- Buddhist Training Is Meant to End
Doug asks when Buddhist training is supposed to end, and how anyone would know. Working from the simile of the raft and the Buddha's refusal to appoint a successor — telling the sangha instead to be islands unto themselves — he traces…
- Why Our Deepest Certainties Can Be Completely Wrong
Doug examines whether there is any reliable way to know when we are right, tracing how confident certainty has misled even history's greatest thinkers, and asking whether Buddhist meditative insight offers a better standard. Drawing on…
- Who’s Really Enlightened? The Buddha’s Surprising Take
How can we know who's really enlightened? It's not a simple question. We'll take a look at various early suttas that show even back in the Buddha's day it was not considered at all straightforward, but rather required a lot of time and…
- Did the Buddha Get Angry?
Was anger recommended by the Buddha as potentially beneficial? Did the Buddha himself ever get angry? In early Buddhism we learn of the unskillfulness of hatred, but is anger in the same category? We will consider these questions in this…
- The Buddha on Investigating Our Teachers: Should Only Enlightened People Teach Dharma?
The Buddha believed that teachers should not be followed on faith, but rather that they required investigation. I'll look at one key sutta where the Buddha outlines such an investigation, and discuss how it can be overinterpreted. What…
- Is a Guru Necessary?
Do you need a guru or teacher to make progress along the Buddhist path? We'll look first at how the Buddha suggested his disciples should investigate their teacher with an eye to deciding if it was worth studying under them. Then we'll…