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...]
Cherish the Nuns
Andrew Olendzki
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...]
Perennial Issues
Thanissaro Bhikkhu
Toward the end of World War II, Aldous Huxley published an anthology, The Perennial Philosophy, proposing that there is a common core of truths to all the world’s great religions. These truths clustered around three basic principles: that the Self is by nature divine, that this nature is identical with the divine Ground of Being, and that the ideal life is one spent in the quest to realize this non-dual truth. In the years since Huxley published his anthology, the idea of a perennial … [Read more...]
The BCBS Model Goes to India
Justin Kelley
When I first turned onto Lockwood Road in Barre, Massachusetts, I had never seen Buddhism in the West. My time had been spent in Asia, predominantly India, practicing in monasteries filled with local people who did not look or act like me. At the time, I thought this was all that existed. Ignorant of the breadth of Dharma in the West, I belatedly realized I had missed its thirty years of fringe existence with little financial support. Even so, I hesitated to trust Western Buddhism. Much of my … [Read more...]
The Pilgrims’ Experience
Various
This story combines recollections from several people on the 2010 BCBS pilgrimage. Contributing were Helen Rosen, Steve McKay, Jim Dailey, Justin Kelley, Victor Bradford, Jeane van Gemert, Mu Soeng, Indira Maini, Edith Haenel, Kristy Arbon, Catherine Brousseau, Emily Carpenter, Amita Chopra and Jaylene Summers. In February 2010, twenty BCBS pilgrims set out to see Siddhartha’s stomping grounds, to walk and sit where he did 2,500 years ago. We found them in twenty-first century India, an … [Read more...]
The Sixth Sense
William Waldron
We are used to thinking of ourselves as autonomous agents experiencing an objective world that is out there, separate from us in here. This is as natural to us as breathing. Unfortunately such a view of the self inevitably brings with it a great deal of suffering. The Buddha has shown us how to overcome this suffering by teaching us how to see our experience of self more clearly. Following his guidelines, we can learn to see how we construct a sense of self from the raw material of experience. … [Read more...]
The Last Stronghold of Self
Gloria Taraniya Ambrosia
I find Buddhist practitioners to be quite good at establishing skillful intentions. We endeavor to keep the precepts, to rise up to the demands of daily practice, and to diminish sense desires. And this can be inspiring to witness. Our resolve is undeniable. Still, the thing I hear most often as a Dhamma teacher is how frustrating it can be trying to stay on course once we establish our intentions. We are constantly faced with patterns and habits that run contrary to our … [Read more...]