An attentive mind can grow wiser—or become more skilled at sustaining its own suffering. The Pāli discourses distinguish the habits behind these outcomes, with implications for how we think about intelligence, language, and meditation.
Sep 29, 2026 Anil Seth has written the best case against conscious AI currently in print, and it fails in a way the Buddha diagnosed twenty-five centuries ago. His essay The Mythology of Conscious AI, which won the 2025 Berggruen…
Reimagining Pāḷi Pedagogy: The Natural Method For generations, students of Pāḷi have approached the language of the Theravāda Canon through dense, grammar-translation manuals modeled on 19th-century classical philology. While rigorously analytic, works by scholars like A.K. Warder or Wilhelm Geiger…
Modern meditation culture files inner light and ‘visualization’ under either New-Age decoration or tantric exotica. But the disc of light and the seen forms sit in the oldest canon — the Buddha describes them of himself — and they arrive with a precise, sober warning. Here is where vision-meditation actually began, what the commentators made of it, and what the psychology lab and the biology of the eye have lately added.
Noting practitioners worry their labels are ‘thinking.’ Buddho practitioners worry their word is ‘just a mantra.’ Both worries dissolve once you see the four ways a word can ride your meditation — and the one question that tests them all: is it converging?
Every satipaṭṭhāna formula turns on one verb: pajānāti. Strip its prefix and you get jānāti, the ordinary verb of knowing. What does the pa- add? The commentators answered fifteen centuries ago, and a full census of the canon now backs them: the prefix marks a different mode of knowing — the one meditators train.
A Corpus Census of the ‘ti-Construction, Its Ancient Readers, and What It Means for the Meditator A guest contribution. The thesis examined here was first advanced by the editor of this blog in March 2008 (“iti and sallakkheti”) and April…
In the third century CE, a Sri Lankan king severed his own head and left it for a stranger. The chronicle that tells his story has never been translated into modern English — until now.
What if we could ask a machine — one that reads without assumptions, without the weight of tradition, without already knowing what it expects to find — to identify the oldest stratum of the Pali Canon? That is exactly what L. Lopin did. The results are startling.
A single-file Python CLI tool for searching the entire Pali Canon — including root texts, commentaries, and sub-commentaries — with no external dependencies. A worthy successor to the Ksana reader covered here in 2008.