Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Feb 10, 2012, 3:00 am
IN THIS ESSAY I am going to present a speculative theory about where the Buddhist idea of karma comes from. It is backed up by some circumstantial evidence, and fits into a larger argument, but on its own might seem a little flimsy. More background can be found in my essay Possible Iranian Origins ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Feb 3, 2012, 3:00 am
I WAS SITTING AROUND earlier today thinking about evil, as you do, and it occurred to me that I had never looked up pāpa in the dictionary. When I did I found quite an interesting story. Pāpa is the same in Pāli and Sanskrit and is almost always translated as 'evil'. Interestingly pāpa and evil ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jan 27, 2012, 3:00 am
My Great-great Grandmother (96) with my Father (6 months) ca. 1936I'VE NOW WRITTEN a number of Raves on the subject of afterlife beliefs. I've looked at the notion from a variety of perspectives: phenomenological, historical, and taxonomic. Along the way I have been drawn to a particular conclusion ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jan 20, 2012, 3:00 am
John Lennon asked this question and concluded that the way to have a revolution was not to change the world, but to "change your mind instead". In this he was probably influenced by his Hindu guru. Behind the idea that we should give up trying to change the world and focus solely on changing our min...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jan 13, 2012, 3:00 am
FOR SOME YEARS NOW I have been interested in the the question: what is it that arises in dependence on conditions? I treat the question as a kind of koan, digging deeper though textual scholarship, and using it as a focus for reflection on my own experience from moment to moment, hoping to see throu...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jan 6, 2012, 3:00 am
Scythian Horseman Lessing Photo ArchiveIN 2009 WHEN I WAS writing about the name of the Buddha I mentioned in passing that some people thought that marriage customs attributed to the Buddha's family in the Pāli Commentarial tradition pointed to the Buddha being Dravidian rather than Aryan. Someone ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Dec 30, 2011, 3:00 am
MANY OF MY BUDDHIST FRIENDS struggle with the idea that the intentions behind actions determine the ethical value of them, i.e. whether they are skilful or unskilful. Some really don't see how this could be. In studying the Kālāma Sutta a penny dropped for me about intention and action. There is a...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Dec 23, 2011, 3:00 am
DAVID HUME is perhaps the greatest thinker to write in the English language, or so everyone says. I've been looking at his 1748 essay Of Miracles which is very readable and couched in English not too different from my own. I think it is still relevant to the kinds of discussions that religious peopl...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Dec 16, 2011, 3:00 am
I HAVE WRITTEN THAT I do not believe in virtual community, that the phrase itself is a misnomer, and I have been critical of the role of technology in our lives. Recently my attention was drawn to a rave entitled Pandora’s Vox: On Community in Cyberspace by Carmen 'humdog' Hermosillo posted on The...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Dec 9, 2011, 3:00 am
This word saṅkhāra is one of the most puzzling terms in our Buddhist lexicon. It is used a number of different ways, meaning quite different things in different contexts. There is no reason why a word should not have different senses - a phenomenon known technically as polysemy 'many meanings'. I...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Dec 2, 2011, 3:00 am
JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO at a Saṅgha picnic one of our group remarked that an elaborate crop circle had appeared in fields near where they live. The person began to speculate about the mystical symbolism of the crop circle and seemed unaware that crop circles are all artificially made. I mentioned...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Nov 25, 2011, 3:00 am
©I've just come across the website Buddha Torrents which specialises in linking to illegally copied and uploaded Dharma books. You would have thought that facilitating the stealing of Dharma books would be a no-brainer - just don't do it - but many Buddhists apparently feel quite comfortable with t...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Nov 18, 2011, 3:00 am
This is an extract from my (unfinished) translation of the Tevijjā Sutta, but I'm presenting it with a little twist. In this extract I have replaced "Brahmins" with "Buddhist Teachers" and "Brahmā" with "Nirvāṇa", and tweaked the text a little to fit around the change - the structure and most o...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Oct 28, 2011, 3:00 am
THE IDIOMATIC PROVERB in my title today is one of the strangest in the language I think. It refers to someone who wants everything. The basic idea is that having eaten your cake you no longer have any cake. So you can either have cake, or you can eat cake, but not both. I think Western Buddhists wa...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Oct 21, 2011, 3:41 am
I WAS COMMENTING ON a discussion on Google+ regarding an article by B Alan Wallace recently when something crystallized out in my thinking about the history of Buddhist ideas. One of my long term interests is the way the definitions of dhammas evolved. Early on it seems reasonably clear that dhammas...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Oct 14, 2011, 3:00 am
KŪKAI'S 声字実相義 (Shōji jissō gi) alongside translations of the two dialogues and some introductory essays. In his text Kūkai develops a way of interpreting mantra, a hermeneutic, which relies on different syntactical analyses of the combination word: Shō-ji-jissō 'sound, word, reality...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Oct 7, 2011, 3:59 am
"Everything we've learned... is just a theory, and it might well be wrong... the greatest thrill of all would be to prove something wrong." Dr Kathy Romer, Astrophysicist. THERE IS A CONVERSATION I seem to have again and again when talking with Buddhists. It's about what science is, and how scienti...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Sep 30, 2011, 3:00 am
