“Tell Me About Me” by Annie Blanchard I’ve been gone a long time, and now that I’m back, one of the first things I’m doing is touching base in old familiar Buddhist places where I’ve hung out in the distant past. In science fiction fandom the word for what I’m doing is called “ego-scanning”. I type “Blanchard” into the search box on a forum and see if anyone’s read anything I’ve written. Professor Gombrich said it takes about ten years for anyone to take notice, so it’s time now, right? And there have been a rare few mentions. What I like about ego-scanning is that it turns up interesting on ..read more

This really is going to be a post about saṅkhārā, honest it is, and soon. But first, I need to cover two personal points. #1 is to say this is a blog, and I’m a writer and a story-teller who specializes in conveying my own life in my writing. In the case of what I write here, my blog is representative of how much my study of early Buddhism is part of my life. Not just the practice — lots of people write about how practice affects their lives, valuable writing which I admire — but about the study and what I find. #2 is to say that the more I study the Buddha’s descriptions of dependent arising ..read more

I’ve been noticing — both recently and many times before — that the way most writers thinking in secular ways about the Early Buddhist Texts (EBTs) approach those texts is very different from my approach, and I’m wondering if I’m on the right track here (am I seeing this accurately?) or if I’m mistaken. I’d love to hear what you think. What I find is that the approach I’ve been seeing is for most thinkers, researchers, academics — writers all — to read the suttas and when they find something that they see as self-contradictory, or confusing, or even not matching with their experience of realit ..read more

another “importance of how we translate” post   DN 15 is one of the classic locations providing both an overview and detail on dependent arising (DA). It seems to be a middle-years formulation. That it’s not one of the oldest suttas on the subject is indicated by its crisply linear structure, so it’s likely later than “Quarrels and Disputes”1 which has two tracks running parallel to each other. DN 15 only has nine of twelve links that appear in the full version, though, so it is likely earlier than many others. The fact that in one of DN 15’s rounds of this-begets-that the Buddha heads it ..read more

This post first appeared December 2015 on the Secular Buddhist Association website. You’ll find some interesting discussion in the comments there.     How readers understand Buddhism depends a great deal on how it is presented to us. This should be obvious. Though Buddhism teaches us to see for ourselves whether what we learn applies to our lives, how we practice, and what we look for when we practice is going to be affected by how we are told to practice, and what we are told to look for. Ironically, this is largely the point of what the Buddha taught: that our perceptions affect w ..read more

I have recently gotten interested in the two versions of what happened during the night that the Buddha got describable insights, during or shortly after his moment of awakening. He speaks of what he saw during the three watches of the night. The sutta-based versions describe “The Three Knowledges” but that title is clearly his using the Brahmins’ Three Knowledges (of the three Vedas) in the playful way he uses many words and phrases of his day, twisting them to have a very different meaning from the definitions the originators would use. Instead of knowledge of the Rg, Yajur, and Sama Vedas ..read more

In the comments on my page of links about Dependent Arising, Eisel Mazard wrote: “Or, we could directly read what the original Pali has to say, we could be honest about it, and we could be open about the history of the ‘European tradition’ of interpretation that has created so many strange assumptions about what the text is supposed to imply (but doesn’t, in fact, say)… “If you can’t read primary sources (in Pali) it’s a sad fact that nobody playing the game makes it easy for you to know where the original text stops, and where ‘interpretation’ starts. If you have the time to read that articl ..read more

Goodness, where I have I been. It’s been too long — more than two years! — since I’ve updated this blog. I’ve had plenty of thoughts I felt suitable to blog about. I even, recently, wrote a draft of a post, but it came out to over 10k words, so I’ll have to figure out how best to break it up before putting it up here. I’ve started lots of other drafts, but have found them leading to incomplete lines of thinking. I’ve written and had a couple of papers published. Mostly, I’ve been working on a book that will serve to clarify my thinking enough to sort out the difference between what I see as we ..read more

Today I was listening to a radio interview with Tracy Kidder (“The Soul of a New Machine”) talking about non-fiction writing as pertains to his newest book, Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction and he was asked whether using the passive voice was appropriate. I really liked his answer, which was that it was, “when the thing done is more important than the doer.” The subject of the passive voice came up during the Intensive Pali Course taught by Professor Gombrich earlier this month. He had mentioned in the handout for the course that there seems to be a particular fondness for the use of the ..read more

“Tell Me About Me” by Annie Blanchard I’ve been gone a long time, and now that I’m back, one of the first things I’m doing is touching base in old familiar Buddhist places where I’ve hung out in the distant past. In science fiction fandom the word for what I’m doing is called “ego-scanning”. I type “Blanchard” into the search box on a forum and see if anyone’s read anything I’ve written. Professor Gombrich said it takes about ten years for anyone to take notice, so it’s time now, right? And there have been a rare few mentions. What I like about ego-scanning is that it turns up interesting on ..read more