The most blissful yoga session of my life didn’t come from a guru.It didn’t come from a famous lineage,or from a teacher who had spent months in an Indian ashram.It came from an instructor at an ordinary American gym,one the other yoga teachers mocked behind her back.They called her ‘Aerobics Jane’. This is a post…
I made a big update to the EBPedia page for viveka:lucid24.org/tped/v/viveka Section 2.1 collects suttas that gloss viveka explicitly.The word is right there in the text, followed by an explanation of it,and in those passages ‘seclusion’ just doesn’t work. It has to be discernment. The new section 2.4 collects implicit glosses of viveka.The word itself…
The Burmese and Sinhala editions of this sutta give mettā ceto-vimutti as the antidote for ill will. The Thai edition has just the unqualified ceto-vimutti as the antidote.Thanissaro explains that here it covers all four brahmavihāras —not the ceto-vimutti of the formless attainments,nor the liberation of mind of an arahant. Sujato translates the Burmese edition.Thanissaro…
Introduction AN 5.162 is interesting in that its first four methods deal with ways to handle resentmenttoward people with character flaws,but the fifth method is for a flawless person,pure in body, speech, and mind.Why would anyone resent a pure person?The sutta and its commentaries don’t explain,so I asked Claude AI to propose reasonable possibilities. The…
Picture it: world famous professor at a prestigious university.Behind the desk sits a teacher who has already solved the oneproblem every human being on earth is quietly struggling with — how to completely eradicate suffering.The sign on his door reads: Office Hours: Every day, every hour. No appointment needed.No fee.No waitlist.He is simply always in.…
The Buddha’s seven methods for shaking off drowsiness in AN 7.61 are a monotonically increasing energy ladder — a repair kit for a jhana flat tire. And methods 2 and 3, thinking over memorized Dhamma and reciting it aloud, settle what vitakka and vicara are.
Jhanic force doesn’t wait for you to sit down. It’s running all the time — in sleep, in the immune system, in morning wood. Viraga stops the leak; kaya passaddhi charges the battery.
Matthew 5:39 regulates the hand. Dhammapada 3-5 names the mechanism that keeps hatred alive – and tells you what to let go of.
I found an error (IMO) that translators make in AN 5.161. The expression a·sati·a·manasi·kāro occurs in two suttas,and in both of them it clearly has the same meaning. In MN 20, a meditator attempting to attain the 4 jhānas has 5 strategies for abandoning unwanted thoughts.In AN 5.161, a meditator dealing with resentment and hatred…
The four jhanas have seven factors, not five. The LBT 5-jhana-factor scheme drops upekkha, sati and dhamma-vicaya — precisely the three that do vipassana.
