indigenous Indian religions 
from the religion of the Muslim colonizers. To the Muslims, everything 
in India was Hindu: Shaivites, Vaishnavites, Mimamsakas, Jains and 
Buddhists were all called Hindus. Eventually, the term was used more 
narrowly, excluding Buddhists and Jains. The constitution of India 
defines a Hindu as anyone living in India who is not a Muslim, a 
Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew, a Buddhist or a Jain. (It is still a 
matter of debate whether Sikhs are to be regarded as Hindus.) 
According to various authors who wrote in the 10th through the 12th 
centuries, there is a distinction between those Indian religions that 
accept the authority of the Veda and those that do not. Buddhists and 
Jains do not accept the authority of the Veda. All the various 
religions of India that do accept the Veda could collectively be 
called Hinduism. Hindus believe in a permanent self (aatman) and in 
the authority of the Veda, and Buddhists do not. 

Buddhism has become popular in the West because very few Western 
people understand what it is really advising them to do. 

If you insist that your trust was abused by someone, then you are 
likely to be reminded that your disappointment has every bit as much 
to do with your expectations as with the other's conduct. This is a 
basic principle of Buddhism. It is also said again and again that if 
another person's conduct is not good for you, then you should walk 
away from it.
 
What I have been trying to say is that no one is to be blamed for 
anything. If there is pain, it is to be alleviated. One of the way of 
alleviating one's own pain is to acknowledge how it came about. If one 
finds oneself repeatedly getting into the same painful situations, 
then seeing what kinds of patterns in one's own thinking may account 
for that is the only sensible thing to do. Laying blame is mostly a 
distraction from that crucial task of discovering what it is in 
oneself that leads one into painful and troublesome situations.
 
A teacher has only as much power as a disciple voluntarily gives to him.

1. If it is not true and not helpful, don't say it.
2. If it is not true but helpful, don't say it.
3. If it is not helpful yet true, don't say it.
4. If it is helpful and true, wait for the right time to say it. 
 
Warning in a general way about pitfalls is in keeping with the tenets 
of Buddhism. Referring to a specific person in a way that makes others 
cultivate negative thoughts towards the specific person is a violation 
of one of the four speech precepts. Telling people in general that it 
is a good idea to seek a teacher who is kind-hearted and to avoid 
teachers who are obviously seeking money and fame and pleasure is in 
keeping with Buddhist tenets. 

Stating one's opinions as though they were facts is acting either out 
of delusion or out of an intention to deceive. 

Any news service that is financed exclusively by corporate subscribers 
interested only in making profits is unlikely to be reliable. 

If one reads about conditions at the time of the Buddha, they were 
pretty awful. There were some very good people among his followers, 
but there were also quite a few people who could only be regarded as 
complete failures. Think of the monk who went around with a razor and 
slashed the throats of over sixty other monks to liberate them from 
their loathsome bodies. Or think of Devadatta, described many times as 
a model monk, who after thirty years of training decided to try to 
murder the Buddha and take over the sangha. Or think of the scandal of 
the prostitute found murdered on the grounds of a Buddhist vihara. Or 
think of Moggallana, who was brutally beaten to death by members of a 
religious community who disapproved of the Buddha (no doubt thinking 
he was the leader of a dangerous cult). All those events are reported 
in the early canon. Doesn't sound like the best of times to me. Sounds 
to me pretty much like every other age in recorded human history. 
Compared to then, our times are not much more (nor much less) dismal. 
I doubt very much that it is much harder or much easier now to be 
virtuous and/or attain nirvana than it ever has been.

It is in the nature of being confused that one cannot easily detect 
the exact nature of one's confusion. After all, if I knew exactly how 
and why I was confused, I would not be confused. I take it for granted 
that others can spot my confusion much better than I, and I can spot 
theirs more easily than they. 

I have found that one cannot get very far in trying to decide which 
party was right and which was wrong. The notions of "wrong" and 
"abuse" turn out not to be very helpful, I find. What is more helpful 
is to begin with the raw fact that there is pain and to work with 
that, leaving the issue of blame behind. 

Controversy is not at all the same as disharmony and conflict. I quite 
agree that disagreement is very stimulating and productive. But I have 
found that disagreement is most productive when it occurs in an 
atmosphere of trust and mutual respect. When people are given a chance 
to refine their thinking and change their positions for the better 
without having people jump up and down and pointing out how stupid 
they are for being inconsistent, then very good things evolve. But 
when there are people hanging around waiting to score points and make 
cheap shots, most intelligent people just get tired of the dialogue 
and go somewhere else.

A better strategy for contentment, I should think, would be to modify 
one's expectations in such a way as not to feel bitter when others 
fail to meet them.

The ideals of the European Enlightenment are endorsed by many nations, 
but I know of no nation that really lives up to them. I have never 
known any religious community that has quite reached its lofty goals. 
Practices never improve without principles that are higher than people 
are currently reaching.

I believe that it often happens in life that one person tries to help 
another but fails to do so. Sometimes one tries to help another but 
actually causes harm. In this latter situation, the person who was 
harmed may feel as though the other person was being deliberately 
harmful, while the person accused of being deliberately harmful may 
feel as though he was trying to be kind. In this situation, it is 
difficult for anyone to establish which side was right. There is a 
difference of perceptions that can never be resolved. In yet other 
situations, one person may feel that he has been harmed, while others 
do not agree that any harm has been done. This can also be a very 
difficult matter to resolve, especially when the harm is psychological 
or emotional. There can be considerable disagreement, even among 
experts, as to the extent to which a person has been damaged by a set 
of circumstances.

Most Buddhists that I know of acknowledge the importance of 
associating with good people (sappuriso) and avoiding the 
companionship of fools. The Buddha himself says that being alone is 
better than having the companionship of fools, but having the 
companionship of good friends is better than a life of solitude. Note 
that this does not imply that one needs a guru. It merely means that 
it helps to have friends who also respect Dharma.

There have always been Buddhists who tried to offer a fairly 
literalistic and linear view of rebirth. The linear view is that 
someone was one person in one life, then died, then was reborn as 
someone else. The heuristic view is that the process is much more 
complex and much less personal than that. In this heuristic view, 
there is no linear process whereby someone is a person in one life and 
then dies and then and is then reborn. Rather, there are impersonal 
patterns of events of various types that recur in predictable ways. 
People who cannot grasp the concept of non-self superimpose a notion 
of personal identity upon these impersonal events. So they believe 
that persons die and then are reborn. But those who grasp the reality 
of non-self do not see things in such terms at all. They stop thinking 
in terms of rebirth altogether and think in terms of impersonal 
causality. Such people realise that rebirth is ultimately a falsehood, 
a sort of myth superimposed upon events through ignorance; this myth 
is, however, capable of helping one understand the true nature of 
things. It is, in other words, heuristic (which means that it leads to 
a discovery of how things really are). This view that I have called 
heuristic may sound modern, but it fact it is found in the Pali canon 
and in hundreds of texts through the ages. It is a sophisticated view 
(and therefore not very popular). 

Christianity has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus of 
Nazareth. It has to do with a redefinition of the concept of the 
Messiah (Christos) by a Jew named Saul, who called himself Paul and 
was eventually deemed a Saint.
 
you cannot will yourself to be a more contented, more compassionate or 
more useful person. The best you can do is to let go of the idea of 
control. If you can let go of the illusion of being in control and 
just ride with the impersonal flow of events, you will surely face 
whatever happens with calm, perhaps even with cheer. 

the doctrine of anatta: Most people translate that word as "non-self", 
but the sayadaw translates it as "non-mastery". The fundamental 
problem most sentient beings face is that they imagine that they are, 
or wish that they were, masters of their own fates. They wish to 
control their bodies, control their thoughts, control their 
personalities. Buddhist practice, he explains, is all about 
discovering that none of these things can be controlled, none of them 
can be mastered. I can think of no discovery more liberating than 
that. Can you?

perhaps you have some of the qualities of a monk, such as generosity, 
compassion, deep contentment with few possessions or pleasures, 
integrity and kindliness in speech, indifference to comfort and 
discomfort, indifference to praise and blame and recognition from 
others, an active readiness to relieve the sufferings of beings around 
you and a remarkable ability to see what must be done to help others 
be less miserable.

What matters is the consistency of positive states following an 
experience. Buddhist practice is not about having peak experiences 
that make you or anyone else say "Wow!" It is about cultivating a 
consistently positive character. If positive states continue without 
interruption, if you never experience anger or impatience, if you no 
longer think in terms of who you were in the past, who you are now or 
who you might become in the future, if you act spontaneously without 
ever calculating whether actions will be of benefit to you in any way 
at all, then you might have entered the ariya-sangha, the community of 
noble men and women. This makes you a valuable member of society, but 
it does not make you in any way unique. 

what's going on? Conditioned events, one after another, all of them 
impermanent and impersonal in nature, none of them worth clinging to, 
none of them worth resisting.

If you overeat, you get fat. If you routinely disrespect others, you 
have fewer friends. If you cultivate kindness, you feel happy. If you 
step over the edge of a cliff, you fall. No one needs a god for all 
those events to occur. There is no judgement at all involved in any of 
them. There are merely actions followed by consequences. That is all 
you need to understand about karma. 

I think the *first* ingredient of any meaningful relationship is
self-respect. Respect for others flows naturally and gracefully out of
that. 

Those who have been battered by others need others to batter. May all
beings have someone to whip until they are ready to lay the whip down. 

Gotama said "Those who seek to meet God face-to-face are like a man who
says he is in love with the most beautiful woman in the world, and yet
when asked for particulars can tell you neither her name, her caste, her
place of birth nor what she looks like." 

Nibbaana is a name given to an absence. This interpretation is confirmed
by the fact that the standard ways of describing nibbaana are
kilesa-nirodha (cessation of afflictions) and bhava-nirodha (cessation
of arising). 

As Bhikkhu Buddhadasa said, in the final analysis you are the only
person who can teach you what you need to do to become free of your
particular forms of dukkha. So get started. Turn off your computer right
now and start watching your thoughts, your bodily sensations, your
emotions and your habitual behavioural tendencies. 

A karma is a wholesome one if it is an action intended to help; it is
wholesome even if the result is actually injury to another. Similarly, a
karma is unwholesome if it is an action intended to harm; it is
unwholesome even if the result is actually helpful to another. 

Now that you have explored the first noble truth, the fact that there is
dukkha, why not move on to the second noble truth? Why are you
experiencing dukkha? Were you disappointed that your question did not
receive a straightforward answer? Why were you disappointed? Was it
because you had a desire and the desire was not fulfilled as easily as
you had been hoping? Did you expect just to ask a question and get an
answer and be done with it? Was that a realistic expectation? Is life
normally so easy that all you ever have to do is form a wish and wait a
second for the wish to come true? After pondering this matter for a
while, you might come to realise that you are disappointed every time
you form an unrealistic wish or expectation. So if you would like not to
be disappointed you could stop having unrealistic desires. Welcome to
the third noble truth, namely, that the elimination of the root cause of
dukkha will result in the elimination of dukkha. Getting rid of
unrealistic desires will get rid of dukkha. Getting rid of unrealistic
desires is easy. All it requires is that you get real. But how exactly
can you eliminate unrealistic desires? What do you actually have to do?
That is the domain of the fourth noble truth. No one can tell you the
answer to that. It is your dukkha. You made it. You have to figure out
how to rid yourself of it. No one can do that for you. Others may be
able to tell you what worked for them, but you have to figure out what
will work for you. Good luck in figuring that out. Begin now, because it
may take quite a bit of time, probably several decades. Don't be in too
much of a hurry, but don't let a minute go by in which you are not
working on this problem. 

As early as the time of the emperor Ashoka, some Buddhists were claiming
that the Buddha had been fully omniscient. Other Buddhists rejected that
idea. One reason for rejecting it was that the Buddha had made mistakes
and had changed his teachings as a result of reflecting on his mistakes.
If he had been fully omniscient, he would probably not have made
mistakes, especially those that resulted in the deaths of numerous of
his disciples. Of course, one could claim that he DID know everything in
advance and simply went through the motions of pretending to be
ignorant, but that explanation does seem rather far-fetched and does
raise some awkward questions. So, said those who rejected the doctrine
of full omniscience, the simpler explanation of the Buddha's behaviour
is that his knowledge was limited, as is every man's knowledge. What he
did know, however, was of extraordinary value, for it enabled people to
become free of their dukkha, something that other kinds of knowledge
cannot do. So it's not that the Buddha knew everything but that he knew
everything of importance for being contented and eliminating dukkha. 
Many centuries later, Buddhists such as Dharmakirti, Dharmottara,
Jnanashrimitra and Shantarakshita argued at great length against the
doctrine that there is an omniscient god (or any other omniscient
being). One of their principal arguments was that this doctrine raises
another interesting question: Is the being who is supposed to me
omniscient also omnipotent and fully compassionate? If so, then why doe
he (or she) allow so many beings to suffer needlessly? If the omniscient
being were compassionate and capable of alleviating everyone's pain,
then surely she would do so. But obviously she has not done so.
Therefore, she must be either cruel or impotent. If she is either of
those, then she is no more worthy of veneration than anyone else.
Dharmakirti questioned what is gained by omniscience. All it would do if
it existed would be do enable one to see far. But he said "if we admire
something simply because it can see far, then we should worship
vultures." 