SĀRIPUTTA WAS ONE OF THE TWO chief disciples of Gotama the Buddha. He was born a Brahmin and wandered with his companion Moggallāna in search of the deathless. A chance meeting with Assajī lead to his breakthrough insight and becoming a Buddhist. He was held in extremely high esteem by all who kn...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Sep 23, 2011, 3:00 am
I'VE COMMENTED BEFORE on the episode where the Buddha speaks to Bāhiya in a post entitled "In the Seen...". He begins the famous speech with: "in the seen, only the seen; in the heard only the heard...". This is somewhat cryptic, but I noted that I had found another sutta which acts as a commentary...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Sep 16, 2011, 3:00 am
music of the spheresFIRST USED IN ENGLISH in 1570s the word phenomenon is traced back to the Greek phainesthai 'to appear, to seem' from phainō 'to show, to bring light'. For instance in The Odyssey, when marking the start of a new day, Homer often used the lovely phrase: phanē rhododaktulos Ēōs...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Sep 9, 2011, 3:00 am
Heraclitusπάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει. Everything flows and nothing stays. Heraclitus quoted in Plato. Cratylus. 402a. Perseus Digital Library. IT CAN SOMETIMES SEEM that Buddhists take the great insight of the Buddha to be that "everything ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Sep 2, 2011, 3:00 am
A diagram of the traditional 12 nidānas and explanations from Pāli and Chinese Āgama texts. Click for a larger image. TODAY I WANT TO EXPLORE the rather mysterious term 'nāmarūpa' in a Buddhist context. The word has a history pre-dating its use in Buddhist texts, but I don'...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Aug 26, 2011, 3:00 am
dopamineMOST BUDDHISTS AND MANY NON-BUDDHISTS would not be surprised by statements along the lines that desire and craving are what cause us to suffer. The message is repeated throughout Buddhist literature, both canonical and commentarial. But what is it about desire and pleasure that is prob...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Aug 19, 2011, 2:30 am
I'M AN AMATEUR SCHOLAR. I don't get paid to write about Buddhism. Although I've been a Buddhist for 18 years, like many Buddhist bloggers, I have almost no training in linguistics or Indic languages; no training is philosophy, history, anthropology or any of the relevant disciplines.[1] I'm not a li...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Aug 12, 2011, 2:45 am
This is the 250th post on this blog. That's 250 raves in a little less than six years, one per week since the beginning of 2008. I started out limiting myself to 1000 words, though that has gone by the board. So I've written perhaps 300,000 words, mostly on the Buddhadharma. Thanks to all my readers...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Aug 5, 2011, 3:00 am
FOR SOME TIME I have wanted to write a critique of the Doctrine of the Two Truths. The task is potentially a large and difficult one because there is no single version of the idea that is universally accepted, and the history of its development is complex. Some version of the idea of Two Truths is a...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jul 29, 2011, 2:38 am
Clipart ETCI'VE ARGUED IN THE PAST that the problem of suffering, especially as conceived of by Buddhists and experienced in the present, may well arise out of civilisation itself. For instance the food surpluses initiated by agriculture led our relationship with hunger, and the pleasurable sensatio...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jul 22, 2011, 3:00 am
Solitary retreat hut Danakoṣa Retreat Centre MY TEXT TODAY is quite well known. The version usually cited is in the Vinaya, but I've opted for the Aṅguttara Nikāya version because it will be easier for people to find other translations to compare mind with. If one is stuck with having to read t...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jul 15, 2011, 3:00 am
teaching Buddha Asian ArtsI'VE BEEN PONDERING FAITH quite a bit recently. I've written a number of times about belief, and then last year was interviewed by Ted Meissner of The Secular Buddhist. Subsequently I joined a discussion group in which we talked about faith and belief; and about secularism ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jul 8, 2011, 3:00 am
© Sidney Harris sciencecartoons.com MY TITLE THIS WEEK is taken from a book by Bishop Shelby Spong, who, apart from having a delightfully resonant surname, wrote Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, a book I read long before converting to Buddhism. I no longer recall much about Bishop Spong's op...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jul 1, 2011, 3:00 am
I'VE ALREADY WRITTEN quite a lot on the confusion surrounding the name of the Buddha, and concluded that we don't really know what his name was. More recently I was pondering the Buddha's biography and considering the two different accounts of his going forth: the familiar elaborate version in which...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jun 24, 2011, 2:00 am
PHILOSOPHER THOMAS METZINGER is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing he has had a number of out-of-body experiences - spontaneous, waking and vivid - and he takes such experiences seriously. He says that any theory of consciousness must account for such experiences or it is "just not i...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jun 17, 2011, 3:00 am
I STARTED TO BE INTERESTED in this topic of the different responses to the certainty of death and found it hard to find information organised in the way that I wanted to think about it. I was looking for a taxonomy of afterlife beliefs, or eschatologies, but what one generally finds is the beliefs o...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jun 10, 2011, 3:00 am
