Once there was a poor boy who happened upon a dead mouse lying in the road. He wondered if he might turn that mouse’s misfortune into some sort of opportunity for himself. He picked up the mouse and brought it to a tavern, where he offered it to the tavern-keeper to feed his cat. The tavern-keeper was grateful, and gave the boy a penny. With this penny the boy went to the market and bought a very small amount of honey. Then he borrowed a large water pot, filled it with water and … [Read more...]
Andrew Olendzki
Attached to Nothing
This is an archaic poem in the Sutta Nipāta, and the language is thus rather compressed. Existing translations vary widely, and this is my best attempt to make sense of the verses while matching the traditional meter’s eight syllables per line. I think Posāla is a yogi of the old school, skilled in attaining formless states of consciousness through intensive concentration practice, including the seventh of the eight stations of consciousness known as “the sphere of nothingness.” This is a … [Read more...]
Mind and Brain
There are generally two approaches to understanding the relationship between the mind and the brain. By mind we mean the subjective side of things, the full range of lived experience, both conscious and unconscious, including such things as thought, cognition, memory, desire, emotional states, and even perhaps the sense of transcendence. By brain we refer to the objective side, the physical stuff between our ears, with its complex architecture of inter-related neurons and the electro-chemical … [Read more...]
Mindfulness of Breathing: Ānāpānasati Sutta (MN 118)
Understanding Key Terms developed: bhāvitā This word is simply the causative form of the verb "to be," and thus means "causing to be," from which we get "development." It is a word used often for meditation in general, and for certain kinds of meditation in particular, such as the development of loving kindness (mettā-bhāvanā). cultivated: bahulākatā Used often beside development as a synonym, this term literally meant something that is done (kata) a lot (bahuli). The way we … [Read more...]
The Greatest Happiness
These verses are said to have been uttered very soon after the Buddha’s awakening to Mucalinda, the Nāga (Serpent) King, after he coiled seven times around his body and spread his hooded head to protect the Awakened One from rain. This mythical imagery aside, the poem offers a cogent definition of happiness at four different, gradually intensifying, levels of scale. The ascetic monk finds happiness in dwelling alone in the forest, far from the web of social responsibility, … [Read more...]
Māra Rebuffed
This poem is all the more remarkable when you know the story behind it. The Elder Gotamī is the very same KisaGotamī who was at the heart of the mustard seed tragedy. As a young woman she was married into an abusive family, who scorned her for being so skinny (kisa) and for not bearing children. She finally did give birth to a fine healthy son, and was then treated well by her relatives. Alas the child had some sort of terrible accident as a toddler and was killed. This drove Gotamī mad with … [Read more...]
Cherish the Nuns
After his awakening the Buddha made a return visit to his home town of Kapilavastu. An influential Sakyan chief (and cousin to Siddhartha) named Mahānāma had the thought that, since many young men of good families had gone forth to join his growing monastic community, it would be good if some youths from the Buddha’s own family joined also. So before long a contingent of six Sakyan princes, including the well-known cousins Baddhiya, Anuruddha, Ānanda and Devadatta, snuck away from town and … [Read more...]
Kama Sutta
This is the Pali version of the better-known Sanskrit work, Kāma Sutra. Discerning readers may notice that the two texts are somewhat different (this one is shorter, for example). I’m translating the word "kāma" here as "pleasure," but it really refers to the wanting of pleasure, the grasping after gratification through sensory objects, and thus denotes an emotional response rather than a feeling tone. It is easy to underestimate the subtlety of the Buddha's teaching here, and to thus … [Read more...]
Words Well Said
These verses were offered by Vangīsa, a monk renowned in his time for his poetic skill, after hearing the Buddha talk about the qualities of good speech. No less than seventy-two stanzas of Vangisa’s have been preserved in the anthology of monks’ verse known as the Theragāthā, more than any other monk, including Sāriputta, Ānanda, Mahā Kassapa and Moggallāna. He tells of formerly being “drunk with skill in composing poetry” (Thag 1253) as he wandered from town to town, presumably earning a … [Read more...]
Truth
This sort of structured discourse found in the Pali literature can seem like linguistic sleight-of-hand, but when one examines it closely and works with it in experience it shows itself to be an insightful and practical guide for finding one’s way among the tangle of views and opinions passing for truth in our world. We cannot help but base much of our belief on insubstantial grounds, but we can avoid the pitfall of regarding our knowledge as definitively true until we have verified it directly. … [Read more...]
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