This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Secular Dharma with Martine Batchelor & Bernat Font (Class 1). It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Martine Batchelor at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
It’s wonderful to be with you, wherever you are. We are in England at the moment, though I live in France. We are teaching at Gaia House. The way it’s going to work today is that I will talk for 15 minutes, then Bernat will talk, then we will have a meditation, then we’ll have a discussion, and then we will have a break. After the break, we’ll have more talks and some discussion, and then we’ll finish with a meditation.
For this first part, I’d like to look at what I want to share with you. The title is “Secular Dharma,” and I would like to look at what that means in terms of secular meditation, secular Buddhist meditation. What do we mean by secular? What we mean by secular is just to mean “for this time.” The Buddha was 2,500 years ago, and through different times and in different countries, Buddhism and meditation have come to us. Of course, both of us, Bernat and myself, are very interested in the early Pali texts—what are they saying, and what are they saying to us today?
At the same time, in terms of secular dharma, I think we are in a very different situation than 2,500 years ago. Over time, in China, Korea, Tibet, Japan, and other countries, Buddhist meditation was generally circumscribed by geography. Only a few people traveled as pilgrims; a lot of them stayed where they were and studied and practiced what was around them. Personally, I feel nowadays, in this secular age, we actually have so many different meditation techniques. We can encounter so many different Buddhisms, and within that, you have so many different aspects that I think it’s very specific to this secular time. One wonders, in a way, what is it I should do?
It’s a bit like in the Kalama Sutta1, where the people say to the Buddha, “All these teachers come and tell us to do this or that. Which should we follow? Should we follow your teaching?” In a way, the Buddha says, “You follow the teaching which will bring more wisdom and compassion, and you don’t follow the teaching which will cause you to cause more harm.”
What interested me, in terms of my background—because I was a Seon2 nun in Korea for 10 years, so more like Zen or Chan—and then I practiced mindfulness and insight, Vipassanā, in England. I was struck that the terminology is a bit different between Seon and Vipassanā, but then I heard about Samatha3 and Vipassanā4—anchoring, concentrating, focusing, and experiential inquiry, kind of looking deeply. To me, it sounded just like my teacher. Every time he gave a talk during a long retreat of three months, he would say, “Bright, bright, calm, calm.” When you practice, you need to cultivate brightness and calmness equally. Then I realized, oh, he’s talking about Samatha-Vipassanā.
Each tradition, each technique, seems to have these two common elements in the meditation. You have a bit of anchoring, focusing, concentration, and you have exploration, looking deeply, questioning. But you might have different objects to focus on, and you also might have a different way you’re going to explore. What became interesting to me, in terms of the secular and what we’re doing here, was to see how this Samatha and this Vipassanā work. The more I practiced—and in my tradition in Korea in the 70s and 80s, they never talked about mindfulness at all—what was interesting to me is that after three or six months of just questioning with their technique, “What is this? What is this? What is this?” I became very aware. So then I became curious: how does it work?
I realized that you can cultivate mindfulness directly or indirectly. You can cultivate compassion directly or indirectly. How does it work? I would say the way it works, or it seems to me in my experience, is that with anchoring, you are actually doing four things. When you come back to the breath, the sound, the body, loving-kindness, open awareness, or the question “What is this?”, you’re still doing four things. First, you don’t feed the distraction. If you’re not on the breath, you’re generally distracted, and what are you distracted by? Generally, repetitive thoughts you have had before. So I see the practice of Samatha as really about not feeding the habit, the pattern of thinking, dissolving its power, and bringing it back to its creative functioning of thinking, imagining, pondering, whatever it might be. The fourth thing that happens is that you come back to the whole experience instead of being locked in just one thought that has taken you away.
