Reading time: 4 minutes You don’t have to be a farmer to know that if you plant a tomato seed, you’re not going to get a potato. The seeds you plant, given the right conditions, will lead to the crop …
The Noble Eightfold Path: Right View
Reading time: 5 minutes When you move to a new city, it helps to buy a map. It wouldn’t make much sense to ramble around the city, scratching out notes as we go. Many people have traveled those roads before …
The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Concentration
Reading time: 4 minutes Come here for a moment, let me tell you a secret. The knowledge I’m about to share has been passed down from one generation of Buddhist masters to the next in an unbroken chain dating back …
The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Mindfulness
Reading time: 6 minutes One day, the Buddha and his followers were hot and thirsty after a long day of travel. They went to fill a jug to drink, but some oxcarts had crossed recently and muddied the water. The …
The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Effort
Reading time: 5 minutes He lived on the streets of New York City during the hard years of the 1980s — alone and scared, but somehow undeterred. By most estimates, he would have very little hope for a life of …
The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Livelihood
Reading time: 5 minutes We all have to pay the bills. The way we pay the bills influences not just our checking accounts but also our wellbeing. It also affects the impacts we make on the world. Here we enter …
The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Action
Reading time: 5 minutes Few parts of the Buddhist path are as visible as “right action.” Every day we’re outside in our cars, jobs, shopping centers, interacting with people and the world around us (depending these days on Covid restrictions). …
The Noble Eightfold Path: Right Speech
Reading time: 5 minutes I can still hear his voice. “You’re a loser,” he said with a sneer after I missed a shot at the basketball goal. “You really stink at this.” I was around nine or ten years old, …
The path to freedom: The Fourth Noble Truth
Reading time: 5 minutes With the knowledge that suffering is not permanent or inevitable, we can confidently seek a cure — a method to bring our suffering to an end. In the Fourth Noble Truth, the Buddha presents this method, …
An experiment in right speech
Reading time: 4 minutes Although I’m not Catholic, nearly every year I observe Lent along with my wife, who is Catholic. In a society fueled by instant and constant gratification, the idea of passing on pleasure is a nearly heretical …