I am quite content not to know for sure, and my contentment arises from
a conviction that the knowledge would do me no good anyway. What I need
to know is only this: what is dukkha, why does it arise, can it be
eliminated and is there a method for eliminating it? As it happens, I do
know the answer to those questions, thanks to the teachings of the
Buddha. Thanks to that knowledge, I am much better off than I was
before. 

If you know that life leads only to death, why breathe? 

Gotama Buddha once said, when someone tried to trip him up by saying
that he denied the self and yet said that one should take refuge in
oneself, "I use the same language as all other people, but I am not
deceived by it." 

One can be perfectly contented with the flow of impersonal dharmas that
flow through awareness. A finely tuned awareness likes wholesome
dharmas, dislikes unwholesome dharmas and is indifferent to complex
constructs such as persons. 

There is but one moment to every life. 
The secret is to use that moment well. 

Here is what impresses me most about the Dalai Lama. He can discard his
own prejudices and preconceived ideas very swiftly and open himself up
to new ways of thinking. In this respect, he out-paces almost all his
devoted fans. As someone once observed, "If the Dalai Lama were not the
Dalai Lama, he would be seen as a heretic." He is far more ready to
discard literalistic interpretations of the Buddhist canon than are most
of his followers. He is astonishingly open-minded about the very things
that many of his Western fans are most closed-minded about. It makes for
an interesting contrast. As he himself quipped once at a meeting I was
at: "My followers worship me like a god. But very few of them listen to
what I have to say to them." 

I make no false claims concerning realizations. I claim merely to be
able to think clearly, to listen carefully, to ask intelligent questions
and to participate in a discussion in a way that usually benefits both
myself and other discussants. And I claim to be able to have the honesty
to admit the limits of my own understanding. 

You are quite right that I like myself very much. And I wholeheartedly
thank the Dharma for that. I like my kindness, my gentleness, my clarity
of thinking, my attentiveness to detail, my openness to a wide variety
of points of view, my playful sense of humour and my patience. I was not
born with any of these qualities, nor did I acquire them through
parental influence. I gained them by practising Dharma, by watching the
conduct of accomplished Buddhists and by making every effort to act as
they acted. The result is that I have become a person who I am very
comfortable being and whom I like very much. But not, I think, too much.
There is still much progress to be made, many faults to eliminate, and I
may still have a few years ahead of me to work on improving myself to
some degree. 

Thinking is one of the ways that one discovers the not-always-obvious
fact that everything is constantly ceasing and being replaced by similar
but subtly different substitutes. Some kinds of thinking reveals
reality. Other thinking obscures it. What is wanted is clarifying
thinking (yoniso manasikaara), or good mentation. What one wants to be
rid of is superficial thinking (ayoniso manasikaara), or wishful
thinking, or bad mentation. 

Samsara is the name we give to the fact that our expectations are not
met. But there is a remedy to that: cultivate realistic expectations.
See things just as they are, without judgement. Just see it. 

The Buddha told monks that they could eat meat if it was offered to
them, and if they knew it had not been killed especially for them.
(Monks who beg house to house are usually given leftovers from the meals
of householders. If a householder has prepared a meat dish and offers it
to a monk, a monk is not only allowed but obliged to eat it.) But even
if offered, some forms of meat were taboo. Monks could not, for example,
eat human flesh, nor could they eat the flesh of certain kinds of snakes
and quite a large number of jungle animals. In monastic communities in
which monks grow their own food, they never raise animals for slaughter.
In Mahayana communities, it is not uncommon for monks to raise their own
food. There are some Mahayana sutras that strongly denounce the practice
of eating meat at all, even when it is offered. They also strongly
denounce dairy products (on the grounds that milk is stolen from animals
rather than given by animals as a gift) and such products as honey
(which is also stolen, not given as a gift). So in some Mahayana
cultures you'll find very strict adherence to a vegetarian, even a
vegan, cuisine, not only among monks but also among especially pious
laity. On the matter of plant life, Jains in India took the position
that plants have consciousness and therefore should not be eaten. So for
a Jain saint, the most noble death is by fasting, abstaining completely
from all food and drink. Even Jain laity tend to eat only plant material
that can be taken from the plant without killing it. So they can eat
leafy vegetables or fruits or gourds, but not potatoes, carrots, leaks,
onions etc. Buddhists in India repudiated the Jain position and argued
that plant life is not sentient. Plants, they said, do not mind being
eaten, because they do not have minds at all. Animals obviously do have
minds, and they obviously hate being hunted down, captured and led to
slaughter. Somewhere in the midsts of all the positions that Buddhists
have taken (and still take), you will find one with which you feel
comfortable. You may find yourself following the trajectory of many
Buddhists, who discover that as they reflect more deeply on themselves,
they become much more aware of the pains of others, and this awareness
leads them to be less willing than before to eat the products of animals. 

It is noted that the Buddha told people in no uncertain terms not to
worry about what happens when a Tathagata dies. In other words, do not
worry (mentate) about what happens when a person who has experienced
nirvana finally dies. 

The Sanskrit word "mala" means a garland. Flowers strung together are
called a mala. Also seeds can be strung together, as can pieces of wood
or even bits bored out of a skull. A mala usually has 108 beads. The
number 108 was considered sacred all over India, and also in Babylon.
108 is two squared times three cubed, and this sort of thing fascinated
ancient peoples, who then attached various meanings to it. In every
Indian religion 108 is considered sacred. (Also significant are such
numbers as 43200, which is 108 times 4 times 1000.) In Buddhism there
are several explanations attached to the importance of 108. Generally
speaking, it is supposed to be the total number of afflictions. So
getting rid of all 108 afflictions requires doing 108 meritorious acts.
That's why Buddhists usually do prostrations in sets of 108, or make
offerings in sets of 108 things offered, or recite mantras 108 times. In
practical terms, the beads can be used to count repetitions of a mantra
or prostrations or whatever meritorious ritual one is performing. And
once the mala has come to be associated with cultivating a wholesome
mind, it can be worn around the neck or wrist just as a constant
reminder of the commitment you have made to cultivating wholesome
thoughts.

There's no element of faith involved at all. It does not make any
difference whatsoever who taught me that eliminating desire could lead
to eliminating dukkha. (Now that I think of it, I think I learned this
from my father and mother. I guess they learned it from their own
experience.) It then took very little experience with life to see for
myself that this was true. Et voila! I was liberated from some of my
discontent. That led me to suspect that I could get liberated from a
whole lot more. And I did. No faith involved at all. Just experience. 
Now it just so happens that of all the literature in the world, the
writing that comes closest to articulating what I myself have
experienced is the Pali canon and the Perfection of Wisdom literature.
So I value that literature, but it conforms to my own experience. Other
Buddhist literature is diametrically opposed to my experience, so I tend
not to quote it much, although I'm sure other people find it valuable.
Each of us experiences dukkha and liberation in slightly different ways.
For each of us there is some body of Buddhist literature that makes
quite a lot of sense, and other Buddhist literature that makes very
little sense (or at least has very little appeal). 

Remembering that everyone faces death, and remembering also that most
living beings fear death, is a way of developing sympathy and compassion
for other beings. The Buddha himself considered the recollection of
death and reflection on one's own immortality as one of the most
positive practices that a meditator can do. Because everyone dies, we
each have to face the loss of many friends and relatives during our
lives. When someone we love very much dies, we must learn to let go. A
funeral ceremony is designed to help the living let the dead go. There
is a Buddhist poem that goes: 
Every gain ends in a loss.
Every victory ends in defeat.
Every meeting ends in a parting.
Every life ends in death.
Because of the positive value given to thinking about death
realistically, and overcoming one's fear of death, Buddhist funeral
practices tend to be occasions for reminding the living of how temporary
and fragile life is, and for reminding the living that we all have this
one thing in common: we are all moving towards our own death. A typical
example of a sermon that might be read at a funeral is the following
poem, composed by the Buddha himself: 
Life is unpredictable and uncertain in this world.
Life here is difficult, short and full of pain.
A being, once born, is going to die,
And there is no way out of this.
When old age arrives, or some other cause,
Then there is death.
There is no way out of this.
Both the young and the old, 
Whether they are foolish or wise,
Are going to be trapped by death.
All beings are moving towards death.
Look: while relatives are watching,
Shedding tears and moaning,
People are carried away one by one,
Like cattle being led to the slaughter.
So death and old age are part of life.
Therefore, when the wise see how the world is,
They do not grieve.
You cannot know where the dead will go,
Nor can you know where the living have come from.
So it makes no sense to grieve.
Peace of mind cannot come from weeping and wailing.
On the contrary, it will lead only to more pain.
The person who cannot leave sorrow behind
Only travels further into pain.
Mourning makes one a slave to sorrow.
What people expect to happen
Is always different from what actually happens.
This fact leads to great disappointment.
This is how the world works.
So we can listen and learn from a wise person
As he gives up his grief.
When he sees that someone has passed away
And left life behind,
He says "I will never see this one again."
Of course, when someone we love very much dies, it is very difficult to
say goodbye. It is not easy to say "I will never see this one again." We
want very much to think that the loved one is still alive somewhere. For
this reason, in many cultures, survivors will offer prayers for the
deceased person, wishing that he or she will be born again in good
circumstances. It is customary, when a loved one dies, for the survivors
to place a photograph of the person on an altar. Every day, one may
offer flowers or incense or fresh water or prayers. Or one may just sit
quietly and remember the person who died, be grateful for having known
them. One can even be grateful for all the pain that one feels, because
that is a sign that once there was great joy and love between two living
people. This period of remembering the dead lasts for seven weeks. Then
one says goodbye and puts the picture away. It is important to be able
to move on with life after a loved one dies. It is important to allow
oneself to remember a person who has died, but it is also important not
to get trapped in memories and imprisoned in grief. 

Myself, I find it better not to pretend to be so sure of what goes on
in another's mind. It is amusing to speculate on such things, but it
is a fool's game to take such amusements seriously. 

A self-taught man has a fool for a student. 

I don't find the concept of enlightened person at all useful. I think
it gets in the way of serious Dharma practice. It is a very good
example of a concept that, when taken to correspond to an external
reality, impedes one's progress towards nirvana. 

No harm comes from thinking that something really exists. The harm
comes in thinking the really existing thing is permanent, part of
one's self or capable of being owned as one's property. 

Without conceptual thinking there is no liberation. This is so
because liberation itself is nothing but a concept. It is a concept
that is necessary only as long as one has the twin concept of
bondage. But if one does have the notion that one is suffering from
afflictions, then it is very useful to have the twin notion that one
can be liberated from those afflictions. 

The use of mantras stems from Vedic sacrifice. A poem or fragment
of poem used in the context of a sacrifice was called a mantra.
Whenever a poem was used in a sacred performance, it was preceded by
saying OM, and followed by saying SVAAHA. Technically, OM and SVAAHA
are not part of the mantra itself. They are like the quotation marks
around a quoted sentence. What the nice man asked you is "What does
the word TUTTARE mean?" The answer is that it has no meaning at all.
It is a nonsense syllable, as are many of the syllables in mantras
and dharanis. It is not a word (a sound associated with a meaning);
rather, it is a pure sound, like "Hey nonny nonny" or "Yadda yadda"
or "Diddle dee dum." Because it has no meaning of its own, any
interpretation can be associated with it in the context of a
particular ritual. In other words, it means whatever one wants it to
mean. This reminds me of something I read in Rodger Kammenetz's book,
_The Jew in the Lotus_. He reports going to some empowerment ceremony
with Allen Ginsberg. At one point in the ceremony, everybody was
loudly chanting OM MANIPADME HUM, and Kammenetz happened to look at
Ginsberg, who was rocking back and forth with a huge smile on his
face and loudly chanting EENIE MEENIE MINEY MO! 

I agree that it is not the goal of Buddhism to have conceptual
thoughts. It is also not the goal to have no thoughts at all. The
goal of Buddhism is not having any dukkha. There is no necessary
connection between having conceptual thoughts and having dukkha. So
getting rid of conceptual thoughts will not get rid of dukkha.
Getting rid of particular attitudes might help get rid of dukkha. And
one way of getting rid of some harmful attitudes is to think about
them conceptually. It is not the only way, but it is one of the ways.
The good news about Buddhism is that there are a lot of ways to
achieve the goal. 

If you cannot think clearly, then it is better not to think at all.
But if you can think clearly, it is better to use that ability
towards the end of eliminating dukkha. 

Let children be children. If they want to meditate when they grow up,
they'll find their way to it. If you are the kind of person they would
like to be when they grow up, they will readily follow your examples and
cultivate your habits. 

Self is merely a conventional designation given to the transitory 
dharmas that for the sake of convenience we call the body and the 
mind. There is no other self than those transitory dharmas. Those 
transitory dharmas, precisely by passing quickly into absence, show us 
the true nature of things. And by knowing the true nature of things, 
we let go of our cravings. Therefore, transitory dharmas are what 
enable us to awaken. So they can be given the poetic designation 
"Buddha nature".

