Buddha-Sasana

Cloth management and alms for the new bhikkhu. (Through the Looking Glass 11, 4/7/2023)

I ordain as a bhikkhu, March 10, 2009, with unexpected pomp in Central Burma. (Through the Looking Glass 10, 3/31/2023)

I travel to the land of the golden pagodas to ordain as a bhikkhu. (Through the Looking Glass 9, 3/24/2023)

I seek out and am inspired by Western monks in Texas and California, and resolve to ordain as a bhikkhu. (Through the Looking Glass 8, 3/17/2023)

A brief history of Zen priesthood and how it felt to be a priest in the USA. (Through the Looking Glass 7, 3/10/2023)

I visit Japanese, Burmese, Chinese and Vietnamese temples and talk to monks. (Through the Looking Glass 6, 3/03/2023)

I ordain as a Zen priest at the Austin Zen Center. (Through the Looking Glass 5, 2/24/2023)

I decide to dedicate my life to Buddhist practice and move to a Zen monastery in California. (Through the Looking Glass 4, 2/17/2023)

I discover why forms and rituals are important and officially take refuge. (Through the Looking Glass 3, 2/10/2023)

I begin Zen meditation retreats and raise some curious questions about myself. (Through the Looking Glass 2, 2/3/2023)

I begin to tell my own “way seeking mind” story of how I first came to Buddhist practice. (Through the Looking Glass 1, 1/27/2023)

We review Buddhism’s unique roles in the symbolic/transcendent world. (Buddhism as Self-Help 18, 1/20/2023)

We look at how Buddhism fits into the symbolic structures of social cognition: the sacred, myth, ritual and community, and how meaning, motivation and supramundane experience are rooted there. (Buddhism as Self-Help 17, 1/13/2023)

Social cognition works symbolically. We continue our understanding of the constructed symbolic world in terms of myth and the sacred and their influence on human behavior. (Buddhism as Self-Help 16, 1/6/2023)

Symbolism provides the workings of social, cooperative life. We discuss the ubiquity and importance of ritual and then the ethic of living by vow, with examples from the Zen tradition. (Buddhism as Self-Help 15, 12/30/2022)

Lasting well-being is possible within the selfless, pro-social, cooperative world. We discuss moral communities, when they go wrong and the Buddhist resources that make them work. (Buddhism as Self-Help 14, 12/23/2022)

The Buddha divides thoughts into wholesome and unwholesome. The mundane unwholesome search for hedonic pleasure necessarily fails to produce lasting well-being for modern psychological and evolutionary reasons. (Buddhism as Self-Help 13, 12/16/2022)

The monastic Sangha provides a context in which social conditions that presuppose a self are excluded. (Buddhism as Self-Help 12, 12/9/2022)

A quick tour of various societal structures gives us an idea of where a non-self might be able to live and thrive. (Buddhism as Self-Help 12, 12/2/2022)

Contrary to being the ideology of global capitalism, Buddhism is only marginally about self-help under adverse social conditions, but intrinsically concerned with improving social conditions. (Buddhism as Self-Help 10, 11/25/2022)

The Buddha made clear that the success of our practice depends critically on an appropriate social context for practice. Self-help focuses on practice in inappropriate contexts. (Buddhism as Self-Help 9, 11/18/2022)

We look at the social psychology of managing our self-image in social contexts as a source for the ego-self and the authentic self, and how individualism is nonsensical. (Buddhism as Self-Help 8, 11/11/2022)

We discuss self-presentation as an individual adaptation to survival in the sociocultural matrix. (Buddhism as Self-Help 7, 11/4/2022)

Humans are fundamentally cooperative and social creatures. We show that most significant individual cognition serves social cognition, drawing significant differences between humans and other apes in this regard. (Buddhism as Self-Help 6, 10/28/2022)

We discuss Buddhist practices for deconstructing the thing-self, and then how modern Buddhism is interpreted in terms of the modern authentic self. (Buddhism as Self-Help 5, 10/21/2022)

We discuss how the ego-self is produced through appropriating assets as “me” and “mine” in Buddhist thought, and then how the historically evolved self in the west became the authentic self. (Buddhism as Self-Help 4, 10/14/2022)

We discuss the thing-self in Buddhist thought, and the evolution of the self in European history. (Buddhism as Self-Help 3, 10/7/2022)

The Buddha analyzed the self at two levels: the thing-self and the ego-self. We use the ego-self, produced in becoming, to begin the analysis of the evolving western sense of self and its shadow sense of lack. (Buddhism as Self-Help 2, 9/30/2022)

Has Buddhism become “the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism"? (Self-Help 1, 9/23/2022)

I argue that modern “mindfulness” corresponds pretty closely to ‘samādhi’ in the early Buddhist texts. (9/16/2022)

How did the meaning of sati evolve from early Buddhist times to give us our modern understanding of “mindfulness”? (9/9/2022)

‘Mindfulness’ misses the mark as a translation of Pali sati. Preferable is ‘recollection.’ (9/2/2022)

More tips for the student confused by Buddhist technical terms. (Buddhist Terminology, talk 2, 8/26/2022)

Tips for the student confused by Buddhist technical terms. (Buddhist Terminology, talk 1, 8/19/2022)

What can we expect to result from the practice of Satipatthana? (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 22, 8/12/2022)

Inclusion of the for noble truths under phenomena greatly extends the scope of the satipatthana. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 21, 8/5/2022)

We discuss how the practice of satipatthana helps us to perceive the world directly in terms of Dharma, to gain knowledge and vision of how things are. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 20, 7/29/2022)

The factors of awakening arise from satipatthana practice to produce concentration. Concentration in turn influences or rather interferes with the process of constructing the world. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 19, 7/22/2022)

The key exercises of the contemplation of phenomena are closely connected to the links of dependent coarising. We discuss what we can learn from this critical teaching. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 18, 7/15/2022)

We discuss the an alternative model of cognition in the Buddha’s teachings that accounts for the arising of the experiential world from the basis of the six senses. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 17, 7/8/2022)

We discuss the five aggregates of appropriation, a hugely important model of cognition in the Buddha’s teachings that accounts for the internal constructedness of the world. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 16, 7/1/2022)

We discuss the five sources of distraction in meditative and contempletive practice. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 15, 6/24/2022)

We introduce the fourth broad subject of contemplation, phenomena or experiences as described in the Dharma, a set of six exercises to be discussed in the following weeks. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 14, 6/17/2022)

We talk about the third broad subject of contemplation, states of mind. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 13, 6/10/2022)

We move past the body contemplations to contemplating our likes and dislikes. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 12, 6/3/2022)

We use the analogy of understanding clouds to illustrate the logic of internal analysis, then consider the contemplation of decaying corpses, which are much like clouds. (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 11, 5/27/2022)

We take a closer look at internal analyis described in the satipatthana refrain, its logic and its function. Find supplementary materials at sitagu.org/shortlinks/satipatthana/ (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 10, 5/20/2022)

We take up contemplation of elements, and consider to what extent we are examining something imagined as opposed to something imagined in the body contemplations. Find supplementary materials at sitagu.org/shortlinks/satipatthana/ (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 9, 5/13/2022)

We take up contemplation of body parts and contemplation of elements. Find supplementary materials at sitagu.org/shortlinks/satipatthana/ (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 8, 5/6/2022)

We investigate impermanence with respect to actions of the body. Find supplementary materials at sitagu.org/shortlinks/satipatthana/ (Rethinking Satipatthana, talk 7, 4/29/2022)