If sati, mindfulness, is not there in ordinary life, it is not working. If it is only there on retreat, and absent in your daily life, this is also problematic. What makes this integration so difficult is that taṅhā, desire or craving, is not just something added to our experience: It is literally built into our cognitive process. We are, if you will, born with the pathology of desire. Part I: The Pathology of Desire Craving, or taṅhā in Pali, is the central problem identified by the … [Read more...]
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What Feels Right about Right Action?
November 10, 2011Is there a right way to live? What is it? And how could we know? Questions about how we should live are central for all of us, and central as well to the teachings of the Buddha in the early Pali dialogues. The cultivation of mindfulness is described in these texts as a means of developing wisdom. By drawing on research into the role of attention and emotion, we can see how the practice of mindfulness can also give us an embodied and experiential way of knowing which ways of acting feel … [Read more...]
Deep Dukkha
October 11, 2011Getting Down in the Trenches with the First Noble Truth In his book, Venerable Father: A Life with Ajahn Chah, Paul Breiter tells the story of an encounter with Ajahn Chah after the latter had just completed two successive nights of long Dharma talks. As Ajahn Chah was walking away from the meditation hall, he said to Breiter, “Anicca, dukkha, anattā—I can’t listen to any more!” As most Buddhist practitioners know, anicca, dukkha, anattā—impermanence, suffering, no-self—refer to the three … [Read more...]
We Are Constructed Through Metaphor
August 13, 2011While mindfulness meditation shows us that language pervades our mental experience, some of those who analyze human experience have long felt there was even more to it than that. Recent analyses of language suggest that metaphor is not just a type of language use but the very structure of language—and therefore thought—itself. From there, we are not far from seeing that what we regard to be “self” is largely constructed through language. Craving, clinging, and attachment are much stronger … [Read more...]
Seeing the Wheel, Stopping the Spin
July 15, 2011As the morning star rose and the Buddha achieved his great insight, tradition tells us, he saw all at once the matrix of causes and conditions that result in human experience: a swirl of interdependent physical and mental events repeating over and over, creating dukkha (suffering). Because he saw so clearly, he also saw how to end the suffering: nibbāna. One could stop the spinning cycle forever. Its dynamic nature—its seeming strength—was also the gate to freedom. One of the most important … [Read more...]
Did the Buddha Teach Satipatthāna?
May 17, 2011Chip Hartranft’s work bridges the traditions of yoga and Buddhism. He is the founding director of The Arlington Center, uniting yoga and dharma practice, and has taught an integration of yoga movement & meditation in the Boston area since 1978. An independent scholar of early Indian Buddhism and yoga, Chip is the author of The Yoga-Sutra of Patañjali: a new translation with commentary and the forthcoming How The Buddha Taught Meditation: Tracing The Path From The Canons Back To The Original … [Read more...]
A Protestant Buddhism?
May 17, 2011‘Protestant Buddhism’ is a label that has been applied to certain progressive elements in the Theravāda tradition, first in Sri Lanka in the 19th century, and more recently to modernist Buddhism in this country and around the globe. It is sometimes used as a pejorative, to the extent the enterprise is regarded as tainted with orientalist and colonialist attitudes, along with the historical Euro-centrism that led the first western Buddhists to immediately begin the task of “improving upon” the … [Read more...]
Shining the Light of Death on Life: Maranasati Meditation (Part II)
December 1, 1994The first part of this article which appeared in the Spring 1994 issue of Insight ended with this quote from the great Tibetan yogi Milarepa: "In brief, without being mindful of death, whatever Dharma practices you take up will be merely superficial." What was Milarepa suggesting? When we forget about our own death, we may also be more likely to forget the dharma? If we don't recall death we will also lose the wish to train our minds in dharma? In forgetting about death do we become … [Read more...]
Shining the Light of Death on Life: Maranasati Meditation (Part I)
May 1, 1994(Adapted from a workshop at BCBS on November 20, 1993) Meditation on death awareness is one of the oldest practices in all Buddhist traditions. In the words of the Buddha, “of all the footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme." The Tibetan Book of the Dead was one of the first and most popular books to attract the attention of Buddhist practitioners in America in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. The tremendous popularity … [Read more...]
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