bodhi tree swaying

Below is an extract from Emily Colette Wilkinson’s review of Marcus Aurelius: A Life, by Frank McLynn. The parallels with the Buddhist approach are striking, and I can’t help feeling again that it’s a tragedy that Stoic philosophy — the original Western Buddhism? — was stamped out by that Middle-Eastern upstart religion, the early Christian church.

Marcus’ creed held that virtue was its own reward and the only life goal worth pursuing. On the Stoic view, we have no power to determine whether we’ll be rich or poor, famous or infamous, sick or healthy, but we can control whether or not we are good. Thus, life’s pleasures and pains–poverty, disease, fame, death-become “indifferents” to the Stoics–i.e. matters that have no direct bearing on our moral wellbeing and so are irrelevant. As a Stoic, I might be poor and sick and

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Friday, November 13 is the day that the new and updated edition of my book on Buddhism and Vegetarianism, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View, will become available. I’m having an online book launch party all that day, but here’s a brief video from a friend of mine, explaining why he decided to become a vegetarian as part of his practice of the Buddhist precepts.

Friday, November 13. An easy date to remember!

It’s the day that the new and updated edition of my book on Buddhism and Vegetarianism, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View, will become available.

I’m celebrating the day by dedicating my whole time to being on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/bodhipaksa), (Facebook), and my blog (that’s where you are right now), talking about Buddhism and vegetarianism. And just generally hanging out as well, so that things don’t get too serious.

As well as playing the suave host and urging people to mingle, mingle, mingle, I’ll be posting articles, quotes, and video to feed into a discussion about this important topic. I’ll also be happy to take questions.

I’ll be online all day, from 9 until 9 (Eastern), but you can drop by on any of those three platforms (again, that’s Twitter, Facebook, my blog). Just remember to say “hi”! …

• Apparently God does not like his followers to resign for ethical violations, misuse of taypayers’ money, lying, and dereliction of duty, as Mark Sandford attests.
• "Joe" "The Plumber" calls for the assassination of a senator, or at least comes close. He also reveals a stunning grasp of history. I had no idea that Karl Marx predated the American Revolution.
• 3/4 of people in the US who are pushed into bankruptcy by medical problems have insurance. You can read about some health care horror stories in this NYT article.
• My 2-year-old pointed to NYT columnist Maureen Dowd’s picture on my monitor this morning and identified her by name. Maia, you rock! (She’d asked me Maureen’s name at least two months ago).
• Glenn Greenwald discusses the deaths (possibly by torture) of perhaps

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c4chaos on Twitter mentioned a post on Daily Kos on Buddhism and healthcare in the US — very apropos given my post of earlier today. It’s a bit "wouldn’t it be great if everyone would just think of the common good" but I think it’s a good start at framing a discussion in Buddhist terms.

You might even want to skip the long intro that covers the four noble truths to get to the section on the eightfold path, which starts:

Right view: bi-partisanship, triggers, co-ops, public options, market competition, socialism, single-payer, profit margins, trillion dollar price tags. In what way do any of these describe a working health care system?Right view would be to start by looking at the problem. What is, are, the problems with health care? Primarily, that some 45 million or more don’t have access to affordable coverage; that the

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Everything that happens is a result of karma. Well, no, actually.

One of the greatest misunderstandings of what the Buddhas taught is the idea that “everything that happens is a result of karma.” You’ll see many Buddhist teachers saying this, especially those teachers from the Tibetan traditions where this actually seems to be the accepted teaching on karma.

Karma, first of all, is just the Sanskrit word for “action” but it refers specifically to moral action. Vipaka is the word for the result of actions, which manifests as either happiness or unhappiness. The karmic status of an act depends on the underlying emotional/cognitive motivation, so that if we act on the basis of unskillful mental states such as greed, hatred, or delusion, we will experience suffering, while if we act on the basis of skillful mental states such as love, compassion, and mindfulness we’ll experience happiness. This is an example of “conditionality,” …

This post is part of some writing I’m doing for a book. It’s the first part of a chapter giving the background behind the Buddhist teachings of anatta (non-self) and sunyata (emptiness). Hopefully it’ll be followed soon by the second part of the chapter. Comments are welcome!

I became interested in Buddhist teachings because I was interested in meditation. At that time time I was still in high school, and experiencing some of the usual angst that teenagers experience, plus an extra dose because all of my best friends at school had moved away. Isolation, at that age, causes a pain that is piercing. I’d heard of meditation, and had the idea that it involved looking inside of yourself for your sources of happiness, well-being, and security. Since the outside world had proved to be very unreliable, that promise was alluring to an …

The notion of in vitro meat — flesh harvested from a vat rather than a living animal — seems straight from science fiction, which is perhaps not surprising given that NASA, the US space organization, originated the idea as a way to provide better-quality food for astronauts in space.

While the notion may seem far-fetched, some people are taking it very seriously indeed. PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, announced in 2008 a $1 million prize for the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

New Harvest, a nonprofit organization formed to promote the adoption of alternatives to meat, points out on its Web site, “Because meat substitutes are produced under controlled conditions impossible to maintain in traditional animal farms, they can be safer, more nutritious, less …

This is my first post created using Utterli, where I call a phone number and the message is automatically turned into an audio file that can be posted to my blog. It seems to have gone well, technically speaking, except that the email I sent with accompanying text didn’t make it into the body of the post. It seems that was my fault though, I posted from the wrong email account.

Update: For some weird reason the link to the post didn’t work. Utterli automatically gave the post the URL http://www.bodhipaksa.com/archives/1529 – but that came up as a broken …

I have a long-standing interest in science, and in fact I came perilously close at one point to getting into veterinary research after completing my vet degree, and I also have a passionate interest in the relationship between science and religion. So that — combined with the 200th anniversary Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origins of Species” gave me the perfect opportunity to post an article entitled, “Four reasons Buddhists can love evolution.”

A conversation on Twitter about spurious “Buddha” quotes (“The Buddha said…” followed by something the Buddha probably never said) reminded me of coming across a quote attributed to the Buddha that was apparently something that Elvis Presley said.

And that reminded me of an interesting page which has all but vanished from the internet, but which was thankfully preserved by Archive.org. The original page vanished in 2002. Actually, I exaggerate: the page merely moved. I dunno, the whole thing could be made up, as far as I know. Maybe there is no “Larry Geller.” Maybe he never wrote a biography of Elvis.

Anyway, it’s delightfully wacky.

Enjoy:

In perusing Elvis’ biography “If I Can Dream” by his hairdresser-cum-spiritual adviser Larry Geller, I stumbled across the following conversation:

Elvis begins: “Think back when I had that experience in the desert. I didn’t only see Jesus’ picture in the clouds — Jesus Christ

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