This article is adapted from a one- day workshop offered by Sylvia Boorstein at the Bane Center for Buddhist Studies on April 5, 1997. Since that time, Sylvia has also taught a ten-week course on Paramis at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. We begin this day of practice in the traditional way of honoring the Buddha and all those others who have awakened to the possibility of living a fully wise and compassionate life. We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the … [Read more...]
Secular mindfulness: potential & pitfalls
This article is based on a presentation at last year's conference at BCBS on Secular Buddhism. Introduction Imagine for a moment that you are a health & fitness trainer—you work with people who go the gym regularly and work out daily, to support them in their efforts to cultivate a perfectly-toned body. Over the past few years you've noticed that many other people in society are beginning to do some exercise—they don't work out daily, but perhaps they attend a weekly yoga class or go … [Read more...]
Buddhist Roots & Ethics
Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) have become a wide-spread treatment because of their secular nature. MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction) has been extremely successful in introducing large numbers of people to the value of mindfulness practice in coping with common sources of suffering, such as chronic pain. In removing these practices from their original context, Buddhadharma, much was left behind. The role of sīla or ethics, for example, in the cultivation of well-being, is being … [Read more...]
Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, & Compassionate Action
Robert Chodo Campbell and Koshin Paley Ellison co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (zencare.org), the first Buddhist organization to offer fully accredited chaplaincy training in America. They co-developed and co-lead the Buddhist Track in the Master in Pastoral Care and Counseling degree program at New York Theological Seminary. In July 2013 they taught at BCBS on the Buddha's remembrances about aging, illness and death. In February 2014, they will teach Love, Compassion, … [Read more...]
Secular Buddhism: New vision or yet another of the myths it claims to cure?
A hundred years ago, almost exactly, Karl Kraus, an eminent Austrian publicist and the German language's foremost satirist, famously claimed in his newspaper that Psychoanalysis is the very mental illness it claims to cure.1 Amusing and bitingly unfair, Kraus turned his violent dislike into a crafty aphorism. Today, we know how prejudiced and superficial his knowledge of psychoanalysis was when he wrote this, how personal slight rather than understanding led to what has become famous not for its … [Read more...]
Wheels of Fire: The Buddha’s Radical Teaching on Process
Ādittapariyāya Sutta: The Fire Sermon, SN 35.28 "Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye—experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain—that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with … [Read more...]
Unburdened With Duties & Frugal In Our Ways
The Personal Economy Of Right Livelihood For contemporary western lay practitioners of the Buddha's way, Right Livelihood (samma ājīva) is hardly the most compelling factor on the Eightfold Path. For us, livelihood is most often simply equated with our job, with what we do for a living, how we make our money. In the midst of our practice, we might pause for a quick mental check to confirm that we aren't supporting ourselves through any particularly egregious line of work, but we then move right … [Read more...]
Mindfulness & the Cognitive Process
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...]
What Feels Right about Right Action?
Is 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...]
Metta Sutta Verse 3
One would not do even the slightest thing That others who are wise would speak against. May they be secure and profoundly well; —May all beings be happy in themselves. na ca khuddam samācare kiñci, yena viññū pare upavadeyyuṃ. sukhino vā khemino hontu sabbe sattā bhavantu sukhitattā: One would not do even the slightest thing That others who are wise would speak against. It is interesting how these lines are phrased. Buddhist ethics are not about absolutes, and do not articulate a … [Read more...]