Monthly Archives: May 2008

The world II – concept and reality

There is one major misconception in current mainstream – understanding of Buddhism (if there is such a thing 🙂 ) IMHO, brought about by a rather misconceived interpretation of one very important and frequent term in the discourses of the…

Lets talk about the world!

Normally, when we talk about the world, we think of mountains, oceans, rivers, valleys, towns, transportation, globalisation, earth, planets, the universe. When the Buddha spoke about “the world” he had something else in mind: As he was sitting there, he…

Are you a monk? – Consider only one duty left!

If you are a monk, i guess you do not read (online). But if you do, this text was written exactly for you 🙂 In 100 BC Buddhist monks faced a tough question: “Should we preferably memorize and thus keep…

Can you feel the sense stream’s drag?

There are a couple of instances in the Pitaka, where the Buddha compares our moment to moment experience (zoom out and you would call it “life”) with a swift river. In some similes he compares our journey from Samsara to…

Ingredients of insight progress

Even at Buddha’s time insight meditators went through times of doubt regarding their meditation practice. In the following case one monk thought he might simply ask his fellow monks how they practice and solve his own uncertainty. Unfortunately, they practiced…