Week 5: A Fount of Fundamentals: The Four Noble Truths; The Eightfold Path; the precepts; dukkha, anata and annica
The wonderful people at Lion's Roar have put together many readings on each of these: pick a couple you find interesting and/or may wish to become more familiar with.
[More generally, like it hasn't become obvious by this point, Lion's Roar generally has one or more nice accessible paywall-free articles written by Buddhist practitioners—which will frequently give you quite a different perspective than articles by academics who don't have a practice\—on virtually every concept, approach, person, and major texts: if you find these useful, send'em some dana to encourage this: coherent unbiased information is not free. I digress…]
- The Four Noble Truths. https://www.lionsroar.com/what-are-the-four-noble-truths/
- The Eightfold Path: the route for escaping suffering. https://www.lionsroar.com/what-is-eightfold-path/
- the Precepts: the guides to ethical behavior, per last week's discussion of Thich Nhat Hanh's list of fourteen "mindfulness trainings", which are apparently typical of a number of Zen extensions of the precepts: https://plumvillage.org/mindfulness-practice/the-14-mindfulness-trainings/ but for this week the classical five: https://www.lionsroar.com/what-are-the-five-precepts/
- The three poisons: anger, greed, and delusion. Also known as Silicon Valley's business model. https://www.lionsroar.com/what-are-the-three-poisons/
- The Brahmaviharas. https://www.lionsroar.com/what-are-the-four-brahmaviharas
- dukkha (stress, suffering, reactivity), annica (impermanence), and anata (no-self, almost always the single most difficult concept of the three to explain)
- Nine teachers (Sam Littlefair, editor) on dukkha: https://www.lionsroar.com/what-is-suffering-10-buddhist-teachers-weigh-in/
- Norman Fischer (a senior U.S. Zen teacher) on impermanence: https://www.lionsroar.com/impermanence-is-buddha-nature-embrace-changemay-2012/
- Reginald Ray on no-self: first of a four part series, and a bit of a slog\—told you this was complicated\—with links to the remaining articles: https://www.lionsroar.com/who-me/
- The Three Jewels: Buddha, dhamma, sangha: https://tricycle.org/magazine/the-three-gems/ (TNH)
- Also see:https://www.lionsroar.com/the-practice-of-sangha/ (TNH on sangha).
- For a sutta version, try https://suttacentral.net/an6.10/en/sujato (Mahanama Sutta)
Quite a chunk for forty minutes, but gets beyond the bumper sticker.
Link to slides from talk (PDF)
Link to 3-page outline for the talk (pdf file)
Other resources
- Stephen Batchelor. After Buddhism: Rethinking the dharma for a secular age. (2015) (Batchelor's on-going synthesis of a secular Buddhism; also see the earlier efforts in his Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening (1997))
- Thich Nhat Hanh. Oh, pretty much everything he has written, but Being Peace (1987) tends to be one of the most popular.
- Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, What Makes You Not a Buddhist (2008) (per the title, a bit of a polemic but a good guide to core tenets)
- Jack Kornfield. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path (2001) (Not sure this goes in this section, but this one is on everyone's list of favorite books)
- Phillip Moffit. Dancing With Life: Buddhist Insights for Finding Meaning and Joy in the Face of Suffering (2012)
- Rodney Smith. Stepping Out of Self-Deception: The Buddha's Liberating Teaching of No-Self (2010) (I've read this through for five times and still see things I missed.)
- Robert Wright. Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (2017). Semi-skeptics view. Actually sat the same retreat—with about 125 people and circular saws in the background as the facility was being expanded—at IMS in Barre in 2013.
- Gil Fronsdal, Tulku Thubten Rinpoche, and Roko Sherry Chayat, "Nirvana: Three Takes" (Fall 2006) https://tricycle.org/magazine/nirvana-three-takes/