No one knows any other person better than that person knows himself.
That is why the Buddha said "No one can liberate another. One can only
liberate oneself." 

Physical pain is unavoidable. But if one does not try to resist the pain
but instead simply accepts it as unavoidable, then the physical dukkha
is not compounded by a psychological sense of discontent or frustration.

Mahayana texts have long sections railing against Buddhists who eat meat
or dairy products or honey. Flesh is forbidden because it requires the
killing of an animal, thus violating the first precept. Dairy, eggs, and
honey are forbidden because they require stealing from sentient beings,
which violates the second precept. Onions and garlic are forbidden,
because 1) they supposedly increase sexual desire and other passions, 2)
they make one's breath smell foul and thus make it difficult to preach
Dharma effectively, 3) the principal life-force of the plant is in the
bulb, and taking the bulb therefore kills the plant. (Eating leafy
vegetables or fruits is acceptable, because one can eat them without
killing the whole plant. Eating carrots or tubers, of course, is
forbidden.) The general claim in these texts is that anyone who truly
aspires to be a bodhisattva will eat what we now call a vegan diet with
no strong-flavoured condiments. In my view, these vegetarian rants sow
the seeds of fanaticism. I am inclined to think that they were part of
the spiritual competitiveness with Brahmins. For quite a few centuries
Brahmins and Buddhists were involved in one-upsmanship, each trying to
take a higher moral road. Alcohol, of course, is banned by the fifth
precept and is generally avoided by precept-observing Buddhists.
Caffeine and tobacco were unknown in India at the time the precepts were
formed, but many Buddhists avoid them on the grounds that they are
addictive. 

The doctrine of anaatman became the hallmark of Buddhism in India. Any
Indian Buddhists who came up with anything that seemed a little too much
like an aatman were quickly reprimanded by other Indian Buddhists. The
result was that a very simple and straightforward idea (there is nothing
over which one has full mastery and control) became a metaphysical
obsession (nothing lasts for more than one moment). As Buddhists became
increasingly obsessed with denying that there can be a permanent
substance, they painted themselves into a doctrinal corner and ended up
taking positions that were quite indefensible and illogical. 

The Padhaana Sutta of the Sutta-nipaata lists the following as the
generals in the army of Mara (Death): 
1. Desire.
2. Dislike.
3. Hunger and Thirst.
4. Craving.
5. Laziness.
6. Fear.
7. Doubt.
8. Stubbornness.
9. Restlessness.
10. Striving for possessions, praise, glory and fame by illegitimate means.
11. Thinking highly of oneself.
12. Belittling others.
The army of the deathless (amara), nirvana, has but one general:
Mindfulness. 
 
When one is told that a buddha is by definition completely free of all
anger, the question I am most inclined to ask is: "So, has anyone
actually ever been a buddha?" Nothing that I have ever experienced would
lead me to think that a buddha has ever actually existed. But then that
does not matter to me in the least. The definition, the ideal of being a
buddha, is still the direction in which I have oriented my entire life.
Whether the ideal can be realised does not concern me in the least. It
is a myth that there have actually been people who realized the ideal.
To some of us it is a useful myth. To others it is not. Let those who
find it useful take it up. Let those who do not find it useful set it
aside and push on in their search for a more useful myth. It could very
well be that if you combed the entirety of human history, everyone who
has ever lived would fall into the category of People Who have Not
Attained Buddhahood. Would that make Buddhism any less useful to
humanity? What's wrong with saying that when we are angry, we have
thrown our buddhahood away for a moment? Buddhahood should be at a
distance. An impossible distance. Otherwise, we will not grow by
striving to reach it. A goal that can be attained is a very cheap ideal
indeed, a cheap toy rather than a useful tool. 

The goal of Buddhist practice is to have zero afflictions. I don't
believe for a moment that anyone has ever reached that state, nor do I
believe it is possible.

It's very difficult for me to speak accurately about my own past,
because it keeps changing every time I recollect it. Memory, I am
convinced, is the most creative thinking that any of us do. As I
remember my life today, I cannot recall a time when I ever took certain
teachings of Buddhism literally. I have for example, never taken rebirth
or karma as doctrines to be taken literally. I think there may have been
a time when I believed in nibbaana and arahants, but that was quite some
time ago.

My own position is that I have no way of knowing whether dukkha-nirodha
is possible or not. But even if I knew with certainty that it is not
possible, I would still work steadily at reducing the amount of dukkha I
experience, because I know for a fact that dukkha can be significantly
reduced. If it can be eliminated altogether, fine. If not, I shall not
be disappointed. 

In the absence of certainty, one has only conjectures.

When one's investigations have turned up conflicting reports as to what
the facts are, then one can only admit that one does not know what the
facts are. 

Don't ask questions about myths. They are not meant to be consistent.
They are the work of imagination, not of historiography or science. They
are meant to inspire and convey basic dogmas. If you don't find the
dogmas conveyed in Buddhist mythology delightful, then move on to some
other mythology, one that you do find inspiring. "Myth" has come to be
seen as synonymous as "untruth", and Truth has for most people come
to be the domain of nothing but "fact", which, sadly, most people fail
to realise is but another word for stories on which there is general
agreement among people hailed as authorities. 

Healthy sexuality. Is that not a contradiction in terms? Sexuality
itself is a disease. It often lead to horrible consequences, such as
birth, which inevitably leads to death. The chances of dying as a result
of being born are 100%, much worse than the chances of dying as a result
of smoking. And yet death could be prevented. It could be prevented if
people stopped being born. And that could happen if people would stop
having sex. So I would have to conclude that having sex is the greatest
cause of avoidable suffering in the history of life. 

If you derive benefit from your opinion, and I derive benefit from mine,
then the question of which opinion is true simply does not arise. For
that reason, I am content to find a Buddhist organisation that meets my
standards, and I have no interest in saying that other Buddhists are
illegitimate or false.

Buddhism has nothing to say at all about Fascism. Fascism was a
political philosophy based on centralised autocratic power with strongly
nationalistic sentiments. By extension it refers to any excessively
rigid form of centralised dictatorial control. The Buddha had quite a
bit to say about the duties of a king to see to it that everyone in the
kingdom had the means to earn an honest livelihood (with which the
Fascisti would heartily agree), but beyond that he did not have much of
anything to say about politics. In fact, he even accepted the patronage
of Ajatasattu, a brutal king who seized power by torturing his father to
death. The Buddha was an equal-opportunity beggar; he turned down
donations from no one, including wealthy prostitutes, and he refrained
from making righteous pronouncements of public figures. 

Not to be aware of one's own tendencies to project can lead to some
pretty unsatisfactory dealings with other people. It does little good to
point out to another person that he or she is projecting some internal
complex onto others; to discover that tendency in oneself, on the other
hand, is perhaps the most valuable insight that one can ever have. The
insight can lead one away from, not towards, a tendency to be
authoritarian and autocratic and excessively harsh in one's judgements
of others. 

Techno music is the most efficient vehicle for totalitarianism yet
devised. It numbs the sensitivities and the intellects of those who hear
it, turning them into complacent zombies, ripe to be taken over by an
autocratic ruler. This hideous noise now pervades every coffee shop in
Montreal, making it impossible to go to a bistro and have a good
conversation. That, of course is the whole purpose of the modern "music"
industry, to make intelligent conversation impossible, thereby making
informed dissent impossible. Read Orwell's 1984. It is all explained
there. 

I don't assume anything. I think rebirth is possible, although I have
never seen any evidence strong enough to convince me that it exists. I
try to live my life in such a way that the lives of those with whom I
interact will be as pleasant as is humanly possible. I reckon if I do
that, then I will die content. If there is an afterlife, it will take
care of itself. If not, then nothing will have been lost, for I will
have lived a happy and productive life. 

There is no actual past. The past as remembered is a fiction. Everyone
is the custodian of the past that he or she creates to make some sense
of the pains of the present. 

I have no interest in saying which Buddhists are legitimate and which
are false. If there are false Buddhists, they will probably not reap the
benefits that often come of practising genuine Buddhism. But life is
complex, and it is very difficult to say to what extent one's success in
being happy and making others happy is a direct consequence of one's
religious beliefs and practices. 

The Buddha said that pleasure is the condition out of which attachment is born. 

I think you'll find if you read carefully, and then practise what you
have read about, that there is no difference at all between Dharma and
indifference to life and death. 

I found that I really enjoyed the affection and the conversations before
and after sex so much that it finally occurred to me that I could
dispense with the sex and just have good affectionate conversations,
uninterrupted by side-aches and wheezing. 

The person named Gotama Buddha, even if he is a complete work of
fiction, is the person whose teachings Buddhists admire and try their
best to follow. Buddhists have confidence in those teachings not because
of who said them, but because people have applied the teachings and
found that they work. This is not to say that other teachings don't also
work to achieve different or similar results. It is only to say that the
teachings in the Pali canon, attributed to a perhaps fictitious
character named Gotama Buddha, do work and are the teachings that best
deserve to be given the label Buddhist. 

I adhere to what Buddhists call the four reliances. The first of those
reliances is that one should rely on teachings, rather than on the formal
credentials or the personalities of teachers. And the second reliance
is that one should rely on the meaning (artha) of a teaching and not
merely on the word (shabda). [more from the dalai lama :These four
reliances consist of advice to rely on the teaching, not on the person;
within the teachings rely on the meaning, not on mere words; rely on
definitive sutras, not those requiring interpretation; and rely on the
deeper understanding of wisdom, not on the knowledge of ordinary
awareness. This approach can be found in the Buddha's own words, as when
he said, 'O, Bhikshus and wise men, do not accept what I say just out of
respect for me, but first subject it to analysis and rigorous examination.']

In Indian mythology, this is the kali-yuga, the era of kali, named after
the name given to the unlucky throw of the dice that marks the thrower
as a loser. We live in the age of losers. It is a characteristic of the
kali-yuga that everything becomes a commodity. Everything is for sale.
Everything has a price. Everything becomes a potential source of
entertainment, nothing is sacred, and no one is spared a turn in the
laughing-stock. In the kali-yuga sex is nothing but a joke, and celibacy
is nothing but a joke; spirituality is a joke, religion is a joke,
morality is a joke and beauty is a joke, and so is secularism,
materialism, wantonness and ugliness. We are a people conquered by our
own frivolity, destroyed by our own shallowness, overpowered by own
fundamental lack of respect for ourselves or for anyone else. We have
become an angry race of tormented hell beings, incapable of doing
anything more creative than mocking one another, taunting one another,
blaming one another for our own stupidity and the misfortunes it
engenders. Does Buddhism have a place in the kali-yuga? Yes, of course.
It, too, can become a weapon by which we bludgeon one another into even
greater insensibility. Does it have a more positive and creative role
than this? I don't know. I can only cite the answer to this sort of
question often given by Krishnamurti: "Find out." 

Trusting people is a fool's game. 

Buddhism is an intrinsically lonely path, as is life. You are alone when
you're born, and you're alone when you die, and you're alone in most
crises between birth and death. Most of all, you're quite alone in the
privacy of your own particular conditioning and the dukkha that attends
it. Despite all that solitude, it can make a dramatic difference to be
(in Stephen Batchelor's memorable phrase) "alone with others". No one
that I have met is as aware of all his own shortcomings as others are.
We all have blind spots, thanks to elaborate defenses our egos have
built up to prevent ourselves from seeing those aspects of our mentality
the ego would rather not see. Others can be invaluable in helping you
see those blind spots, and giving you the courage to own them and then
deal with them. Even if you can't find a Buddhist community where you
are going, you might be able to find some friends with a sincere
interest in contemplative practice. They may use a different vocabulary
from the one you are most comfortable with, but they can still be very
valuable to you. Seek such people out. You're almost sure to find them,
almost anywhere you go. 

What I have found is that progress in the contemplative life is best
achieved when one's life is kept simple. And simplicity is best served
by living by the maxim "If something is not necessary, leave it out." 

To the best of my knowledge, the notion of the kali-yuga came about
because of dramatic social and demographic changes that swept India as a
result of waves of invasions by conquering foreigners. Due to these
demographic changes, social customs changed, religion changed, languages
changed. Those who clung to the old ways naturally saw all these changes
as threatening. One of the standard observations about the kali-yuga
(which was a Hindu idea, not a Buddhist idea) was that Buddhism had
become much more popular than Vedic sacrifice. Buddhism was quickly
adopted by those who came into India from outside as military
conquerors, and since they were in power and found Buddhism attractive,
they patronised Buddhist institutions and neglected Hindu institutions.
So while it's true that the notion of a kali-yuga was a subjective
reaction based on resistance to change, it is also important to realise
that the changes being experienced were quite dramatic and not the sort
of thing that anyone could easily ignore. 

If you have trained yourself to see the world as a place in which people
create their own lives, then everything you see with confirm that dogma.
But if you set that dogma aside and try to see the world in various
other ways, through the lens of other dogmas, you'll probably find that
they also make quite a bit of sense and that experience will seem to
confirm them. In the end, it is very difficult to be sure whether
fortune and misfortune is a consequence of people engineering their own
destinies or a consequence of a complex of essentially impersonal causal
factors over which no one has any control at all. 

