- What Did the Buddha Tell a Grieving Father?
Doug starts from the Buddha's encounter with a father grieving his only child, and asks what exactly we love when we love a particular person. Drawing on dementia, the Capgras delusion, and Derek Parfit's thought experiments, he examines…
- Who Was Ananda? Life of the Buddha's Closest Companion
Apart from being the Buddha's close attendant, Ananda has the reputation of being everyone's favorite early monastic. We'll consider why that might be the case by looking at his life and the controversy that eventually clouded it.
- Hidden History: Were There Originally Two Buddhist Refuges?
Nowadays traditional Buddhism involves taking the so-called "three refuges": refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha. How many refuges were there in the Buddha's day? We'll look at the early accounts where the Buddha recommended we have…