As is pointed out in the texts, Samatha, in whatever way you do it, is going to lead to calm. Then the looking deeply—which you can do by looking into impermanence, or the technique I used of asking “What is this?”—leads to a similar place of becoming aware of impermanence. And through becoming aware of impermanence, wise compassion arises. I really see the insight, the Vipassanā, the looking deeply, as a means to not only have clarity but also to experience a compassion which will change our behavior.
It seems to me that when these two things come together, we’re actually developing what I would call a creative awareness, a creative mindfulness. I would say that creative awareness or mindfulness then has two aspects: one aspect of acceptance, where we see, “Oh, this is the way things have arisen, and I have to mindfully accept what’s going on,” and at the same time, there is transformation, which means we need to do something. It seems to me that when we cultivate this, whatever way we do it, it actually removes the obstacle to our creative potential. What arises is something that will respond to the situation.
For quite some time, I have had this idea of creative awareness, creative mindfulness, creative engagement. I wanted to check with one of the great scholars, so I asked him, “Can I translate sammā sati as creative awareness?” He said, “It’s not in the text.” So I thought, okay, I cannot do that. But as a secular Buddhist, I thought I can still use it, because I really felt what we were developing was not just this bare awareness. I really feel that when we practice meditation, we are cultivating a creative awareness that helps us to see things anew and, more than that, to respond to the situation at hand with wisdom and compassion.
Nowadays, I would say creative awareness, but now I’m starting to translate sammā—I presume you know the term sammā from the Eightfold Path, as in sammā sati, generally translated as “right mindfulness,” then “appropriate mindfulness,” or “skillful mindfulness.” Personally, nowadays I prefer to call it a “caring and careful mindfulness.” I’ve started to expand the meaning of sammā as caring and careful. So it’s caring and careful action, caring and careful effort, caring and careful samādhi, caring and careful mindfulness.
It seems to me that in terms of secular dharma for our time, each of us has to make sense of how we experience and understand this. Sometimes we create a language which might not be totally exact to the text but might speak better to us or possibly speak better to our audience. So that’s what I wanted to share today from my side.
Thanks, Martine. Another way that we can understand this “secular” in secular dharma is secular as meaning “this world,” our condition here. We talk about the secular state, the temporal state. So, secular means this world. How does Buddhism explain this world, our existential condition? It is with what is usually known as the three characteristics. You may have come across this term, usually translated as something like impermanence, suffering, and not-self.
If I had to explain this without using Buddhist jargon, I would say that it’s trying to describe not existence—I find that too metaphysical—but our experience, our existential condition, what our life is. I would say that it’s saying that we live in a changing, unstable, unpredictable world. That’s what life is: a changing, unstable, unpredictable place in which we depend on and are vulnerable to circumstances, lots of them outside of our control. We are not the mini-gods of our many worlds. We don’t write the script. We cannot decide how things go.
The first of these characteristics is fairly self-evident: change, impermanence. Things change. Things are unstable. Therefore, they’re unreliable in some sense, and they’re finite, and we are finite. But the second one is much more interesting. Impermanence is an observable fact, but the second one, Dukkha5, really depends on how we understand and translate it. To me, this term is quite crucial to our understanding of the dharma. It’s often translated as “suffering,” which is many times a good translation, but sometimes it doesn’t work. In Pali, Dukkha is sometimes a noun, sometimes an adjective. In the famous First Noble Truth, it’s an adjective. It doesn’t say that birth is suffering; it says that birth is painful, aging is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful. Being separated from what we like is painful. Being associated with what we dislike is painful. It’s an adjective. I can quite relate to the slogan, “Life is painful.” It doesn’t mean that it’s painful all the time, but that it contains pain and tragedy. That’s part of life, precisely because it’s changing and unstable, which opens us up to hurt, physical or emotional.
