Who are you? What’s your purpose? What does “success” mean to you? These are the big questions you need to answer for yourself. Don’t let others tell you. Don’t let media moguls or politicians or workplace bosses or spirit guides or life coaches or family and friends tell you. Sure, listen to the people you admire and trust but remember that their life experiences and their visions of success aren’t yours…
Buddhism teaches that the soul or ‘self’ is not a permanent entity but a combination of material and mental phenomena in constant flux. Researchers hypothesized that believing the soul or self to be illusory would mitigate the seemingly natural human instinct to fear death, and monastic Buddhists would be more generous and less afraid of death than lay Buddhists, Hindus and Christians. But their study published on 22 January 2018 apparently found otherwise…
A useful reminder of what constitutes meditation and its place within the grand scheme of canonical Buddhist teachings…
It’s not uncommon for Buddhists to feel like their practice has stalled. Concentration wavers, awareness is lost, doubts arise, and the Buddha’s supreme freedom from samsara seems hopelessly unattainable. It can be an especially trying time if you’re a solitary practitioner lacking the guidance of a skilled meditation teacher. But it’s also an opportunity to straighten your views and re-affirm your refuge in the Triple Gem.
As a Buddhist practitioner I reckon I need to be very clear on what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. In this post I explain how Buddhist morality is more to do with the effects of one’s own wilful actions (kamma) upon one’s own state of mind and less about the consequences for others. Nothing in this world is inherently good or inherently bad, but the Buddha’s doctrine of anicca, dukkha, anatta should not be understood as some kind of nihilism where ‘anything goes’…
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