Rañjana yig gmo + extension and double daṇḍaI have often wondered about the symbols one sees at the beginning and end of texts and mantras. I've been researching them for my forthcoming book. It possible to consider these as simple decoration, but scholars of Buddhist texts and inscriptions hav...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Jun 3, 2011, 3:00 am
Assutavā Sutta (SN 12.61, PTS S ii.94-95) THUS HAVE I HEARD. One time the Buddha was staying in Sāvatthi in the Jeta Grove, in the park of Anāthapiṇḍika… of this body four elements can be seen. Therefore the unlearned folk might become fed-up, lose interest, and be free. However that which...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - May 27, 2011, 3:00 am
I WAS VERY PLEASED to receive a review copy of Vishvapani's (i.e. Viśvapāṇi) new book on the life of of the Buddha. I was involved in several email exchanges with the author during the writing of the book, earning me a mention in the acknowledgements as making "perceptive comments". I also provi...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - May 20, 2011, 3:00 am
THE URBAN MYTH that the Nazi swastika goes one way, but the sacred symbol of India goes the other way seems to still be current. Sadly, this is not true. The official Nazi Party emblem, adopted in 1932, was the clockwise swastika, and this is often seen on Buddhist images as well. Jains even use the...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - May 13, 2011, 3:00 am
IN THE TRIRATNA MOVEMENT, like many other Buddhist groups, we celebrate the Buddha's awakening about now, to coincide with the 2nd full moon after the Vernal Equinox. We call this festival Buddha Day, and it is trined with Dharma Day, two full moons later in July, and Sangha Day in November (a non-t...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - May 6, 2011, 3:00 am
In this post I want to look at a theme that I explored in my recent talk at the London Buddhist Centre (available on Free Buddhist Audio). Thomas Metzinger points out that evolution has imbued all life with a powerful urge to continuity. We humans experience this on a number of levels - we will do a...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Apr 29, 2011, 2:35 am
I've already blogged about Thomas Metzinger a couple of times. In this post I want to write about another of his ideas. His book The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self opens with the words "In this book, I will try to convince you that there is no such thing as a self" and ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Apr 22, 2011, 3:00 am
THE KĀLĀMA SUTTA is probably over-rated. It is an interesting sutta, but far too much has been claimed for it, and so it has become something of an albatross around the neck of Buddhists. It's wrongly quoted in support of a raft of ideas, many rooted in 19th Century Romanticism, that appeal to mo...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Apr 15, 2011, 2:50 am
I have now identified more than two dozen texts which describe the Spiral Path. Spiral path at 10.61 & 10.62 The beginning of craving-for-becoming isn’t clear. And yet craving-for-becoming has a specific condition (idappaccaya). Craving-for-becoming is fed, and fulfilled by ignorance, Ignorance is...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Apr 8, 2011, 3:00 am
LAST WEEK I DWELT in some detail on the negative criteria in the Kālāma Sutta - trying to tease out the intended meaning of the terms individually and collectively. My conclusion was that the intention of the text was not to provide general decision making criteria, or to encourage 'free thinking'...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Apr 1, 2011, 3:00 am
IN THE KĀLĀMA SUTTA the Buddha provides a list of negative criteria for making moral decisions. These are quite interesting, but I don't think any of the mainstream translations really capture what's going on. We all seem to agree that the criteria form sets, but the translations offered don't see...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Mar 25, 2011, 3:00 am
MANY WORDS HAVE INTERESTING STORIES associated with them. This is a seventh set of terms which have caught my eye as having some interest, but which did not rate a whole post on their own. There is a list of other terms I've written about at the bottom of this post. I've resisted this one for while ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Mar 18, 2011, 6:20 am
THIS IS A DIAGRAM showing the Canonical variants of paṭicca-samuppāda in both its lokiya (left) and lokuttara (middle) forms along with the bojjhaṅgas or factors of awakening (right) which have some cross-over. The lokiya being more usually know as the 'nidānas', or in the Triratna movement th...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Mar 11, 2011, 2:12 am
I HAVE BEEN READING The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger. It is a book with some flaws, which I'm not going to dwell on, but on the whole Metzinger presents a fascinating theory of consciousness, selfhood, and self-consciousness. Metzinger is a philos...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Mar 4, 2011, 2:00 am
IT IS SOMETIMES ASSUMED THAT BUDDHISM is an introspective path, best suited to dreamy, inward looking, introverts. After all we spend a lot of time on omphaloskepsis, or navel gazing, don't we? And the ideal Buddhist is often portrayed as a solitary, reclusive meditator. Buddhism can easily be seen ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Feb 25, 2011, 3:00 am
One of the main critiques of traditional Buddhism put forward by Western Buddhists is against superstition. Western Buddhists promote such ideas as: Buddhism is a rational religion; there is coherence between science and Buddhism; Buddhists are naturally atheist; and Buddhism does not require blind ...
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Jayarava posted an article on The Jayarava Rave - Feb 18, 2011, 3:00 am
IN THE INTRODUCTION to their book Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture, the authors Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley admit they intend to cause trouble. The audience for the book is probably involved on one side or the other of the sometimes bitter scholarly conflict they are writi...
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