This might sound like a strange thing to say, but through this book, I am sharing several of my greatest loves: my love of meditation and the spiritual life, my love and gratitude for the Buddha and his transformative teachings, and my love for the physical place of Lord Buddha’s enlightenment. Bodhgaya, a holy site sacred to Buddhists from all around the world, is situated in Bihar state, northea…

Faith is an essential part of our practice, and it’s not something that magically appears on its own. Rather, the arising of faith takes effort. We need to direct our attention toward it to frequently reflect on the arising of faith as a real possibility for us. As Westerners, most of us are not on familiar ground when we reflect on faith. But it is an important quality for balancing the different…

Buddhist cultivation covers more than what we would understand through reading books or even through meditation. For instance, although solitary meditation is what we see in the discourses, one of the main features in the Vinaya and of the Buddhist life is the practice of community. You can recognize this especially when there is a big gathering such as today’s alms-giving ceremony, the Kathina. T…

Last night a number of the monks had an opportunity to go up to Ajahn Dtun’s kuṭi for a discussion on Dhamma. One of the themes brought up was the tendency for personal standards to decline in one’s practice. This is an important trend to examine. We can look at the direction our practice has taken over time— how we started, how we’ve been practicing, and where our practice seems to be headed. Tha…

Because the early texts rule out killing in all circumstances, attempts to formulate a Buddhist just-war theory ultimately have to fall back on one basic assertion: There’s something wrong with the texts. Because this assertion can take many forms, it’s useful to examine a few of them, to see how misleading they can be. That way, we won’t fall for them. The big one is this: • The moral ideals expr…

There’s a depressing pattern in human behavior that Mark Twain noted more than a century ago, and it’s with us still: The powers-that-be want a war. Politicians and the media start beating the drum, denouncing the evil intentions of the enemy and calling for all patriotic citizens to attack them. At first, people are reluctant to go along, but then religious leaders jump on the bandwagon, telling…

“Protecting oneself, one protects others; protecting others, one protects oneself. And how does one, in protecting oneself, protect others? By the repeated and frequent practice of meditation. And how does one, in protecting others, protect oneself? By patience and forbearance, by a non-violent and harmless life, by loving-kindness and compassion. ‘I shall protect myself’, in that way the Attendin…

The Buddha’s Dhamma—his teaching—is primarily focused on the question of how not to suffer from aging, illness, and death. It answers this question by offering practical advice on two levels: (1) how to experience aging, illness, and death without suffering from them; and (2) how to find a dimension where aging, illness, and death are never experienced ever again. As we will see, the two answers a…

In the classical Buddhist teachings, there are four gradations or stages of enlightenment that are described over and over again. The first level is called ‘stream-entry’. This represents an irreversible breakthrough into a quality of psychological integration or self-actualization or ‘emotional intelligence’ that will necessarily result, eventually, in the ‘unshakeable well-being’ of full enlight…

If we are focused in samādhi with continuous mindfulness, then sometimes the state known as pīti will arise. Pīti is characterised by physical sensations of coolness or of a rapturous energy thrilling throughout the body – like waves breaking on the shore – which can cause the body to sway and the hair to stand on end. These sensations are accompanied by mental perceptions of physical expansive…