The very first sutta in the enormous collection known as the Connected Discourses (Saṁyutta Nikāya) has a spirit being come to visit the Buddha and ask him how he “crossed the flood.” The Buddha replies with a beautiful metaphor on the kind of effort needed to progress on the path:  “By not halting, friend, and by not straining I crossed […]

Welcome to a new year. Have you got your resolutions in order? How soon are you expecting to break them? We must joke about New Year’s resolutions because we either don’t take them seriously, or wish we could but lack the means to do so. If the latter is true, and I thank it is because most people are sincere

One of the more startling implications of the Buddha’s insight into past and future is how deeply individual objects, events, and persons are best understood as interconnected conditioned processes. The interconnected part is heartwarming at first glance, but it startles because it undercuts everything we think as solid—not just objects like in Thich Nhat Hanh’s elegant “see the trees and

There’s a reason “waking up” is the metaphor used for liberation in the Buddhist system. When we wake up from a dream, we understand that although the experiences in the dream very much have an affect on our lives and the states of heart and mind that are the texture of this life, in a basic physical sense, they did

Destroyed is birth, the holy life has been lived, what had to be done has been done, there is no more for this state of being. Rebirth is ended, the spiritual journey has been completed, what had to be done has been done, there is no return to any state of existence. This is the stock phrase from the Pāli

A couple Dharma friends and I were just having an email convo around how to talk to spiritually-oriented progressives about the climate crisis. Here’s some of my reflections. Earlier references in the conversation included the work of Rebecca Solnit and Marcelle McManus on the problems with individual lifestyle as a focus for climate action. When I use the word “renunciation”

Why do we get so freaked out? Can we stop freaking out already? First, we have to understand what’s happening. And then do what’s necessary to not freak out. That’s the four Noble Truths, slightly out of order (2, 3, 1, 4). The Buddha understood that making the world, especially other people, conform to our preferences is a losing battle.

In preparation for the task of awakening, Gotama brought his mind into a state that would be useful for a very specific process. “Awakening” is shorthand for replacing ignorance with knowledge of how things really are, and finding “the deathless,” which was what Gotama called his goal. After fleeing a life of comfort, family, and hedonistic pleasure, he had practiced

Without explicitly using the word very much, time is the issue at the heart of Buddhist practice. We see it alluded to everywhere: in the constant refrain that all conditioned things are impermanent, in “the deathless” being the goal of the path, in memory (sati) being the literal translation of what we usually call mindfulness. How—and how much—we remember, what

All the instructions in meditative stability (samādhi) depend on the settling of well-worn patterns of obsessive thought and reactive emotionality. The word “concentration” is what’s usually used for these practices, and I get why folks don’t like the word. It smacks of internal effort applied in a forceful way, and that’s unpopular nowadays. Because stability is attained through calming the