The practice I have found most effective and transformative over the
years is mettaa-bhaavanaa, the cultivation of loving kindness. I used to
do it every day but now do it only about once a week. It has had a
dramatic effect on my own personal happiness and has made it much easier
for me to deal with other people in daily life. Because I am a deeply
introverted and very shy person, dealing with others was always quite
difficult for me when I was younger. I was so timid that I just
automatically agreed with everyone. But over the years this practice of
loving-kindness has made it possible for me to be much less shy, and
much less prone to seeing agreement with others as the only way of being
compassionate towards them. 

Is there an inhuman side of Buddhism? If so, I have not yet seen it.
Offhand, I would think that if you find inhumanity, it is more because
of a failure of someone to grasp the principles of Buddhism than a sign
that Buddhism itself promotes inhumanity. 

The four brahma-vihaaras (divine abodes) are: 
1.metta, which literally means friendship.
2.karuna, which literally means compassion, acting to alleviate suffering.
3.mudita, joy, often translated as sympathetic joy.
4.upekkha, impartiality, equanimity.

Since none of us has the faintest idea what the truth is, let's stop
fighting with each other over it.

There is no such thing as Sanskrit lettering. Sanskrit may be written in
any of the Indian alphabets, or in the Latin alphabet, or in Tibetan
letters.

The Dhamma to which one goes for refuge is Nibbaana (nirvana), defined
as the eradication of all afflictions, and especially the ten
afflictions of greed, hatred, delusion, pride, views, hesitation, sloth,
anxiety, shamelessness and immodesty. Secondarily, Dhamma refers to the
quality (dhamma) that is most necessary to attain nirvana, namely, the
quality of wisdom. Thirdly, Dhamma refers to any body of literature
(including oral teachings) that promote wisdom and impart it to others.
Dhamma can therefore refer to the literature of any school of philosophy
or any religion that promotes wisdom and the resultant eradication of
afflictions. Fourthly, as a member of the category of Dhamma as
expressed in the paragraph above, Dhamma refers specifically to the
Sad-dhamma or Buddha-dhamma that is preserved in the vinaya, the suttas
and the technical treatises known as abhidhamma.

The very idea that some religious organisations are dangerous is
precisely what turns them into dangerous organisations. If left alone,
if not constantly hounded by outsiders who consider them dangerous, very
few religious communities would become what are popularly and
derogatorily known as cults. To label an organisation as a cult tends to
be a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

At one time, I was trying to understand and make sense of the
Buddha-dharma so that I might deepen my practice. As my practice
deepened, however, I found that understanding began to fall away and
become unnecessary. Now I promote the practice, but place less and less
emphasis on the theoretical structure built on outmoded cultural
assumptions that prevailed in India 2500 years ago. 

One time a claim was made that some monks had reformed the Buddha's
program (buddha-saasanaa). In response to this claim, this advice was
given. "If someone claims to have reformed the Buddha's program, you
should ask whether they have rejected any of the four noble truths or
added a fifth truth to them. You should then ask whether or not they
advocate cultivating the thirty-seven factors of awakening. You should
then ask whether they advocate killing, stealing, fornicating, lying and
being intoxicated. If the affirm the four noble truths, recommend
cultivating the factors of awakening and advocate living by the
precepts, they have not reformed the Buddha's program at all." 

When it becomes apparent to me that trust in me has broken down in
someone, or that my ability to trust another has broken down, and when
it is pretty clear that trust cannot be restored, I withdraw from the
discussion. 

The "Fat Guy standing with a bag over his back" is a statue of a Chinese
monk who used to wander around the countryside giving toys and candies
to children. He became popular in East Asia as a kind of equivalent of a
Santa Claus figure. Later Buddhist tradition identified the good-natured
fat monk as the future Buddha, Maitreya. So in the popular mind, the
jolly fat guy is Maitreya, who is up in Tushita heaven, waiting to come
to earth as the next Buddha. 

Mettaa-Bhaavanaa is the generation (bhaavanaa) of loving-kindness
(mettaa). In some traditions the practice begins by generating
acceptance and other positive feelings towards oneself, then towards a
dear friend, then towards a stranger and then towards an enemy, and
finally towards all sentient beings in all six directions. In other
traditions, one begins by thinking that all beings have at some time in
history been one's own mother and then going from there. Beginning with
oneself is useful for people who have sufficient self-esteem (which is
certainly not everyone). Beginning with the thoughts of motherhood works
well for people who buy Mother's Day cards every year. 

Just for the record, I do not for a moment think that ANY scripture
within Buddhism is cleaner or purer or more accurate than any other. I
also don't think it makes the least bit of difference which scriptures
come closer to the teachings of the actual Buddha. Even if we had him on
videotape, I would still question everything he said and would not let
him get away with any bullshit. My preference for the Theravada canon as
a rule has nothing to do with my assumption that it is closer to the
teachings of the Buddha himself. That's irrelevant. My preference for
the Pali canon is that it has, on the whole, less bullshit in it. I find
its teachings very direct and to the point. I also find that those
teachings, if practised, lead very rapidly to positive results. 

My favourite real-life mantra story is of a woman who asked me once if I
could give her a mantra to curb her anger. I told her I don't believe in
mantras, so I'm the wrong one to ask, but I told her she might go see a
Korean Zen master. She did. The next time I saw her, she was beaming
with smiles. She said the Zen master had given her a wonderfully
effective mantra. She said it every time she felt angry, and the anger
disappeared immediately. I asked her what the mantra was. She repeated
it me. I managed not to laugh or even crack a smile when she solemnly
recited the Korean words for "One, Two, Three, Four, Five." 

Ajahn Chah used to ask his disciples "Are you feeling dukkha?" If they
responded that they were, he told them to continue with their practice.
It's really as simple as that. Dukkha gives one all the urgency one
needs to find a way of eliminating it, seeing to it that it has no more
rebirth. 

Buddhists are trying to get rid of dukkha (frustration, discontent).
That is something that can be done in this very life. It makes little
difference what happens after the death of the physical body. The Buddha
said not to worry about such questions.

Most of the suttas in the first division of the Diigha-nikaaya [prohibit
the chanting of mantras]. Also in the vinaya there is a rule against
chanting, which is usually understood as a prohibition against intoning
mantras. Mantras, of course, were the heart of the Vedic sacrifice.
Those who rejected the sacrificial religion also rejected the intoning
of mantras and other such rituals. But habits die hard. Within a few
centuries Buddhists were as hopelessly addicted to mantras as everyone
else in India. The Vedic mentality eventually conquered the Buddhists. 

The cessation of afflictions (kilesa-nirodha) is not regarded as a thing
in itself. Cessation is not a thing that exists; rather it is a name
given to the fact that things no longer arise. Because it is not a thing
in itself, it is said not to be conditioned. As Naagasena says in the
Questions of Milinda, the cessation of sorrow can produce a great deal
of bliss or joy. The example he uses is a man who climbs out of a pit of
burning embers feels happy to be out of contact with what was once
causing him pain. This is what nirvana is; it is the cessation of things
that once caused dukkha. About that cessation one can feel joy, or one
can feel equanimity. Therefore, nirvana is not intrinsically joyous or
equanimous. How one feels when it is achieved varies. 

There is nothing wrong with saying mantras as such, just as there is
nothing wrong with healing people. But when one exchanges the service of
saying mantras or healing for livelihood, then one is misusing them.
Mantras are quite dangerous, I think, because it is very easy to slip
into the mentality that sees them as a commodity that can be bought and
sold and become part of one's livelihood. I can also imagine that
convincing people that they need to be empowered by an initiation before
the mantras become truly efficacious would be seen as a form of wrong
livelihood, for it is a way of inviting the practitioner to support the
giver of the initiation. This is remarkably close to the kind of
brahmanism that the Buddha unambiguously criticized. But I don't mean to
single out mantras and initiations. An awful lot, perhaps most, of what
Buddhist monks and priests do to earn their daana falls squarely in the
category of things that the Buddha said that he and his disciples never
do. Wrong livelihood is alive and well in the bhikkhu-sangha and has
been for very long time. 

Mantras: I am quite familiar with those practises. I do them myself. I
am just saying that the Buddha did not teach such things and that in
fact he condemned the reciting of mantras. But so what? Most of us who
call ourselves Buddhists do many things that the Buddha recommended
against doing. That is, perhaps, why some of us still experience a bit
of dukkha from time to time. Of course, if one thinks about mantras as
Asanga did, then there is not much of a problem. He saw them as a device
for maintaining concentration and mindfulness. He saw them as empty
phrases having no inherent meaning or efficacy; reciting them is doing a
completely meaningless act, and it thereby helps one be mindful of the
inherent meaninglessness of all activities. If you see mantras in that
light, then there is no problem in reciting them. I would strongly
prefer singing a song or listening to a bit of music. Then one has less
delusion about the nature of what one is doing. If one recites a mantra
to get out of an unpleasant mental state, then one may get the false
impression that there is something spiritual about getting over feeling
a bit down. The technique for getting over an unpleasant mental state
that I find most useful is just to study that mental state very
thoroughly. If it is unpleasant, study its unpleasantness with the
greatest of care. Then the mental state will go away, and you will not
be tempted to invite it back into your mentality. By really studying a
bad mood, I find I can banish it for a very long time. Getting out of it
by some other method (songs or mantras), I find, is a bit like putting
wallpaper over a crack in the wall. It hides the damage but does nothing
at all to repair it. Any time one does anything for the sake of gaining
comfort, then it is worldly. There is nothing less worldly about getting
our of a blue funk by performing a puja or reciting a mantra than there
is by singing a song or taking Prozac or getting laid. When the goal is
simply to gain temporary relief from an unpleasant state, then it is a
worldly goal. 

Which body do you wish to keep? Do you wish to keep your body as it was
at the moment of conception? Or the body as it was when it came from
your mother's womb? Or your body as it was when you were a teenager
covered with pimples? Or you body as it was when you were in the prime
of youth? Or your body when it becomes afflicted with arthritis? Or the
body as it was at the moment of death? (What if you die of multiple
sclerosis, or cancer, or by burning to death? Is that the body you would
like to keep?) The fact is, your body changes every day. Every time you
eat, sweat, shit, urinate, ejaculate or blow your nose, you lose part of
your body. Do you studiously avoid all these activities, for fear of
losing your body? The standard Buddhist belief is that if it's a body
you want, it's a body you'll get after you die. You'll shed the old
cancer-ridden carcass and start over again as a fertilized egg. And
you'll keep doing that until you finally get tired of having a body and
a mind. Then, if you learn to drop attachments to bodily and mental
processes, you'll achieve nirvana (bhava-nirodha). 

Narcotics and alcohol are among the favoured ways of extinguishing
consciousness. Others prefer Zen. The effect is much the same. 

I have no problem with pleasure. I enjoy it from time to time myself.
What I have learned over the years, however, is that many things that
seem pleasurable at first become tedious with time. One gets used to
them and seeks other kinds of pleasure until one is so thoroughly
addicted that one wishes to keep the body for eternity. As I have said,
if you wish to go from one body to another for eternity, you can do so.
If you find eventually that it is no longer satisfying to keep seeking
one physical pleasure after another, and seeking one intellectual thrill
after another, and going from emotional peaks to the slough of despond,
remember us Buddhists. We might be able to help you out. 

It is very easy to understand that the only way to eliminate
disappointment (dukkha) is to eliminate unrealistic desires. It is less
easy to face the fact that unrealistic desires really do have to be
given up if one wishes to attain freedom from disappointment. Most of
us, I think, try to strike some sort of bargain with reality. It takes
some time before one is prepared to recognize that reality is
uncompromising. 

If you want a general guideline that covers all situations, it is simply
this: Engage in no sexual practice that harms oneself or another person.
So what is harmful? The only way to figure out what is harmful is to
think about your experiences and those of people you know. Reflection of
your own is a far better guide to the precepts than the often outmoded
advice of old commentators. 

About fifteen years ago I was a member of the board of directors of a
Zen temple that was located in a part of town where prostitution was
very much in evidence. Some members of the temple said they thought the
presence of prostitutes in the neighbourhood was detracting from the
quality of the neighbourhood and suggested that the temple should take
some action to clean the situation up. The Zen master listened to the
proposal and then said "What do you think? Would these prostitutes
pursue this line of work if they could make a reasonable livelihood in
some other way? And would the people who employ them pay money for sex
if they could find it in some other way?" Everyone agreed that the
answer to both questions was probably No. So the Zen master said "So
these prostitutes are in a position where they really have little choice
but to sell sex for a livelihood, and their customers are in a position
where they desire sex but cannot get it without paying money. If we are
fortunate enough that we do not have to sell sex or buy it, I don't
think we're in a position to pass judgement on either the prostitutes or
the people who hire them, do you?" We then passed on to more pressing
business. 

Dependent Origination : Things come into being when their conditions are
present and cease to be when their conditions become absent. Another
term for dependent origination is emptiness.

It is pretty useless to think in terms of absolutes. Thinking of
absolutes does not carry the ball to the goal line. 

