Baishui Zen

Category: Approaching the Buddhist Path

  • Dealing with Feelings, Part 3 – Fear

    Continuing the theme from last time, I want to share a few useful meditations I have come across in my studies which address different kinds of fear. I can think of three different kinds of fear. In no particular order, these are: I’m not sure that everyone uses these words…

  • Dealing with Feelings, Part 2 – Attachment

    At the outset of the last post, I didn’t intend to do a part 2 for this topic, but with some further reflection, it occurred to me that I left things in a state somewhat unfinished. I titled the post, and we discussed Buddhist perspective on several socially pervasive negative…

  • Dealing with Feelings

    This post continues the previous one on the complexities of emotions we encounter, and the complexities involved in understanding Buddhist doctrine regarding them. We’re going to look at four classes of feelings, as they are classified in English, and understand their positive and negative aspects, and how Buddhists distinguish between…

  • The Buddhist view of Emotions

    So you’ve read this far into the series, and you’ve understood the broad strokes of Buddhism’s project for each individual. We understand afflictions, a little bit of the metaphysics and philosophy of mind. We’re aimed at the Buddha nature. This is a great vision for personal cultivation as it stands,…

  • Ending Suffering: The Buddha Nature

    Today’s post finishes off our goal of tying together the most basic concepts to the Buddhist path by addressing the last two of the Noble Truths as discussed previously, and explaining what is essentially the goal of Buddhism. Different sects of Buddhism have different views on this concept, but essentially,…

  • Dependent Origination

    As we attempt to lay out the cornerstones of Buddhist philosophy, we’ve talked primarily about philosophy of mind. This approach has sought to balance what in the west, we would contrast as materialism, the view that all things are material, with idealism, the view that all things are primarily mental.…

  • The Structure of Buddhist Religion

    Before continuing on further, I want to have a shorter post as an interlude to discuss the general structure of Buddhist faith as an organization, to give some context as to what sorts of documents we’ll be pulling from, and why they are important. Since in these posts, we are…

  • Four Precious Truths

    It’s not that I have the audacity to rename the central doctrine of Buddhist thought or anything like that, it’s that for the sake of these introductory posts, we want to clarify as much as we can surrounding this doctrine, which I think is sometimes poorly explained in what I…

  • The Buddhist View of Self

    Self is an inherently slippery concept, tied up with the idea of mind, which is what we focused on last time. Self is part mind, part body for us normal human beings. It’s kind of like the glue that fuses our consciousness with our physical form, and gives us a…

  • The Buddhist View of Mind

    If I had to try to summarize Buddhist philosophy separately from religious practice, I would say it consists primarily of three prongs, which are essentially inseparable from one another. These three are: The first thing to understand, is that the Buddhist view of mind is not particularly concerned with its…