Author Archives: theravadin

Stronger prior to breaking

Or: The meaning of samyojana The Buddha defined four stages during the emancipation from Samsara: The stream enterer – someone who realized nibbana (magga-phala) through insight meditation for the first time with a reminder of 7 lives left in samsara…

Hearing background noise in the jhanas?

For many, this is a big issue. Some take the position to say, that it cannot be a jhana if the meditator experiences “any” (other) sense impression, than the meditation topic. Others say, wait a moment, i can clearly experience…

iti and sallakkheti

Have you ever wondered, where the Buddha’s “meditation instructions” are? Why doesn’t he talk about them in the Pali Canon? Or does he? Well, he does… In fact, he cannot get any clearer explaining how exactly your practice of Buddhist…

The king and the holy one

Or: How to recognize an enlightened being. Again, this sounds like a Zen story. But it is not. It is from the early days of Buddhist practice when Sri Lanka (in this case) was full of “Living Buddhist Masters”. Enjoy…

CST4 – additional dictionary resources

Frank Snow made his newly developed Chatta Sangayana Tipitaka v.4 very accessible. Especially when it comes to the dictionary. Here you can find a zip archive containing Buddhadatta’s Concise Pali-English and English-Pali dictionary in the correct format for the CST4….

Ksana – Pali Canon Search Engine & Reader

Even if you may be familiar with Tipitaka.Org’s online Tipitaka search engine you might not know that this search engine is, indeed, open source software and free to download: http://www.ksana.tw/ So with a 60MB download you get a web based…

no virtue – no meditation?

Why did the Buddha emphasis, over and over again, the necessity to keep the 5 basic precepts PURE in order to progress in meditation? Keep them for a couple of days while meditating and you will know! Nothing helps to…

Vitakka & Vicara – What do they mean?

Or: How do i find my way to the first jhana? Let’s say your meditation topic is Anapanasati (remembering the breath). So you would concentrate on breathing. If that is all you do, very soon, you would find yourself lost…

Remembering previous lives

Please add to the list of Prof. Ian Stevenson, Dr. Jim Tucker, Dr. Raymond Moody, Francis Story and Thomas Shroder one other name: i found Prof Erlendur Haraldsson website this afternoon. Have a look at these three cases from Libanon:…

Bahiya’s Bodhi

Do you have a favorite passage in the Suttapitaka?…Difficult question, there are so many gems. But this one is really special, IMHO. It’s a ZEN Masters dream come true in the Pali canon: ‘Tasmātiha te, bāhiya, evaṃ sikkhitabbaṃ – ‘diṭṭhe…