Week 2:
The Historical Buddha, the Pali Canon, and the Theravadan Tradition

The "Insight" tradition which is the most common approach at IMCC derived from the "southern route" of Southeast Asian Theravadan in Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand, so we will start with this, and more generally some of the historical context within which Buddhism arose in India; the extent to which material attributable to the Buddha actually derives from a single historical person, the institutionalization of Buddhism after the death of the Buddha, culminating in the written Pali Canon following about 500 years of a purely oral tradition, and then later influential commentaries, notably the Visuddhimagga. We will then skip forward to the specific and rather idiosyncratic circumstances of this approach which came into the US starting in the 1980s.

Suggested reading:

Link to vocabulary from talk (pdf file)

Other resources

  • Karen Armstrong. Buddha. (2001) (relatively short and very clearly written narrative of the life of the Buddha looking at various textual sources—trying to sort the probable from the mythical—and historical context)
  • Erik Braun. The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (2013) (Braun is a major scholar in the field and teaches at UVA)
  • Susan Stone. The Sati Trilogy
  • Richard Gabriel. "Buddha: Enlightened Warrior" https://www.historynet.com/buddha-enlightened-warrior.htm (alternative view of Buddha's upbringing given that all accounts agree that he was from the kshatriya warrior class)
  • Sylvia Boorstein. It's Easier Than You Think. Boorstein is a co-founding teacher of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center and an early innovator in combining insight practices and Western psychotherapy. Her memoir is Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist.

Podcasts

  • Jack Kornfeld. Buddhism 101. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/super-soul/id1264843400?i=1000408470928