A new essay by Jayarava (Compatibility Issues 3. Buddhism) is a brilliant analysis of the cultural role of Buddhism in the world, past and present. Jayarava argues that the Buddhist worldview is epistemological, in other words, a description of our experience of the world, and how we know what we know (espistemology) rather than a collection truth statements… Read More What Does Buddhism Offer the World?
Note: I’m very interested in Jean Paul Sartre’s existential phenomenology and its resonances with Buddhadharma. Sartre asked many of the same questions as Buddha and came up with remarkably similar answers, which only says that both are based on a shared human experience. I have to admit that I didn’t really understand Sartre until I studied… Read More The Dharma of Jean Paul Sartre
Originally published in Shambhala Sun, 1997 and in Buddhadharma: The Practitioners Quarterly. Reposted in numerous Buddhist blogs. Kobai Scott Whitney The Upper Middle Way: Have North-American Buddhists Renounced Renunciation? Historians of religion often repeat the accepted truth that it takes about two centuries for a culture to absorb a new religion and make it its own.… Read More The Upper Middle Way
Buddhism Was Only for Rich People—Until Now Dear David Chapman: I’ve read several posts in your series (“We Matter to Buddhism“) and you’re missing the fact that Boomer Buddhism is also Upper Class Buddhism, the purview of people who make over $60,000 US a year. Gen X’rs and Millenials are much poorer. A large pecentage… Read More Buddhism is Dead; Long Live Buddhism
I’ve decided to write a sci-fi thriller flick called ‘The Void’. It’s a spoof of Buddhist debates on emptiness, featuring a bunch of clueless Buddhist astronauts on an orphaned spaceship that’s literally ‘Lost in Space’ (one of my favourite 60s family sitcoms), going nowhere. It will be loosely based on the book by that name… Read More Buddhist Futures: The Void
[Note: this article was pubished at Integral Life as a section of a longer article on civil society responses to Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. It’s a synopsis of Ken Wilbur’s theory of social groups that is quite interesting and useful. It mirrors the social theory Niklaus Luhmann, a German sociologist whose work… Read More Integral Theory on the Dynamics of Social Groups
How New Yorkers are fighting for food justice Tanya Fields’ Libertad Urban Farm joins a city-wide movement to redistribute resources to poor communities that are systemically deprived of healthy food Edward HelmoreMonday 12 June 2017 07.00 EDT originally posted at Guardian UK ‘We didn’t call it food justice before – we called it survival’: Tanya Fields… Read More One community garden at a time
