Gethin, Rupert

Several years ago the eminent scholar and professor Richard Gombrich put forward a controversial thesis: that the Buddha believed practicing kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity could lead us directly to enlightenment. We…

Which mental faculties are most important for our development along the path? We will look at the so-called "five spiritual faculties": what they are, what our attitude should be towards them, and to whom they may apply.

What does "faith" mean in Buddhism, and how important is it? Should Buddhism be termed a "faith tradition"? We'll look at those questions in this video, beginning with the question of what faith means in Western traditions, and then…

What are the seven Factors of Awakening in early Buddhism? We will look at their importance to the path, and grapple with a couple of different ways they can be understood.

We may have heard the metaphor of the "luminous mind" in Buddhist discourse. We'll discuss one famous source of that metaphor and how it has influenced some aspects of Buddhist thought in the abhidharma and thereafter, as well as certain…

The unconscious plays a key role in recent theories of psychology. Does it have any counterpart in Buddhism? Well ... sort of. We will look at the suttas of early Buddhism in particular, at one way we may be able to recover some ideas…

Did the Buddha really exist? It's a question that concerns some of us today, given the paucity of hard evidence from the early period of the Buddha's lifetime. We'll look at some of the issues involved in reconstructing that early history…

We'll take a quick overview of the history of Mahāyāna Buddhism, beginning with its earliest developments and how it separated from the rest of mainstream Buddhism. Then we'll look at a few of its later developments that came to define…

Theravāda Buddhism can be seen both as very old and very new. We'll go over the ways Theravāda has roots in the earliest forms of Buddhism, as well as the way it may be a very recent form of religious identity. This is a huge topic and so…

Philosophies and religions the world over have key texts outlining their founders' beliefs and aims. What are Buddhism's key texts?

What does the word "dharma" mean in early Buddhism? We will look at several ways it's used in the texts, and discuss its importance. For further information, see Rupert Gethin, "He Who Sees Dhamma Sees Dhammas: Dhamma in Early Buddhism".…

Lots of folks ask me for recommendations of good books on early Buddhism. I have a bunch of good ones here. This is my fourth YouTube video, so it's a bit rougher than some of the later ones. Apologies and thanks for watching!