“Excellent!” (Context: The Buddha’s Passing.) The Buddha taught for about forty-five years. He left a body of teachings so voluminous it can take somebody reciting it full-time many months to do it. Just an initial detailed study of the...
Siddhattha became the Buddha at the age of thirty-five. He taught for the next forty-five years or so until he was eighty. At the ripe old age of eighty, he passed away, or more accurately, he entered final nirvana. His last days were documented in...
Friends, The Buddha passed without appointing a successor. Instead, he told the monks, “After my passing, the Dharma and the discipline (Dhamma-vinaya) I taught you shall be your teacher.” It took three remarkable individuals to preserve Dhamma-vinaya for all of us...
While Buddhist civilizations did not give birth to modern science, Buddhism can justifiably be called the “Science of the Mind”, as the Dalai Lama has done. That is because the entirety of one’s Buddhist training can be thought of as repeated applications of the...
“We prefer instruments that look deep inside the mind.” (Context: Buddhism’s comfort with modern science.) You may ask, if Buddhism was so comfortable with science, why didn’t they develop the fields of physics or chemistry or biology, and why didn’t...