But when we go to the psychological, that’s where I think the translation “unsatisfactory” comes from, which is very popular nowadays. I have a mental project to trace where this interpretation comes from because I don’t know any Pali term that would literally translate as “unsatisfactory.” It’s a very modern idea. The word for contentment in Pali is completely different and has no linguistic connection to the word Dukkha. So I find “unsatisfactory” a very unsatisfactory translation. [Laughter]
If anything that’s changing is unsatisfactory by definition, it’s kind of fatalistic. It’s a little bit like buying a flower and then going back to the flower shop complaining because it withered. “I’m returning it to you because the flower has wilted. It’s not beautiful anymore. I want my money back.” Or if a waiter asked you, “How was the food?” and you said, “Well, it tasted nice, but then it changed. It was transient, so I didn’t find it very satisfactory. You’re just getting one star on Yelp.” That would not make a lot of sense.
Impermanence is often explained with this idea that good things end. We resist when good things change, but we don’t resist when a toothache goes away; we embrace that change very happily. Still, to me, this idea of unsatisfactoriness as a mark of our experience relies on a mindset that values permanence and devalues what is transient. We see this even in the story of the Buddha, who sets out in his noble quest to find what does not age and decay, what does not change.
A secular dharma is one that takes these questions and ponders them deeply. How do I understand that? Where do I agree or disagree? What interpretation do I give to this, and what effect does it have on my practice? It’s a very natural inclination to be dissatisfied with what’s unreliable and changing, of course. But what do we do with it? An emphasis on this encourages some world-denial and that search for something that will not pass, something reliable, something which can never fail us. But what would that be? In a sense, that is a quest to find something which is not of this world, because things of this world are changing and unreliable. They’re imperfect. They’re just the way that they are.
So, a secular dharma to me is one that fully embraces this world, to the last consequences. It sounds a little heroic, I know, but to fully embrace change and unreliability. It doesn’t mean that you love it all the time. It’s a deeper understanding that this is the state of things. It’s understandable to seek refuge from this existential condition that seems to not offer anything solid. We seek refuge metaphorically from the inclemency of the weather, the weather also being a symbol of this change and the unpredictable nature of nature. Our existential condition is one of being in the outdoors, exposed to the elements. We are exposed.
I pity the English language for not having a perfect translation of the Spanish term intemperie. Intemperie is a term that refers to that exposed condition when you sleep exposed to the elements, when you sleep in the outdoors because you don’t have a roof. It ends up having this almost psychological sense of being unprotected. There’s a Catalan philosopher, Josep Maria Esquirol6, that has this quote: “We are out in the open. The most fundamental human situation is to be exposed, to be unprotected. If there were not this basic exposure, the gesture of caring for and protecting would make no sense. But it makes perfect sense. It makes the most sense of everything that makes sense.”
I really like this quote. It boils down to the fact that we’re vulnerable. Nowadays, this is my favorite translation of Dukkha: vulnerable. It speaks to the fact of pain and the possibility of pain. Everything that’s changing is vulnerable in the sense that it’s subject to circumstances. If it were not subject to circumstances, if it was an isolated thing that cannot be touched and affected by anything else, it would not be changing. Things change because they depend on something that changes.
I think of the three characteristics as what I call the “triangle of vulnerability.” If you really think about it, these three characteristics imply each other. If I’m changing and impermanent, it means I’m vulnerable (Dukkha). I can be affected by conditions. And this means I’m conditioned. I am not an autonomous and all-powerful self. I depend on conditions, and their change means I change. They affect me. In other words, something is at stake.
To be alive means to be engaged in the activity of self-sustenance. I have to be doing something to continue being alive. We’re exchanging gas with the atmosphere, taking in food, taking out waste. This activity has to continue for us to be called alive. A doorknob doesn’t need to do anything to continue being a doorknob. To be mortal means to be dependent on things outside of our control, because these activities involve external things.
I will draw this to a close with another quote that gets to the heart of the matter, from Martin Hägglund7 on secular faith. He says: “The sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about is at the heart of what I call secular faith. To have secular faith is to be devoted to a life that will end, to be dedicated to projects that can fail or break down. I call it secular faith because it is devoted to a form of life that is bounded by time.”
