Below are my posts on Buddhism or other “Eastern Philosophies”.
Last updated to August 2011 posts.
Sympathetic Buddhists Posts
- Buddhist Faith : Defining Faith in Buddhism
- The Juggernaut of Habit : We habitual and rarely free
- Reality Eats Us : How this phrase can help free us from idealism
- Aro Buddhism : A strange Western Vajrayāna Buddhist sect
- Inseperable Thought-Emotions : Emotions, ideas are inseparable
- Zen Slaps : Fun techniques to help wake us up
- Taming the Monkey Mind : Meditation as ways to understand the mind
- Well-Being inside of Sadness : TED lecture by Matthieu Richard
- Buddhism: a diagram : Central doctrines in Buddhism
- Mystical Defects: : My sympathy for a Korean Zen Master’s mysticism
- The Will to say “No” : Meditation nurtures real free will, perhaps
Critiques of Buddhism
- Being Zen vs. Being Japanese : Aspiring to a culture instead of a faith
- Buddhist vs. Christian Bells : Grass is greener on the other side
- Buddhists LOVE their ancient holy Asian languages! – inordinately so.
- Buddhism is a Religion : no matter what you say.
- Using Science to Market Buddhism : From Quantum Mechanics to Neurology
- Nature is not Beautiful, Life is not Suffering : Idealization and Pessimism: Both are mistakes
- Buddhist Apologists : Tibetan monks train in rhetoric, not meditation
- Global-Enlightenment Myths : Accomplished Buddhists have limited skills
- Comparing Buddhism & Christianity: An Offense? : Buddhist like to think they are totally different
- “Mindfulness” Hype & Driving : Mindfulness don’t see everything
- Treating Mega-Metta : Insincere thank-you’s — Buddhist slimy righteousness
- Dog Healed by Meditation : Do you believe meditation healed this dog?
- Nasty Buddhists : The irony of finding many angry, frustrated, on-line Buddhists
- Religious Prescriptionists : When Buddhists tell other Buddhists what a “real” Buddhist is
- Buddhist & Christian Creedal Self-Deception : Different sects use the same creed by twisting words
- Conze on Doctrine : Edward Coyne with thoughts of Westerners evaluating
- Buddha: Doubt vs. Belief : Many everyday Buddhists in Asia and in the West are deeply
Buddhist Superstitions
- Mandala: Buddhist Romanticism : Romanticism permeates much of Western Buddhism
- Amulets for Buddhists and Atheists : Superstitious Good Luck
- Enlightenment Crystals : Cremated masters leave rocks behind. Really? !
- Tibetan Weather Miracle : My Initiation
- NonSense Chanting Pragmatics : Why people still chant nonsense.
- The Magic Language Bias : The grass is always greener in someone else’s language.
- Zen Tree Prayer : Zen priest makes us pray for a dead tree. Seriously!
Secular Buddhism
- My Atheist Buddhism: My Buddhism is unorthodox and lazy but …
- Do you care what the Buddha taught : How important is this to you?
- Do I qualify as a Buddhist : Some would say “yes”, some “no” — personally, I don’t care.
- Your Meditation Saddle Meditation on a horse
- The Buddha was not a mystic: Not Believing Buddhism Steven Batchelor quote: Buddhism without mysticism
On Reincarnation
- Precious Human Life : the reincarnation myth uses
- Rape and Reincarnations : abuse of the reincarnation doctrine
- Rebirth, Reincarnation or Neither : using various terms to capture nuances
- Did the Buddha teach Traditional Reincarnation? : controversial, but how important?
- My Previous Life as a German : my dream reveals on of my past lives, or not.
- Reincarnation: The Population Problem : An obvious problem
- Reincarnation, Heaven & the Bogeyman : how reincarnation comforts my daughter
- Reincarnation as a Pig : how I insulted a friend about his new daughter
- Roadkill Theology : your guru’s death is like everyone else’s
Fun & Interesting
- “Hara”: a Japanese Lesson : The lower belly (“hara”) is key to many meditation systems.
- Buddhist Dog-Brain : Does meditation simply recapture our earlier mammal brain?
- Buddhist Hemmorhoids : A lesson in the meaning of a Chinese/Japanese character
- Meditation, Urination and Inhibition Full bladder activates inhibition. Does it help meditation?
Kids & Buddhism
- Buddhist Readiness : Take it slow with kids
Series Indexes
- The Making of Buddhist Modernism : Book Interaction: David L. McMahan’s
Taoism
- The I-Ching and Tofu: How the I-Ching “works” (one theory)
