Curated playlist
Nonduality
- ZenIf enlightenment is already in everyone, why does Zen take a lifetime of practice?
- AnattāAnattā is the Buddhist teaching that nothing has a fixed, permanent self. Yet karma and rebirth remain real.
- Advaita VedantaAdvaita Vedanta says you are not different from ultimate reality. Only Brahman, "the one," is ultimately real.
- YogaYoga, in the words of the scholar David Gordon White, has "a wider range of meanings than nearly any other word in the entire Sanskrit lexicon." That is a surprising claim about a word many people now link mainly to exercise. Yoga is a…
- Ego deathEgo death is the complete loss of subjective self-identity, and few ideas have been described in such opposite terms. In 1964, Timothy Leary and his colleagues Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert wrote that it leaves "no visions, no sense of…
- NondualismNondualism begins, in one famous telling, with a temple bell. The Zen teacher Yasutani roshi described the moment this way: 'When I heard the temple bell ring, suddenly there was no bell and no I, just sound.' In that instant, the story…
- MadhyamakaMadhyamaka argues that if causes were truly separate, fire could produce darkness.
- Samatha-vipassanāDo calm and insight in Buddhist meditation need each other, or can one stand alone? Schools disagreed for centuries.
- Prajñā (Buddhism)Buddhaghosa used a child, a villager and a money-changer to explain deep understanding.
- YogacharaYogachara Buddhists added two more kinds of consciousness to the standard six. The eighth stores karmic seeds.
- TantraTantra began as a word for a loom. In the Rigveda, the hymn numbered 10.71 uses it for the warp, the stretched threads on which cloth is built. Centuries later the same word named a family of esoteric traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism.…
- VijñānaSariputta compared consciousness and the mind-body complex to two sheaves of reeds leaning together.