Walking the Buddha’s Path
Meditation, Relationality, and Getting Well in an Unwell World
About this Course
Something needs to change. We find ourselves moving through a world shaped by the projects and struggles of our ancestors, reckoning with the inheritance they left us, part beautiful, part terrible. We live in a place and time where every generation’s vision of how to live well is already obsolete by the time their children take the wheel. Each of us is one of those children, and for many of us our way has been marked by poor guidance, distorted histories, and the erosion of grounded, healthy culture.
The ancient South Asian teacher we call the Buddha established a path of community-based training in response to social upheaval and the need he saw for a new spirituality of heart, inner clarity, and accountability to the web of life. His principles, which have always moved against the stream of the prevailing culture, offer those who take them up a tested path to well-being and a vision for human flourishing. These teachings are laid out in a stunning body of oral literature called the Pāli Canon, preserved by the Buddhist community known as the Theravāda, or the “Elder Way.”
In this 5-week course designed for beginners—the first in a series of deepening practice and study courses—you will build the foundations of a sustainable and dynamic Theravāda Buddhist training. We’ll explore the basic skills of relationship and community-tending described by the Buddha, establish a solid meditation practice, and engage with the Pāli Canon as both a teaching source and a literature of extraordinary beauty and depth.
Each week you’ll work with new meditation instructions together, read passages from the discourses, and explore the implications of the teachings for your life here and now. You will come away with an approach to Buddhist practice that is flexible, curious, and joyful, an earthy spirituality that honors the wise and well ancestors and the possibility of real awakening in our time.
Class created for New York Insight, fall 2024.
Take this Course
All courses are offered in the Gift Economy model. This course is available on a wide sliding scale, based on self-assessment of your income and ability to offer your resources in a way that supports others with lesser resources to attend. Please support us in using the Gift Economy model by engaging sincerely with the process and selecting the highest level you can on the sliding scale (or beyond it). Your generosity directly gifts scholarship support to those who need it, and allows us to share these teachings with everyone who might benefit from them, regardless of access to wealth. Thank you!
SELECT A TIER TO ENROLL:
Further scholarships are offered as widely as possible and based on request. Our goal is to not turn anyone away for lack of resources, both for this course and future offerings. Email us here to request a scholarship.
What’s included
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We begin with a set of short discourses that describe the centrality of the Eightfold Path, and defines each of the eight aspects of the path. This chapter begins with the teaching that ignorance, our inherited and habitual state, is the starting place for our practice as it is the source of all distress and suffering.
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 28 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
Further study links
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In this class, we will look at how mindfulness is described in the early Buddhist texts, and some of the basic practices taught in the meditative limbs of the path. We will see how Buddhist mindfulness is more specific than many contemporary presentations, but that even a very simple practice of directed attention can have tremendous benefit in our lives.
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 33 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 2 hours
Further study links
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This week we’ll explore the concept of purification and read a famous discourse that uses this simile to understand how the disciplines of practice work on the heart and mind to cultivate beautiful states that lead further into happiness and the conditions for insight and awakening.
Reading content
Recorded meditation, 32 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 1.5 hours
Further study links
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This week we’ll talk about ethics and the relationship between intention, choices, and the impact of our actions. We’ll read a discourse given by the Buddha to his son Rāhula, who was a novice monk. In it we find a strong teaching on looking for the impact of our actions, and learning over time how to act in ways that are more and more beneficial both for our own well-being and the well-being of others.
Reading content
Five ethical precepts chants in the ancient Buddhist language of Pāli, with translations.
Recorded meditation, 30 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 2 hours
Further study links
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In this final class of the first round of this course, we read the Buddha’s famous first discourse, given to his five ascetic friends just a few weeks after his awakening. In this text, which is chanted and memorized by millions of Buddhists, lays out the basic structures of the entire system, including the “middle way,” the “Four Noble Truths,” and the “Noble Eightfold Path.”
Reading content
The “three refuges” chants in the ancient Buddhist language of Pāli, with translations.
Recorded meditation, 30 minutes
Recorded class teaching, 2 hours
Further study links
Friendly for both beginning and advanced practitioners, and sometimes I don't know which one I am. :) There was a lot to chew on and practice with—much more than I expected! It was a very rich experience.
— Class Participant
Meet your teacher, Dr. Sean Oakes
He/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English ancestry, living on unceded Pomo land in Northern California
Sean teaches Buddhism, Yoga, and somatic practice, focusing on philosophical inquiry, trauma healing, devotion, and social engagement as expressions of the Dharma. He wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance, and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and elsewhere. Read more about…