A view is a position held for a specific reason. If one wishes to die in
order to escape the effects of one's bad karma, then one is likely to
believe that there is no life after death. That is known as the
Cessationist view (uccheda-vaada). If one wishes to live forever because
of a fear of extinction, then one is likely to believe in some form of
the view that awareness lasts forever. That is known as the Eternalist
view. If one neither fears extinction nor seeks it, then one no longer
has views. Even if one believes that awareness does eventually come to
an end (for example, in nirvana), that is not considered a view, because
it is not attended by a desire that things be a certain way. It is only
if one were to feel disappointment on learning that an hypothesis is
false that the hypothesis is classed as a view; it is then an
attachment. And more particularly, it is when the hypothesis to which
one is attached is an hypothesis that is used to rationalize one's
conduct in the world (such as rationalizing abusive behaviour on the
grounds that it makes no difference how one acts in this life, since
death obliterates the good and the evil alike, without discrimination)
that it is called wrong view (mithyaa d.r.s.ti). 

Hypocrisy means pretending to be what one is not, especially pretending
to have virtues that one does not in fact have. Not so many people are
hypocrites. Most people are quite aware of their own failings and do not
pretend to be free of them. Nor are that many people really ignorant (in
the Buddhist sense of the term). They know what they ought to do. They
just don't do it. That is not ignorance, nor is it hypocrisy. The Greeks
called it akrasia (impotence, weakness of will). I find it quite a
useful idea, since it covers the majority of people who have moral
failings and yet are neither ignorant of virtue nor hypocritical. They
are simply akratic. 

A Buddhist friend once said to me: "When you feel like praying, just pray.
You can work out the theology later." I found that very helpful. Prayer
is a way of speaking to oneself. It may be a way of getting in touch
with the best of oneself, which may or may not be called God, and which
may or may not come from the outside. Does it matter? Since that remark
from a good friend, I have never choked on the word "God", nor has it
seemed at all important to me to keep reminding myself and others that
as a Buddhist I don't really believe in God. 

If your goal is to live harmoniously with others, then it makes good
sense to take their prejudices into account. Failing to do so is sure to
result in experiencing unnecessary dukkha. Of course, one may strive to
help educate people so that they are less prejudiced, but this task is
more likely to succeed if one first gives every appearance of living
according to their ideas of what is acceptable and what is not. 

It may be noble to show little concern for one's own reputation, but it
is cavalier to pay no heed to the reputations of others. 

Beings need compassion precisely because they have no enduring self and
yet wish they did have an enduring self. Although there is no aspect of
experience that endures, part of the experience of most beings is that
they wish they could endure, and wish they could be in control of their
destinies. Because they cannot endure and cannot be in control of their
destinies, they experience disappointment. Compassion takes the form of
helping them better grasp reality so that their disappointment will
decrease. 

Emptiness is not an absolute term. Beings are not empty of absolutely
everything. Rather, they are empty of self. They have no nature all by
themselves, because they are dependent on conditions over which they
have no control. Because they wish they did have control but in fact
lack it, they experience disappointment. Therefore, they need compassion
in the form of helping them better grasp the true nature of things. 

It's true that "compassion" means to suffer with. But "KARUNA" comes
from the verb "KAROTI" (to do) and means to take action for someone.
When another being is experiencing affliction, then the appropriate
response is to act to remove the cause of the affliction. KARUNA, then,
is not so much a matter of suffering with as a matter of providing
relief from suffering. It is not compassion but pro-action. 

Concentration is focussing the mind on a single topic. In Pali it is
called ekaggataa (literally, single-pointedness). When
single-pointedness occurs in a healthy mind (kusala-citta), it is called
samaadhi. 

Mindfulness is a translation of the Pali term sati, which literally
means recollection. Specifically, it is recollecting the dhamma in
everything one does. Simply being aware of one's mental and physical
states is not mindfulness, but recollecting how one's mental and
physical states fit within the framework of Buddhist doctrine is
mindfulness. Specifically, when one is aware of the arising of physical
and mental states, then one is counteracting the extreme view of saying
that nothing exists (sabbam natthi). When one attends to the passing
away of physical and mental states, then one is counteracting the
extreme view that everything exists (sabbam atthi). Avoiding these two
forms of wrong view is remembering (sati) the middle path. And
remembering the middle path is remembering the dhamma. 

Buddhism is all about reducing (and eventually eliminating) mental and
emotional discomfort. And since no one can ever know for sure to what
extent another person is in psychological pain, or whether over a course
of time that person's pain is generally waxing or waning or simply
oscillating, it follows that no one can ever know for sure how well
another person is understanding and practising Buddhism. 

Why not simply forget all labels? For the time being, I seem to have
lost all interest in wearing them. I have no more interest in wearing a
Catholic label than I had when you made your kind offer a while back to
put the Brahmanical, Jaina, Hinduist, Marxist, materialist, Pragmatist,
or Stoic labels on me. The Buddhist label does not interest me much
either, I must say. I sometimes refer to myself as a Buddhist simply to
give credit where credit is due; I got to where I am now by thinking
about Buddhism more than anything else. Perhaps one could say that it
was by misunderstanding Buddhism that I got to where I am now. So be it.
Since it was Buddhism I misunderstood, I think it is only fair to say
that, to that extent at least, I am somewhat more of a Buddhist than
anything else. 

Dhammas have the mark of dukkha only to one who longs for them to have
the marks of permanence and self. But when dharmas are viewed without
false expectations, as impermanent and impersonal, they have no capacity
to deliver dukkha. 

I have found that my satisfaction with life tends to increase as my
material needs decrease. It also tends to increase in proportion to my
willingness to admit that I have a capacity to enjoy beauty. To someone
from my rather austere background, it was not easy to admit that joy is
simply a passing positive mental state that can be fully experienced
without attachment, rather than a distraction or a sign of inherent
spiritual depravity. I am happy to have made room for joy in my life,
and one of the principal ways I now do it is to attend mass in some of
the exquisite churches in my city. Another way is to spend time in the
company of deeply good people who gather together for silent worship,
hence my fondness for Quaker meetings of worship. 

No doubt one of the most often used strategies of marginalizing another
culture or trivializing a rival religious tradition is to deny its
differences from one's own. Teaching that all roads lead to the top of
the mountain assumes that there is only one mountain top to go to. The
accompanying, usually unspoken assumption, is that one's own road is the
swiftest and most direct and that other roads might just as well be
abandoned. Stating that all roads lead to the top of the mountain is
often another way of saying "Since all religions have the same goal, and
since my religion is a more efficient way of getting to that goal than
your current religion, you would surely be better off following my
religion than yours." 

On a personal level, I tend to be very resistant to any kind of monism
or non-dualism. I am a robust pluralist. That means that I believe that
many religions have very different goals from other religions. Not only
do I acknowledge difference, I celebrate it. The goal of Christianity is
not at all the same as the goal of Judaism or Islam, and none of those
religions has the same goal as Buddhism. That notwithstanding, there are
numerous important points of congruence. Similarly, the goal of
psychoanalysis is not at all the same as the goal of Buddhism, and the
goal of quantum mechanics is not at all the same as the goal of
Buddhism, but one might find a few points of convergence between
Buddhism and either psychoanalytic theory and between Buddhism and
quantum mechanics. On a practical level, I practice several religions,
because I do not find that any single tradition gives me everything that
I seek in life. I attend Roman Catholic or Anglican mass almost every
Sunday, and often follow that by going to a Quaker meeting of silent
worship. I am not in any sense of the word a Christian, and I find the
basic teachings of Christianity somewhat unappealing, but I love the
atmosphere of a high mass, and I also love entering into the living
silence of a Quaker meeting. Most of all, I love being among people who
are seeking to cultivate the higher aspects of their being. During the
week, I practice yoga and several different forms of Buddhist
meditation. I find them all helpful. If I did not find them useful, I
would not do them. If they all had the same results and same goals, I
would probably find that doing only one of them was sufficient to my
needs. Because I have a variety of goals, and a variety of sides to my
character, I celebrate the varieties of religious doctrine and practice
and feel no need to choose one to the exclusion of the others.
Especially I feel no need to reduce them all to a single principle or
single set of ideals. I am madly in love with the world and with life.
It is impossible to love without celebrating the radical otherness of
one's beloved. If I loved the world (or some particular person in the
world) only as my self, I would merely be a narcissist. It would be a
cramped and claustrophobic sort of self-love. That is not at all what I
seek. Therefore, I love the world as other than my self, as strangely
and mysteriously irreducible to my own desires. I love it for defying me
and thwarting me and even at times mocking me. I love it dualistically,
pluralistically. Non-dualism is to me anathema, for it always feels to
me like a barren doctrine for icy souls incapable of love, unwilling to
experience life in its fullness. 

I have never seen any Buddhist text anywhere saying that unhappiness in
inherent in phenomenal existence. What I have seen is that if one clings
to phenomenal existence, then dukkha is likely to ensue. But if one can
face phenomenal existence without clinging, then dukkha will not ensue.
In other words, it is not inherent in experience, but an accidental and
therefore avoidable feature of experience. 

As soon as a practitioner really begins to gain insight into Dharma, the
majority of mere believers will accuse him of having lost his faith.
Sadhya, your faith is monumental. May it eventually blossom into
insight. Meanwhile, leave heresy to the Christians and Jews. Heresy is
their concept, and it really has no place in Buddhism. Accusing someone
of misunderstanding (micchaa-di.t.t.hi) is quite different from accusing
someone of heresy. The concept of heresy refers to creating rifts and
sects within the community and is usually seen as an offence against God.
Saying that someone has a wrong view, on the other hand, simply implies
that they have misunderstood something that will impede their progress
in some way. It is not at all considered a sin.The distinction is subtle
but quite important.

From what I see here, the most common manifestation of "insight" is to
show contempt for other people, their views and their practices. Such
insight seems (to my admittedly fallible eye) rather shallow and
impoverished. Still, it may be a start. As soon as the practitioner can
leave off the practice of feeling and expressing contempt for others,
the germ of insight might just grow into something magnificent to
behold. 

Pseudo-psychoanalytic subterfuge is the preferred form of ad hominem
argumentation of our age. 

I have no idea how suicide would affect your soul, but I know it is
likely to wreak havoc on your body. And just in case your body is all
you have left, I would not advise treating it badly. Much depends, of
course, on what condition your body is in. If your reason for
contemplating suicide is that your body is already in very bad condition
and is barely able to sustain life, and if it is in greater pain than
you can possible endure, then suicide may be an option that gives you
some at least the feeling that you have some degree of control over your
destiny. There is no way of being certain what damage suicide might do
to your soul; there is no way of being certain that there is a soul to
damage. Much depends on how willing you are to take risks. About thirty
years ago I went through a phase of thinking very seriously about
suicide. What prevented me from doing the deed then was a kind of
stubbornness, a refusal to allow myself to be defeated by my own dark
moods. So I kept saying that I would wait until the dark mood passed. I
didn't want my last moments to be unpleasant ones. The dark moods always
passed. Who knows why? They just did. Eventually they got tired of
pestering me and just stopped coming around at all. I haven't drawn an
unhappy breath for twenty years or so. This is something that I never
used to dream it would ever be possible for me to say. Who knows? Maybe
thirty years from now you'll be telling someone that you haven't drawn
an unhappy breathe for several decades. I hope so. Meanwhile, I wish you
the very best of success in thinking and feeling your way through this
important issue. It may well be the most important issue you have ever
thought about. So take your time. 

Enjoy the stories if you are able. Believe them if it helps you in some
way. Dismiss them as superstition if so doing gives you greater comfort
and hastens you along the path. As an historical point, these claims of
what the Buddha was capable of doing were not considered supernatural at
the time of the Buddha. You'll find if you read the Pali canon that many
yogis, and not only the Buddha, are portrayed as having exactly these
powers, which were considered to be natural to anyone who practised
yoga. You'll also find descriptions very much like this in the Yoga
system of Patanjali. To claim such powers was in no way tantamount to
claiming to be a god, nor was it claiming to be in any way in touch with
or empowered by gods. 

Nothing rattles so loudly as an empty cart.

It has always seemed to me that a person can be quite serious about
saying something one day and equally serious about saying the opposite
on another day. Anyone who is intellectually and emotionally alive is
bound to be capable fo seeing things from many different and even
mutually exclusive perspectives. 

Taking an honest look at one's own body and mentality is a good way to
be aware of dukkha and its causes. Once one is aware of that, the rest
is very simple. Just stop feeding the monster. 

It is enough to know that things fall apart and that awareness itself is
always changing. It is enough to know that there is nowhere to stand in
the vast universe, nowhere you can call home. Then relax into that
radical homelessness. You'll be quite okay. 

Dharma is said to be a medicine. If you feel sick, take it and see if it
helps. Dharma is also said to be a path. If you feel you need to be
somewhere else, then take it and see if it gets you anywhere. 

