There’s an “Interfaith Blog Event” going on at 3 different blogs. The topic is karma, and it’s being written about simultaneously by Mike at Unknowing Mind, Jon Pennington at Jesusfollower’s Journal, and Sojourner at A Pagan Sojourn. Mike writes from a Mahayana Buddhist perspective; the orientation of the other two writers is described [...]
(The following is an excerpt from Chapter 8 of The Art of Happiness: Teachings of Buddhist Psychology, (Shambala, 1989), by Mirko Fryba. Fryba is a Czech Theravada monk, also known as Ayu Kusalanda Thera; the book was originally published in German as Anleitung zum Gluecklichsein.
It should be evident why the claims expressed here are [...]
Lotta good stuff out there today.
Found a couple of good sources on the Abhidhamma. One’s an online book by Nina Van Gorkom called Abhidhamma in Daily Life. The other is an online course (in 90 lessons!), originally given by John D. Hughes of the Buddhist Discussion Centre in Australia, and published in that [...]
Worth looking at today:
At Meaning of Life TV, an interview with Dan Dennett.Update: Kevin Kim at Big Hominid has some remarks about this interview,too.
A discussion on “What is Buddhism?” on Stephen Batchelor’s blog.
Nathaniel Cordova at Woodmore Village reports on a discussion he got into on another, unnamed blog, on the claim that “divine laws [...]
The Milindapanha is a Buddhist text which purports to record a series of conversations between King Milinda (Greek Menandros, Latin Menander), king of Bactria, and the monk Nagasena. Bactria was one of the Asian Greek kingdoms founded in the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquest of portions of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent; it [...]
The following story occurs in Book I of Hiuen Tsiang’s Buddhist Records of the Western World, and deserves to be recorded:
A former king of this country worshipped the Triple Gem. Wishing to pay homage to the sacred relics of the outer world, he intrusted the affairs of the empire to his younger brother on [...]
The following is quoted from pp. 39-41 of Mark Siderits’s Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy: Empty Persons (Ashgate Publishing Company, Burlington, VT, 2003.) It’s posted here as a supplement to my previous post.
The Reductionist denies that persons ultimately exist, but affirms the existence of such psychological events as pains. Since, Schechtman might assert, [...]
(Here’s another oldie from The Gadfly’s Buzz, originally posted 04/13/2005. This post was selected for the April 2005 Philosophy Carnival, a monthly roundup of interesting writing on philosophical topics from around the Web.)
Victor Reppert has a post about the Cartesian cogito which seemed relevant to the discussion of anatta and meditative experience that I’ve [...]