This is a devotion to a life bounded by time and defined by vulnerability. When a project fails, when a relationship stops, when a loved one dies, we can feel a lot of pain. But would we then say it was never worth engaging in in the first place because it ended? That is secular faith.
(Question from audience): I’m very much enjoying your presentation. I’ve longed to hear about secular Buddhism for a long time. But in listening to Bernat, it seemed to me that most of your comments were about things happening to us externally. I think sometimes it needs to be emphasized that at the same time, we ourselves are eternally changing. Instead of isolating ourselves and looking at the world as a changing thing, we ourselves have to take into account and realize that we are changing and our sense of self is changing.
(Bernat): Yeah. It’s not the world as an external thing. It’s our existential condition to be finite beings who are changing, who are vulnerable, who need each other. That’s the point of care. Absolutely.
(Martine): And I think what we have to think is it’s a little like this flow of inner conditions meeting the outer flow of conditions. The conditions within us in terms of mood, thought, and sensation are changing at the same time that the outside is also changing. You have the change which comes and goes, and then you have the change which is over time. To me, what is interesting in our practice of daily life is to notice when, for example, a mood changes inside ourself. Then I ask myself, “How long is this going to last?” If it goes quickly, I think, “Oh, I don’t need to do anything about it.” If it continues, then I really need to creatively engage with it.
(Question from audience): Part of what attracted me to attend this is I just feel like Buddhism is so fundamentally secular, and I would call it non-theistic. When I look at Dharma teachings, if you peel away the cosmology and the fanciful stuff, it is completely secular, and by that I mean relevant to everybody and how they live their lives, and not incompatible with any other religion.
(Bernat): I would question to what degree Buddhism is non-theistic. It doesn’t have a creator god in the same way, but I mentioned the Buddha’s idea of the noble quest. He asks, “If I’m subject to aging and decay and death, why do I seek what is also aging and decaying and subject to death? Why don’t I seek what is not changing and decaying and subject to death?” That’s not very far from some conceptions of God as that which is not this world, that which is not changing, not imperfect, that cannot fail us. So it’s a similar idea. There is a sort of religious tendency in seeking that.
To me, the idea of secular Buddhism has less to do with stripping away the culture. I don’t think there is a Buddhism before a cultural overlay or underneath a cultural overlay. Buddhism is a fruit of culture, always, from day one. It’s dependently arisen. But in terms of stripping away the cosmology, personally, I think we have all the right and permission to interpret these things the way we want—psychologically, metaphorically—as long as we do so with knowledge and respect. We have the permission to put them aside. What makes a Buddhism religious for me is rather the question: are we aspiring to something other than this changing, imperfect world to escape it, or are we aspiring to engage and embrace it? In that sense, Buddhism throughout history has had what we could call religious and secular aspects to it.
(Question from audience): I’m still asking about timelessness and the interface between secular Buddhism and, for example, the idea of reincarnation. There can be a conflict between living in the moment and mindfulness, and then the idea of reincarnation and how one’s karma will lead to the next reincarnation. That dance between something in the future and being in the moment now… the reincarnation tends to keep popping up and I don’t know where to put it in my own study of Buddhism.
(Martine): You see, you have two suttas I would recommend: the Kalama Sutta, but also the Tittha Sutta. In the Kalama Sutta, what I love about it is that the Buddha said what is important is not the truth of the statement that the teacher says, but if you apply it, are you going to be less harmful or more harmful? The sutta is like a piece of music in four movements. The third movement is about if you believe in reincarnation, then if you do good, if you are harmless, you’re going to have a good next life. If you don’t believe in reincarnation, you will have a good life anyway because you’re not harming anybody. So I really like this. The Buddha is saying, “Well, you believe in it, it’s still helpful. You don’t believe in it, it’s still helpful,” because the point is more about not harming than what will happen or not, because we’re not sure about that.