When I find myself becoming complacent, then I find it helpful to focus
a bit on my shortcomings and to think in terms of having the goal of
improving my mentality a little. When I find I have pushed myself too
hard, I find it useful to stop and reflect on already being where I
thought I had to be. Both teachings are helpful, each in its own season.
Neither is helpful if it is taken as the only truth. It's good to learn
to be inconsistent in what you teach yourself. Consistency, I think you
may find, will land you in a real mess. It makes you rigid, dull and
alienated from life. And that is dukkha. 

I have never understood why some people apparently need to turn pretty
good people (such as the Buddha) into superhuman people. But one cannot
deny that some people do seem to have this need, and I cannot see that
it does any real harm to them to believe that the Buddha could fly, read
minds, walk on water and issue sandalwood farts. I recently read a
biography of a 19th century lama that was filled to overflowing with all
kinds of semi-miraculous stories. It was reported that the lama had read
the entire vinaya and all its commentaries (13 volumes) in a single
sitting, memorized the entire perfection of wisdom literature (several
thousand pages) in the time it took him to drink a pot of tea, turned a
mountain to dust by throwing a dumpling at it, and brought several
people back from the dead. It was great good fun, sort of like my
favourite childhood stories about Paul Bunyan. 

What do you do when you discover that anything is causing you trouble
and pain? You just stop it, right? So if the desire to be rid of dukkha
is causing you dukkha, then just stop trying to get rid of dukkha. Just
relax into it. You'll be fine. 

If your practice requires effort, you are not practising right. It takes
no effort to drop something that is tormenting you. And that's all you
need to do in Buddhist practice. If it hurts, stop it. 

Most meditaters I know are samadhi junkies. They use meditation like a
narcotic. They think it is a panacea. It probably doesn't hurt them all
that much, but it sure as hell doesn't do them much good. It certainly
does not do them as much good as just letting go of their turmoil would
do. 

There are no wrong turns. All roads eventually lead to Albuquerque. Some
just take a bit more time, which gives you all that much more time to
enjoy the scenery. Bon voyage, mon ami. 

The word "fundamentalist" has many connotations. It often means holding
the view that a canonical body of scriptures contains the whole truth
but only when interpreted literally, without metaphorical, allegorical
or heuristic overtones. As would be expected, some Buddhists are more
literalistic than others about such issues as rebirth, the existences of
paradise realms and hells, and the supernormal powers of yogis. Some are
so literalistic and canon-bound as to be very close in mentality to
Christian, Islamic or Hindu Fundamentalists. (One finds this kind of
literalism especially among some Western Buddhists, who are probably
somewhat insecure about their own conversions to Buddhism and need to
berate any interpretation of scripture that threatens them.)
Fundamentalism also suggests a strong stance against humanism,
secularism and scientific skepticism. Many self-proclaimed
fundamentalists are, in effect, at war with modernity and see the modern
world as an evil realm that must either be reformed or destroyed
altogether. Very few Buddhists that I know of take such a view as this.
I can't think of any who feel driven to take control of the educational
system, form lobbies to influence politicians and so forth. Perhaps
there are Buddhists with such aspirations, but they are probably just
smart enough to realize that they are significantly outnumbered. (Only
one American in 500 is a Buddhist, and only one Buddhist in 500 is a
fundamentalist. So we're talking a really tiny minority group here. You
could probably fit all of them into a Volkswagen van.) 

I have never heard of any Buddhist who had any difficulty with the
theory of evolution. Perhaps this is because Buddhism does not
incorporate any dogmas about creation. Indeed, the Buddha warned his
disciples not to let themselves get involved in such irrelevant
questions as how, when or even whether the world had a beginning. 

Although most Buddhists claim to feel well disposed towards scientific
method, some Western Buddhists in fact harbour essentially irrational
suspicions towards the findings of science, especially when those
findings weigh against traditional Buddhist dogmas. Probably the issue
in which this is most felt is in the area of whether rebirth (as
traditionally understood by some Buddhists) is possible, given what we
now know of the central nervous system. About this issue you can find
views held with a level of conviction that borders on the obsessional. 

The usual Buddhist attitude concerning sexuality is that if one wishes
to avoid pain and conflict, then it is not a bad idea to go along with
prevailing social values. Therefore when Buddhism is found in deeply
homophobic cultures (such as Tibet and Myanmar), it tends to be strongly
homophobic. Japanese culture is much more open to homosexuality (and
sexuality in general), so Japanese Buddhists tend not to get too worked
up over adultery, homosexuality and other forms of sexual expression.
Western Buddhists, predictably, run the whole gamut of Western culture.
In America, which is arguably the most sexually confused civilization on
earth, Buddhist attitudes towards sexuality are hopelessly complex.
American Zen master Robert Aitken has observed that for most Americans
sexuality is by far the biggest set of personal conflicts they have to
deal with. So don't expect much uniformity of view among American
Buddhists on issues of sexuality. On one end of the scale you can find
people who fully accept homosexuality as a valid form of sexual
expression; on the other end, you can find Buddhists who will tell you
that homosexuality will surely result in rebirth in hell. 

I have never suggested that there is no rebirth. I have merely said that
there is controversy among Buddhists over the issue and that the issue
does not matter at all to the practice of Buddhism. This in no way
nullifies the whole purpose of the Buddha's teaching. The Buddha said
repeatedly that his teaching was about disappointment (dukkha), the
cause of disappointment (dukkha-samudaya), the cessation of
disappointment (dukkha-nirodha) and the path leading to the cessation of
disappointment (dukkha-nirodha-gamini-pratipad). 

The Buddha himself said that he could not know what a person's mentality
was like unless he spent several months with them in person, observing
their actions and hearing their voice. In the absence of certainty on
these matters, there is nothing much to be lost by assuming the best in
people rather than the worst. Give it a try. You might find it makes
life feel more comfortable if you don't assume that everyone around you
is filled with anger, rage, suspicion and ulterior motives. 

Sri Lankan and Burmese Buddhism were both heavily influenced by Mahayana
and possibly even by tantra during the early part of the recently ended
millennium. This is well documented. Some Thai Buddhists like to play up
the Brahmanical influences on Sri Lankan and Burmese Buddhism so that
they can represent Thai Buddhism as the only "pure" Theravada, hence the
only pure "Hinduism-free" Buddhism. Of course in Thailand Brahmanism is
still alive and well, every bit as much as in Lanka or Myanmar, so I
think all claims to "purity" are pretty ridiculous and show more of an
obsessively sectarian nature than signs of impartial scholarship, real
insight or (dare I say it?) awakening. 

As you no doubt know, Asanga defended the practice of reciting mantras
precisely on the grounds that mantras are meaningless and
non-efficacious. Therefore, if one recites them, then one can learn to
do an action without attachment to expectations of results. Since
mantras appear to be words but are in fact meaningless, reciting mantras
is a way by which one can gain insight into the fact that ultimately all
words and phrases are meaningless. This makes good sense to me. It is
why I have no trouble endorsing mantra practice for some people, even
though I myself never do it. 

There is more to Fundamentalism (used as a descriptive term, not as a
term of contempt) than just returning to sources. Fundamentalism usually
involves an insistence that a particular body of scriptures is the ONLY
source of true teaching for the religion in question. So it is not just
the return to scriptures that makes one a fundamentalist, but rather the
deprecation of all that lies outside the chosen canon. 

It is interesting to note that the late Venerable Buddhadasa also argued
that the doctrine of rebirth was not only a non-Buddhist doctrine but an
anti-Buddhist doctrine in that it runs contrary to the very idea of
dependent origination and no-self. 

Surely you are smart enough not to keep committing the genetic fallacy,
namely, the view that the origin of an idea determines whether it is
true or false. The Buddha did not advise people to regard something as
true merely because it was stated by someone expert in the tipi.taka. He
advised people to see as Dharma anything that conduces to solitude,
independence, liberation from passions, etc. So if someone finds a
"Hindu" or "Gnostic" or "shamanistic" notion or practice conducive to
solitude and liberation, then it is Dharma every bit as much as
something that happens by some fluke to have been preserved in a canon
as the word of the Buddha. 

Fear is one of the principal traits of the mentality of any
Fundamentalist. Fundamentalists protect themselves from fear by drawing
imaginary magical circles around themselves and saying "Inside the
circle everything is safe and acceptable, but outside the circle
everything is dangerous and threatening." 

It is precisely because I myself am stubborn, mean-spirited, opinionated
and uncharitable that I can spot those tendencies immediately in others.
But as we both know very well, no one has a svabhaava. None of us has a
fixed self. And because I have no self, my character is sometimes
stubborn and uncharitable, at other times quite generous. At times I am
filled with love, at other times overflowing with murderous hatred. That
is how anyone who is not enlightened is. We are all mercurial and
unpredictable until we have been "fixed" by a combination of insight and
many decades of painstaking cultivation. 

Usually scholars use the term "Brahmanism" to refer to the early Vedic
religion with its commentaries. They use the term "Hinduism" to describe
the much later religion based mostly on the Puranas, which tends to have
a different cast of characters from the Vedas. So it would be more
accurate to say that The Hindu religion grew out of Brahmanism under the
influence of Buddhism and Jainism. 

The concept of sin does not really arise in Buddhism. It is a
Judaeo-Christian concept that refers to wilful disobedience to the
commandments of God. Precepts in Buddhism are not commandments. They are
merely observations about what causes pain. The general principle is
that taking the lives of other living beings involves acting against
their wishes and therefore does violence to them. Also, depriving other
living beings of their freedom of movement by putting them into pens and
cages does violence to them. If your goal is to avoid doing violence to
others, then you will naturally not be much in favour of killing animals
or confining them in corrals and pens.The desire to avoid doing violence
to others is one that tends to grow rather slowly. It may begin with a
desire to avoid actually wringing the neck or cutting off the head of an
animal. It may then progress to not wanting to pay others to do those
acts. Eventually it may lead to not wanting to participate in any way in
a system that results in the continued taking of animal life for any
reason, whether for entertainment or for food or clothing. There is no
need to be absolute in these matters. What is better is to reflect on
your actions and the direct and indirect harm your actions may cause,
and then to reflect on how willing you are to allow this harm to
continue. Reflecting on the consequences of your actions is precisely
what the Buddha recommended to those who wish to minimise the amount of
suffering in the world. 

It is a matter of common experience that many people believe they are
awakened when in fact they are not. It may be possible for a person to
be quite calm, fearless, generous, compassionate and well behaved for a
very long time and to think that all this good conduct is a sign of
awakening. But then a crisis arises and the person falls apart and
reverts to old negative habits that had been dormant but not completely
uprooted. How embarrassing! So it is probably better never to assume
that you have "made the grade". Better to assume that your afflictions
are just in remission, rather than completely cured. Then you'll keep on
guard, thereby reducing the chances of being taken by surprise by a
sudden fall from grace. That, in any case, is what I would advise, if
only because I have fallen from dizzying spiritual heights so many times
during my life!

'Spiritual' is a triumphalist term coined by the early Christians to
show their superiority over the Greeks. The early Christians
acknowledged that the Greek philosophers were very refined people who
had a rich tradition of cultivating wisdom, justice, moderation and
patience. These four virtues were called the philosophical virtues are
were said to be within the grasp of any human being who worked for them.
But in addition to these ordinary virtues, the Christians recognized
three virtues that human beings could never cultivate by their own
efforts. These virtues required divine grace. The three gracious virtues
are faith, hope and love. And these, said the Christians, were available
only through the holy spirit. Therefore, anyone who had those virtues
was said to be spiritual, in contrast to Greeks (and Buddhists and
Manichaeans and so forth), who were not spiritual but merely wise and
virtuous. Needless to say, Buddhists are not at all spiritual. To say of
a Buddhist that she is spiritual is a deep insult, for it is tantamount
to saying that she became what she is not through works (the Buddhist
way) but through divine grace (the way of those who believe in God).

One need not be a Buddhist to have virtues and insights that Buddhists
admire and espouse. And one need not be a Buddhist to have things of
value to say to Buddhists about Buddhism, its doctrines and its
practices.

The place that invited me to lecture was the Elijah School,
www.elijah.org.il, an organization that promotes interfaith
dialogue among members of the world's religions. The school offers at
least one academic course a year, credit for which is given through
McGill University. The theme of the course last August was religious
conversion and whether it is possible for people to have more than one
religious identity. This is a big issue in Israel, since quite a large
number of Israelis have taken refuge in the three jewels or become
followers of Krishna Consciousness or taken up Sufi practice; a question
for many of them, and for their family members, is whether by becoming,
say, Buddhists or Sufis they cease to be Jews. Answering this, of
course, requires a deeper understanding of just exactly what is involved
in being a Jew, or a Buddhist or a Muslim or a Hindu. (Labels are so
easy to thrown around and to apply to others and to ourselves. But we
really think about what these labels may mean a little less often than
we should.)

Who of us is not a hero in his own eyes?

