Philosophy
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Emptiness (sūnyatā) explains the nature of everything. The explanation was already implicit in the earliest teaching of no-self (anattā) – that humans have no permanent, unchanging ‘self’ (or soul), but instead consist of five aggregates: the body, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Another early teaching looks to the nature of experience, concluding that nothing…
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A while ago, I asked an AI agent about Buddhism’s Three Marks of Existence. The answer started well: ‘a way of looking at reality exactly as it is, without illusions’, but then it seemed to go downhill rapidly. Perhaps I had hoped for an answer that could deepen my understanding of reality, how that reality…
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In early Buddhism, karma was defined as volitional intention (cetanā), where the moral weight of an action lay in the psychological impulse behind it. Intentional acts of body, speech, and mind functioned as seeds that ‘ripened’ into specific results within the cycle of suffering and rebirth (saṃsāra). Rather than being a system of divine judgment,…
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Whether you look upon Buddhism as a religion or as a way of life underpinned by a philosophy – which is my way – you will probably take the ‘Four Noble Truths’ and the ‘Noble Eightfold Path’ as the foundations of your practice. By way of analogy, the Noble Truths are often presented as the medical diagnosis of an…