In the Tittha Sutta, he discusses wrong views. The first one is that everything we experience is because of past karma. The Buddha said, “No, no, no. Because if everything is due to past karma, then you cannot change anything now.” Then he said if it’s because of God, you have no action on God, so you can’t do much. And then you have the people who say there is no cause and effect, and again he said you can’t change anything with that. What interests the Buddha is what kind of action can we have now so that we don’t create harm now. Personally, in a culture which believes in reincarnation, I’m not going to tell them I don’t believe in it. For myself, it’s about what I can do now, and we’ll see later what happens or not.
What we want to do in the second part is look at awakening, enlightenment, Buddhahood from a secular point of view. What I found interesting about where we find ourselves in terms of encountering Buddhist ideas is that we can see the history from 2,500 years ago. You have certain transformations in certain countries, different traditions evolving, and now we encounter these different elements. We can see that you have slightly different ideas about awakening.
The first idea of Buddhahood that appeared was that in order to become a Buddha, he had to have many, many lifetimes of practice. And one important condition for his last life to become the fully realized Buddha was that he had to be born in a male body. I have a little trouble with gendered awakening. Does that mean the ladies have to wait in the back? My teacher used to tell me, “Oh, pray to be reborn as a man and then you’ll have better chances.” I used to totally disagree with him.
So we have that first idea. Then over time, you start to have another idea: that Buddhahood, awakening, enlightenment is possible within one lifetime. If one practices hard enough, then possibly toward the end of this life, you could experience it. You find this more, for example, in some Tibetan traditions.
Then you have a further idea, from the Seon/Zen/Chan tradition, that you are actually already awakened. So, from many lifetimes, to one lifetime, to now you’re already awakened. The only thing you need to do is to see it, to know it. I met a wonderful nun in Korea long ago, and I asked her, “What’s your practice?” She said, “My practice is to be a Buddha.” In the morning, she would do her chanting and meditation, and then she would leave the temple with the intention to be a Buddha today. Totally secular. Then she would come back in the evening and check how Buddha-like she had been, and how un-Buddha-like she had been, and then she would start again.
There is this idea of “sudden awakening followed by gradual practice.” Most of the time in the Zen tradition, the best deal is “sudden awakening and sudden practice,” which never truly made sense to me. So I was so happy to be in this temple whose basis was sudden awakening followed by gradual practice. What did it mean? It’s looking at sudden awakening as something which can happen at any moment. Since you’re already a Buddha in that tradition, it can happen at any moment.
What happens, from a secular perspective, is a moment of un-grasping. The problem with enlightenment is that we feel it’s going to be something that transcends everything. I have an image that you suddenly start to rise above the ground and become a Christmas tree at the same time. But I doubt this is what happens. Maybe it is more what we experience when we meditate, but also in daily life: we have these moments where we are experiencing and manifesting what we would call the factors of awakening—mindfulness, quietness, evenness, care. It’s a moment when the selfish self dissolves, and we experience connection.
You have this sudden moment where you see things clearly, where the self, this grasping, disappears for a moment, for a few hours, for a day or two, and then it comes back. Why does it come back? It comes back because of the power of the habits. When we practice the dharma, we recognize that we are caught in repetitive patterns. That’s what I was talking about with anchoring—it helps us dissolve the patterns. If we dissolve the patterns, there is so much more space, so much less repetition, and there can be much more clarity and insight. But the power of the habits is quite strong.
I am very interested in patience in daily life. I have meditated for over 10,000 hours, but sometimes my patience can be timeless, and sometimes my patience is a millisecond. This is so interesting. Why? This is back to what Bernat was talking about: conditionality. The gradual practice is very much looking at process, the absence of something, the presence of something. How can something not arise? What are the conditions for that?