You must be familiar with a different Buddha than I. Or perhaps you just
prefer to pick out different qualities from the same rather complex
Buddha than the ones I most admire. The Buddha I have have most admired
is the fellow who said such things as this: 
-A person who persists in opinions regards as a waste everything other
 than that which, thinking "it is supreme", he regards as best in the
 world. Therefore he fails to get beyond disputes. Then, grasping at just
 that which he sees as commendable to himself in rules of conduct and
 vows and what he has experienced, learned or thought out, he considers
 everything else to be useless. The wise use the term "shackle" for that
 by which one regards everything else as a waste. (Sutta-nipaata 796-798)
-One who is free of judgements has no shackles. One who is set free by
 wisdom has no delusions. But those who take up judgements and opinion go
 about in the world being argumentative. (Sn 847) 
-Any teaching, I think, may be either liberative or imprisoning,
 depending on how it is taken up. If it is taken up with the spirit of
 belittling others, denigrating them and finding fault with them in order
 to make oneself look better in contrast, then the most liberative
 teaching in the world becomes a prison. 
The Buddha, so far as I am aware, was not prone to putting himself in a
prison of deeply held opinions by which he belittled others. True, he
often says that he knows what comes of those who hold various views and
who dispute, and he does not recommend holding views that lead to being
argumentative. But rarely does he dismiss a rival teacher as incompetent
or foolish. In one famous passage in the Pali canon he speaks of
teachers who liberate others but who do not liberate themselves; he
likens them to farmers who plough their neighbours' fields but fail to
cultivate their own land. Such teachers, he says, are effective, but
perhaps not as effective as those who heed their own wise counsel. 
The Buddha even admits that he is not sure whether or not those who
follow other teachers attain the final goal of arhantship; that he is
uncertain implies that he thinks it is possible that they do. I do not
see much evidence that the Buddha regarded himself or his own teaching
as uniquely worthy of being followed.

I can only speak for myself and for those whose conditioning is similar
to my own. I follow Buddhism because it makes and has always made a
great deal of sense to me, and it has helped me to make sense of my
experiences in life, and by following it for years I have become much
more contented and significantly less prone to anger and judgement of
others than I was as a younger man. The fact that Buddhism has served
very well to improve my outlook on both life and death, however, does
not lead me to believe that it is the best religion for everyone. People
differ considerably in their conditioning. I am content to let others
discover for themselves which doctrines and practices serve them best in
their own quest to eliminate dukkha from their lives. I am also content
to let others have other goals than that of eliminating dukkha from
their lives. To each his own. As for me, nothing has pleased me more
than Buddha's dharma.

The self is that which controls or that which is in our control. But
none of the five aggregates that make up our conventional selves is
ultimately in our control. The body is not in anyone's control, so it is
not the self. Nor are any of the aspects of the mind. Accepting that one
is not in control and that one has no self is known as entering the
stream, the first step towards being an arhant. The mind may
mistakenly be seen as the self, but in fact it is not.

The Sangha that is one of the three jewels is not the monastic order
(bhikkhu-sangha), but rather the community of noble ones (ariya-sangha),
which comprises all those lay brothers and sisters and monks and nuns
who have attained to stream entry or beyond. This ariya-sangha is as
valuable to monastics as it is to laity; its value lies in its being a
source of inspiration, a testimony to the possibility of making progress
along the path. During the Buddha's lifetime, several people attained
nibbana without being ordained. By the time of the writing of the
Questions of Milinda, the Buddhist view was that tens of thousands of
lay people attain nibbana for every monk. It is absolutely unnecessary
to be a monk in order to attain nirvana. But since monks have fewer
possessions to take care of, and less hair to worry about, they may have
fewer distractions and an easier life. And this may give some people a
bit of an advantage.

People willingly endure pain in order to get some pleasure or benefit.
If one knows that loving someone will inevitably result in the pain of
separation and then chooses to have the benefits of love and to tolerate
the eventual pain of separation, then that decision is not so much an
example of clinging as it is an example of a mature and well-informed
willingness to accept the partially painful consequences of a decision
to pursue a pleasure that outweighs the pain. When one takes on pain
willingly as part of the deal in gaining pleasure, it does not take one
by surprise and therefore is not disappointment (dukkha). 

I have seen people get all tangled up in trying to figure out whether
God is ineffable in the same way that Nirvana is ineffable, whether the
Buddhist doctrine of anaatman means there is no soul, whether karma is
compatible with divine grace, whether enlightenment is the same as
beatific vision and so on. Rarely does spending time on such problems
bear much fruit or take one any closer to the goal of eliminating the
root causes of avoidable suffering. These questions all fall into the
realm of what the Buddha probably would have called "Questions that tend
not to edify." 

Speaking only for myself, the greatest danger in working with ideas and
practices is that I am prone to seeing my own ideas and practices as the
standard by which all others are to be seen as of lesser value. Perhaps
no one else has the problem, but I have it in abundance. What I find has
worked best for me in dealing with this particular problem is to take
several steps. First, I try very hard to be clear about what other
people are actually saying, not assuming either that they are saying in
other words the same thing that I believe, nor assuming that they are
somehow disagreeing with me and therefore need to be punished. Second, I
try very hard to see in exactly what ways another person's beliefs and
assumptions do differ from my own. (This is what I call labelling.)
Third, I try to see the value that the other person's beliefs have for
him or her, how they speak to the other person's conditioning. Fourth, I
try to honour differences by realizing that beliefs and practices that
differ from my own may do very well to serve other people's needs. 

The word "hinayana" literally means The Vehicle that has been thrown
away,or The Vehicle that is Trash. It appears for the first time in a
sutra whose message was that Sravakayana Buddhism is not genuine
Buddhism at all and should be rejected by all true Buddhists. The usual
definition of a Hinayanin is a Buddhist who follows Buddhism for purely
selfish reasons and has no care or concern for the welfare of others.
One can easily reject the bodhisattva path and still have a deep and
abiding concern for others and thus not be a Hinayanin. It is probably
best to understand that a Hinayanin is any Buddhist whom the user of the
term wishes to characterise as an inferfior Buddhist. It is very much
like the expression "substandard Buddhist". It is true that I do not
like language that creates division and disharmony by expressing
contempt. That is why I do not applaud the use of the word "hinayana".
It was coined for no reason than to create division among Buddhists. Why
honour such a word? I do not judge you negatively for using the term. I
am simply trying to help you understand that you are using a term that
is deeply offensive and hurtful to some people.If you do not wish to
offend and hurt, you might think of seeking alternative expressions. 

One need not be a Buddhist to make authoritative statements about
Buddhist doctrine and theory. One need not be a Buddhist to have insight
in Dharma. One need not be a Buddhist to attain nirvana.

The Buddha himself advised that the most rapid way of progressing on the
path is to have a beautiful friend (kalyaa.na-mitram), that is, a
companion who shares one's aspirations and values and encourages one to
achieve them. It is by mutual help that two or more friends can make the
fastest progress towards dropping their kleshas, thereby dropping their
self-centred clinging. Buddhism does promote intimate relationships. One
can find it said repeatedly in the Pali canon that the best way to
cultivate the path is through association with good friends. It is even
said in one dramatic statement that good friendship is the entirety of
the religious life (brahmacariya). It is said that one can attain
nibbana by a life of service to a good person. There is no reason why
this good person cannot be an intimate friend, provided the intimacy is
founded on a shared love of and dedication to noble values and
liberative practices. In the Bodhicaryavatara, Shantideva says that the
most rapid path to abandoning oneself is to give oneself entirely and
completely (sarve.na sarva.m ca) to another with a heart filled with
love (bhakti) and faith (shraddhaa). By giving oneself entirely to
another, one abandons a self-centred orientation, and as a result of
abandoning the self-centred orientation one transcends one's past bad
karma and puts one into a position where one will not generate any
further bad karma. So a loving relationship is said to be the fastest
path to dropping the self and thereby realising nirvana. 

There are people who say very valuable things about Buddhist (or
other kinds of religious) practice but who do not themselves benefit
much from the knowledge they pass on to others. One should never
minimize the contributions made by such people. They do a service to
others, for which one can only be grateful. If they themselves are
unhappy owing to their inability to practise what they preach, then one
can only be sad on their behalf and hope they themselves will eventually
benefit from the good advice they give to others. 

As far as I know, no one has got rid of all afflictions. Some people
have claimed to have done so, but it is impossible for me to test their
claims. We also have example of people in the Canon, such as Channa, who
believed he had got beyond all afflictions and then discovered he had
not. So we know it is possible to be mistaken about the question of
whether one has become awakened. For that reason, I am content to say
that as far as my own experience goes, I have no reason to believe that
anyone has ever got rid of all afflictions, because I do not have the
capacity to know the mental states of others.

I have a tendency to admit that I don't know when in fact I do not know.
I am willing to make conjectures, but I try not to allow myself to
confound conjecture with certainty. I have conjectured that no one has
ever attained awakening, and I have said that even if that were a fact,
it would make no difference to me, for I would still put all my energy
into trying to eliminate all my afflictions, even if I knew for sure
that I would fail.

Nothing shows just as it is. Everything appears only in the mind of the
perceiver. As we have seen many times, what one person perceives as a
display of some quality, positive or negative, another person perceives
in an entirely different way. I see no way to adjudicate among these
competing perceptions. When there is a dispute, some agree with one
position, some with another. There is no such thing as settling the
dispute definitively.

Siddhartha Gautama ran around calling himself a tathaagata, which can be
interpreted in a variety of ways. He was also called a jina (conqueror),
an arhant (worthy of respect), bhagavan (one possessed of blessings),
sugata (one who has gone well, that is, who has gone to nirvana) and
sammaa sambuddha (one who is completely and fully awake). Later Indian
tradition usually called followers of Siddhartha Gautama by the name
Saugata (those who follow the teachers of the Sugata). The term
"Buddhist" is relatively modern, I think.

One need not be a prisoner of doctrine to make effective use of
doctrines. Similarly, one need not be addicted to a pharmaceutical drug
to benefit by using it.

It does not matter a great deal whether one gets well by taking one
medicine or by taking another. But it can be dangerous to mix two
medicines, even if each by itself might cure one's disease. For this
reason, it is a good idea to put labels on medicine bottles. Since
Buddhism (the teachings of the Buddha), taken by itself, can be a highly
effective medicine for removing some of the avoidable pains of life, it
is not a bad idea to put a label on the package of dogmas and practices
associated with the Buddha, and it may even be a good idea not to mix
this medicine up with other equally effective medicines. Keeping one's
medicine clearly labelled is good pharmacology. Mixing pharmaceuticals
indiscriminately and without knowing exactly what one is doing can be
very bad medicine. Even if it is no longer necessary for you to heed the
labels, it does not follow that you should tear the labels off the
bottles. Others may still need them, and they are not bothering you. (If
labels DO bother you, then you probably need a bit more medicine after
all.)

If anyone is master of myself, it can only be I. No one else can be my
master, I assure you. But even I am not master of myself; I can assure
you of that, too. For if I were my own master, then I would have a self.
But I do not have a self. And I know it. Most of the time. (When I
forget, I usually get into trouble.)

Because very little in the world is purely beneficial or purely harmful,
People will endure that harmful effects of things in order to receive
the pleasant or beneficial aspects of those same things. There is no
real mystery to this.

First of all, I see no way to be sure what mental states lie behind
words. One certainly cannot tell from the words alone, because words can
be written ironically. And even if words are not written in irony,
people may very well read a great deal of emotion into words that the
original author was not experiencing while writing them. Not all that
appears to some people as anger is necessarily anger at all. (Children,
for example, are notoriously liable to attribute anger to parents who do
no more than thwart the child's desires.) So one must be very cautious
in ascribing mental states to other people solely on the basis of words.
Secondly, it is not wise to judge any method by the people who fail use
it and to benefit by it. Even if it couldbe established that people
writing to a Buddhist group were angry, it would not follow that
Buddhism itself is defective. It could very well be that the specific
people writing to the Buddhist group were not practising the specific
forms of meditation that Buddhism prescribes as a remedy for anger. If a
medicine is prescribed by a doctor and the patient does not take it, one
does not usually blame the doctor or the medicine. Nor does one blame
the patient, really; one simply notes that the patient did not take
advantage of a cure and therefore continues to suffer.

The question "what is true?" frankly does not interest me much any more,
although it used to. Strangely, the question "what is true?" seems to
have vanished from my mentality at about the same time I stopped
worrying about self-esteem and gave up being obsessed over the whether
or not I am really a Buddhist.

Your karma has nothing whatsoever to do with events that happen to you.
What your karma determines is only your own reaction to what happens to
you. If, for example, you find it irritating that someone punches you on
the street, you may react in anger. That angry reaction is the
consequence of having developed a habit of reacting angrily to
irritations. If the anger is followed by a desire to harm the source of
your irritation, that desire is a mental karma. That mental karma may be
followed by your speaking harsh words to your assailant, or it may be
followed by your striking her back in retaliation. Then mental karma
(the desire to injure) is compounded by angry words (verbal karma) and
physically damaging action (bodily karma). Alternatively, you may
respond to the irritation of being hit by seeking to help the person who
has hit you get over the pain that has led her to assault you. Your
intention to help your assailant be rid of her intention to harm you
then becomes the basis of a chain of pure karma, which helps both you
and your attacker. 

What the Arabic Muslims called Hinduism was a complex reaction to
Buddhism and Jainism and incorporated many of the best features of both,
while retaining and redefining some of the aspects of the ancient Vedic
religion. Much of what now survives as Hinduism is in fact Buddhism and
Jainism, with a goodly bit of shamanism thrown in for good measure.

