Andrew Olendzki has been part of Barre Center for Buddhist Studies since its earliest days, bringing it to life, managing its operations and teaching countless courses to many grateful students. After moving into a full-time role as Senior Scholar in recent years, to focus more on scholarship and teaching exclusively, he is now continuing that role part time and embracing a new role with the Mind and Life Institute in Amherst and Hadley, Massachusetts. Insight Journal asked Andy to talk about … [Read more...]
MIT Meets the Monastery
Rajesh Kasturirangan is a faculty member at the National Institute of Advanced Studies at Bangalore, India. He has a doctorate in cognitive science from MIT. He has taught at BCBS about the overlap between Buddhadharma and cognitive science, most recently in 2009. This month, Insight Journal talks with him about a new online community he is starting to explore these issues further. In addition to the implications of its title, MIT meets the Monastery, he uses phrases like "Wisdom and Science," … [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...]
New rivers, new rafts: The Secular Buddhism Conference
Here some clansmen learn the Dhamma—discourses, stanzas, expositions, verses, exclamations, sayings, birth stories, marvels, and answers to questions—and having learned the Dhamma, they examine the meaning of those teachings with wisdom. Examining the meaning of those teachings with wisdom, they gain a reflective acceptance of them. They do not learn the Dhamma for the sake of criticising others and for winning in debates, and they experience the good for the sake of which they learned the … [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...]
True & False: Dharma After the Western Enlightenment
Insight Journal: How do Western Buddhists, in spite of our many modern views, take their forms too literally? Rita Gross: Since I often teach in a Mahāyāna setting, let me use an example from that tradition. According to Mahāyāna legend, the Buddha hid his Mahāyāna teachings in the realm of the nāgas, serpent-like creatures who dwell under the sea, because his students were not yet ready to receive them. Eventually these teachings were retrieved by the great 2nd-century master Nāgārjuna. This … [Read more...]
A Classical Future: Interview with Insight Journal Editor
It was about three years ago that the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (BCBS) first started distributing Dharma teachings by email on the full moon of each month, and about eighteen months ago the printed version of the Insight Journal became the electronically distributed full moon Insight Journal. Chris Talbott, who had been managing the production of these publications for several years, became the editor of the new offering, taking over the role from Andrew Olendzki, the BCBS senior … [Read more...]
Mindfulness in Buddhism & Psychology
Christopher K. Germer, PhD is a clinical instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School and a founding member of the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. He is the author of The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, and co-editor of Mindfulness and Psychotherapy and Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy. He taught Training Compassion: From the Buddha to Modern Psychology, with Mu Soeng, at BCBS September 7-9, 2012. Insight Journal asked Germer to talk about some key aspects of 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...]