I am inclined to see the Skeptics as more in line with the Buddha than
the Stoics, but I agree in general that early Buddhism is hardly
different in any important way from some of the Greek and Hellenistic
philosophies.

From what I have seen, people who follow Tibetan Buddhism are on
the whole not any better and not any worse than those who follow
Vipassanaa, Theravaada, Nichiren, Japanese Zen, Korean Zen or Vietnamese
Buddhism. 

It seems to me that before one truly grasps the fact that nothing in the
universe is personal and that therefore nothing is oneself and nothing
is one's property, then all of one's speculations are flavoured by one
of two fundamental delusions. One is either deluded as an eternalist, or
one is deluded as a cessationist. 

A good beginning would be for him to recognize simply that his biases
differ from mine. A good beginning for me would be to recognize that my
prejudices differ from his.

Of the ten roots of skillful action discussed in Buddhist texts, four
have to do with speech. The four speech precepts together constitute the
limb of the Noble Eight-limbed Path known as Right Speech. Right speech
consists in abstaining from four kinds of harmful speech. They are
enumerated as deceptive speech, harsh speech, frivolous speech and
slanderous speech. Deceptive speech is any kind of speaking (or writing)
that is intended to lead others to believe something that the speaker
knows or suspects to be untrue. It is deliberately misleading others
through either direct lies or through hints and innuendos,or even
through withholding information. Harsh speech is speaking directly to
another person in a way that is intended to hurt that person's feelings,
lower the person's sense of sense-worth or discourage the person from
continuing a fruitful course of action. Frivolous speech is talking
about anything other than Dharma. It is any form of speech that is done
just for the sake of amusement, self-aggrandizement, averting boredom or
distracting attention from the enterprise of reflecting on how to live
and die harmlessly and with dignity. Slanderous speech is any kind of
communication aimed at diminishing a person's reputation or value in the
minds of others. The speech precepts are very subtle and therefore easy
to break. Like all Buddhist precepts, they should be understood as
invitations to reflect on one's own conduct, not as hard and fast laws
or rules, and certainly never as occasions for passing negative
judgement on the behaviour of others. 

Life is too short to read things you find difficult to understand.
Buddhism is extremely simple to understand. It is also very simple to
practice, once you break the old ego-driven habit of thinking you have
to do extraordinarily difficult things in order to receive the most
precious gifts.

It is worth bearing in mind that the liberation offerred by Buddhism is
not absolute liberation. Rather, it is liberation from avoidable forms
of disappointment, namely, those kinds of disappointment that come from
having unrealistic expectations. If you find that you are not
disappointed as much as you used to be, then you have reason to believe
that it is possible to be liberated from disappointment.

No one, ancient or modern, should ever be accepted uncritically and
without question. To question and be critical of our dharma ancestors is
to pay them the deepest respect possible. Simply to repeat their words
without question is more deeply disrespectful than urinating on their
graves. There is nothing at all perverse in questioning the claims of
people who have a vested interest in promoting a particular view of the
truth. People who make canons are nearly always doing so in order to
gain power and control other people and how they think. The Buddhist
canon is no exception. Why else would monks be portrayed as telling a
genocidal king that it is fine for him to kill thousands of
non-Buddhists. To recognize that the inclusion of such a text in the
canon is to promote the interests of the canon-makers is in no way
perverse. It is, however, skeptical in the very best sense of the word.
The "skeptic", as you know, means "one who asks and investigates". How
did the Buddha define wisdom? He defined it as INVESTIGATING the dharma.
He was the most radical skeptic in the history of Indian religions. I do
not find the text in question valid in any way at all. It is a text that
portrays a group of Buddhist monks marching in front of an army that
then takes the lives of tens of thousands of Tamils. When the king of
Lanka then feels remorse for all the carnage, the Buddhist monks tell
him not to worry, since the killed Tamils were not Buddhists and
therefore were subhuman. This text obviously promotes hatred and
justifies brutality and carnage in the name of Buddhism, and it suggests
that monks can absolve lay people of the hideous crime of genocide, so
long as it is done to promote Buddha-sasana. So the text cannot possibly
be a candidate for Sad-dharma by the criteria that I accept, despite the
fact that some people, for reasons of their own, decided to include the
text in their canon. As I have said, there is a very clear standard. And
I take full responsibility for the way that I personally apply the
standard. I am willing to run the risk of rejecting even canonical
teachings if they seem to me to violate the deeper Dharmic principles
that I have chosen to guide my thinking, speaking and acting in the
world. The [standard] is Sad-dhamma. And for it, the criteria have been
given very clearly in the Vinaya. "Of whatever doctrines you are
conscious, if they promote passion rather than peace, self-love rather
than respect for others, wishing for much rather than wishing for
little, love of mobs rather than seclusion, and laziness rather than
making effort, then you may know those doctrines are not Dhamma. On the
other hand, of whatever doctrines you are conscious, if they promote
peace rather than passion, respect for others rather than self-love,
seclusion rather than love of mobs, and making effort rather than
lassitude, then you may know that these doctrines are True Dharma." I am
more interested in truth than in what people agree to be the truth. And
the more interested in truth I get, the more I find only human agreement
to tell the same stories, whether they are true or not, whether they are
useful or not for freeing the human spirit from the shackles that bring
it only pain. 

What the canon says, simply, is that the Buddha declined to say whether
or not an arahant continues to exist after death, because the answer to
the question makes no difference whatsoever. The question is irrelevant.
It is not unanswerable, nor is it one that should not be answered. It is
merely a question to which one needs no answer in order to have a
wholesome and productive practice that leads eventually to the cessation
of dukkha. That attitude makes a great deal of sense to me, I must say.
My own experience bears it out very well. I have learned not to waste
much time on pointless questions, such as whether or not there is
rebirth, or whether consciousness depends entirely on events in the
physical body.

Please note that Eternalism is NOT a miccha-ditthi. It is merely a view
that the Buddha does not himself promote. People who do endorse it, he
says, tend to do so because of their fear of death. Similarly,
cessationism is not a miccha-ditthi. The Buddha endorses neither
eternalism nor cessationism. He remains completely neutral on the
question. So do I.

The question about whether an arahant (actually a Tathagata) continues
to exist after the break-up of his body is one of many unanswered
questions. Another unanswered question is: "Does the world have a
beginning or not?" The Buddha says the answer to that question does not
matter to one who is seeking an escape from dukkha. He does not say that
the world is outside our conceptual framework. He also says that it does
not matter whether or not the life soul is exactly the same as the
physical body; he does not say that the body is outside our conceptual
framework. The meaning of the text is so clear that a child can grasp
it. So why go out of your way to make it say something it does not say,
just to make it sound profound? I can't imagine that the Buddha would
have approved of such obfuscation and such murkiness. Making nibbana
mysterious and outside the scope of reason does not make it any more
worth attaining to one who is interested only in the cessation of dukkha
(dukkha-nirodha, also called, by the Buddha and his pals, nibbana). 

Gratuitous advice is rarely welcome, especially where it is
most necessary.

It is not at all necessary to understand the nature of nirvana in order
to attain it. All you have to do to attain nirvana is to stop craving
things that fail to satisfy you. Craving can be ended in many ways. It
certainly helps to understand that some ways of seeking contentment do
not work, and it may even help to understand why those ways fail. But
understanding is not essential. What is essential is that you stop
seeking contentment in ways that fail to provide it.

Buddhaghosa, in his commentary to the Acchariyabbhuutasutta, defines
papanca as a combination of holding a view, being attached to it and
being contemptuous of those who disagree. 

Why, please tell me, is it inappropriate to say that a child can think
more clearly than the Buddha thought? What makes a buddha a buddha is
nothing more nor less than having awakened to knowing the root causes of
eliminable dukkha and then having eliminated them. One need not think
clearly to do that. And being able to think clearly does not mean that
one has become a buddha. The Buddha was, by today's standards, quite
ignorant of many issues that we today take as common knowledge. He was
not particularly gifted at reasoning. Later Buddhists far surpassed him
in the art of reasoning clearly and concisely. There is such a thing as
progress. Not that it matters much to anyone interested in being
contented and eliminating dukkha, but it is a demonstrable fact all the
same. Let's get this whole issue into perspective. The fact is, I simply
disagree with you about one trivial matter that the Buddha himself
repeatedly warned people not to waste time arguing about. 

In the principal canonical text in which the Buddha explains the
doctrine of no-self, he notes that the body is impermanent, conditioned
and not entirely under the control of our will. That is, it is
impossible to make the body behave exactly as we would like it to
behave. It gets sick, gets injured and dies even though we would prefer
it not to. This is what anatta means: the physical body is not within
our control. What is important to note is that what is true of the body,
according to this same canonical text, is also true of every aspect of
consciousness and the accompanying mental features. The "mind" is every
bit as composite, conditioned and beyond our control as the body is. The
"mind" is therefore no more the self than the body is. The "mind" is no
more nor less real than the body, no more nor less reliable, no more nor
less a refuge, no more nor less one's identity. If one can understand
all the ways in which body is not-self, then one is well on the way to
understanding that "mind" is also not self. (Recall that the Buddha once
said that neither body nor mind is the self, but if one MUST think of
something as the self, then it is better to think of the body as the
self, because it lasts much longer than any mental event.) 

Whether you use Sanskrit, Pali or English words, you pretty much define
them in whatever way best suits your polemical needs, a bit like the
caterpiller in Through the Looking Glass. Is this idiosyncratic way of
redefining key words your way of honouring the Dharma?

Science is a methodology that consists in testing hypotheses and then
eliminating those that fail the test. Science is most decidedly not a
set of conclusions or even a set of assumptions. Science has not adopted
any paradigm at all. It has been a matter of testing a whole range of
hypotheses. In science nothing is ever proved definitively. The only
thing that can be done definitively is to eliminate certain hypotheses.

Science is, by its very nature, free of social, political, asethetic,
moral or commercial values. Buddhism is, above all else, a system of
values. Take the values out of Buddhism, and it ceases to be Dharma. Put
those same values into science, and it ceases to be science. Science and
Buddhism are, always will be and must be operative in entirely different
spheres of life. We need both. Without Dharma we would be utterly lost,
and we would be severely handicapped without scientific method. But God
help us if we get the two realms mixed up. 

Why not content yourself with teaching people to focus on their
breathing and watching the rising and falling of phenomena? That's what
the Buddha taught, and it's what all of us who follow his teachings find
useful. Forgot all this fancy intellectual masturbation about cosmology,
cosmogony, the relationship between mind and matter and all those other
questions. THOSE ARE EXACTLY THE QUESTIONS THE BUDDHA SAID WERE
COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO THE TASK OF ATTAINING BHAVA-NIRODHA.

According to Nagarjuna himself, he was seeking to establish the middle
between the view that all things exist and the view that nothing exists.
The view that all things exist is explained further as the view that all
things exist independently and eternally. This false view is remedied by
observing that everything that can be experienced ceases to exist as we
experience it. The view that nothing exists is remedied by observing
that items of experience arise in awareness. The middle way is the view
that all things exist dependent on other things; nothing is independent,
therefore nothing is eternal. 

The division of Buddhists in Hinayana and Mahayana has very little
validity, since there is no practical distinction at all between these
two yanas.

Here is what the word "nihilism" means: 1,The denial of any objective
and real ground of truth. 2, The theory that nothing is knowable. 3, The
theory that no knowledge is possible. 4, The rejection of the validity
of all ethical, religious, political and social values. 5, The denial of
the value of all distinctions. It may be true of nihilism that it
implies amorality, since one of the basic definitions of nihilism is a
radical questioning of the foundations of the distinction between good
and evil, truth and falsity, right and wrong, etc. But there is nothing
in materialism that implies nihilism, nor is there anything in
materialism that implies hedonism or amorality. Your claim is every bit
as fallacious as the claim of those Christians who claim that one cannot
be an atheist and still have a moral foundation. That claim is plain
silly. There is no necessary correlation between any ontological stance
and one's moral view. They are separate domains. 

There is no such thing as mind, according to Buddhism. There is feeling,
concept formation, connation and awareness. And none of these can be made to
behave exactly as one would like them to behave. That fact of not being
within control of the will is what the Buddha called non-self (anatta).

If the sankhaaras were completely within one's control, one would have no
kilesas at all. But one does have kilesas. If it were impossible to have any
influence whatsoever over the samkhaaras, then one could never get rid of a
kilesa. But kilesas can be eliminated. From all this it follows that one
does not have COMPLETE control (the failure of complete control being what
the Buddha says he meant by using the expression "anatta") but one does have
limited influence, which is what makes practice worth doing, albeit
sometimes difficult.

Suffering in this world is experienced as hunger, poverty, degradation,
injury, disease and bereavement. 

You are entitled to your view, of course. But you must admit it is,
well, a view. And the Buddha recommends getting over the thralldom of
views. 

The doctrine of anatta, as taught in the Pali canon, says only that no
aspect of what we normally take to be a self is fully within our
control, and therefore it can only cause dukkha if we become obsessed
with trying to control it. That is really all there is to early
Buddhism.