There are these two things in tandem: the sudden moment where the grasping can go, and other moments where inner and outer conditions will make us tense up, we “self.” I think one of the conditions that really makes us self is uncertainty and fear. At the moment, there is so much uncertainty and fear. How can secular dharma help us to creatively engage with the uncertainty and fear so that care can be there? I notice with impatience, if I am impatient, I’m actually not compassionate, not very caring and careful. When you are busy, awakening is very far away; selfing is in full action.
I find for secular dharma, that idea of “sudden awakening followed by gradual practice, again sudden awakening, again followed by gradual practice” is a very interesting framework to ground the practice on.
Awakening is an important topic in Buddhism. One way to think about Buddhism is that it’s a reflection on impermanence. A second way is that it’s an extended reflection across time about what awakening means. And it has been changing.
Since secular Buddhism is usually associated with going back to the early texts, I thought we could go back to the Buddha’s story. I’m going to be using the story of the Buddha, regardless of historical arguments about it.
As you probably know, the Buddha is said to have lived in great luxury in a palace. He’s dissatisfied and has an awakening moment when he realizes that everything is finite, transient, impermanent. We all grow old and get sick and die. He wakes up to his existential condition. He wakes up to the fact that we live exposed to the elements. He literally leaves the palace and goes to live out in the open.
You could say that he has already seen the truth of impermanence and Dukkha. So that cannot really be the big awakening discovery, because he already knows that when he sets out on his path. He’s looking for something else, for something that’s not changing, not vulnerable, that is not going to disappoint us. He spends some years practicing very harsh austerities until he thinks that maybe just harming himself is not going anywhere. The village girl, Sujata8, offers him a bowl of rice porridge. After eating that, he thinks maybe he does not need to fear this sort of pleasure of just nourishing himself if it has nothing to do with reactive patterns. He has this meditative experience of bliss, of joy, that is not related to reactivity. That’s a big breakthrough.
He reaches his awakening and then hesitates whether to teach or not. He’s inclining to not teaching, thinking it’s going to be exhausting, that people don’t want to hear these things. Then he receives the visit of a deity who says, “Please teach. Some people will understand.” And then he decides to teach.
Why is this interesting? After he wakes up, he decides to teach. Part of what he’s doing is helping the world. He teaches the dharma. He sometimes tries to mediate between rulers and villagers. He expresses his care. My question is, this is not what he had set out to find when he left the palace. He was looking for that which is beyond change. So, how did he end up there? What’s the turning point?
I think what makes a difference is Sujata, the village girl who offers the Buddha some rice porridge. It’s an act of care, and that’s what leads the Buddha to wonder about well-being. The beginning of the turning point of the journey is the kindness of this girl. It’s as if through an act of kindness from someone else that he receives, he realizes that the path of hardships doesn’t make sense. In that path, he’s harming himself. Later, the Buddha will criticize that type of practice, saying, “You’re just creating pain for yourself for no reason.” Through that act of kindness from Sujata, the Buddha thinks the way is not to cause harm.
For a while now, I’ve been thinking about nirvana not in terms of freedom from suffering, but freedom from harming. It seems like just changing a word, but I think it has quite big implications. If I aim for freedom from suffering, I’m assuming that an end is possible for every suffering. Yes, the second arrow, but there are still other forms of suffering. I think suffering is there to be embraced because it’s a part of life, and I don’t think I can stop all of it. But I observe that very often I create suffering for myself and for others. And that’s the bit that’s interesting. I harm myself and others, not because I want to, not because I’m evil, but because I suffer myself and I don’t know how to handle it.
The question is, how does this happen? How am I creating suffering? If I know how, then I will know how I can stop. This reminds me of the story of the serial killer Angulimala9, who is chasing the Buddha. The Buddha appears to be walking very slowly, but Angulimala can never catch him. Angulimala gets frustrated and says, “Why don’t you stop?” And the Buddha says, “I have stopped. Why don’t you stop?” Maybe we can interpret that as the Buddha has stopped inflicting suffering. The idea is that we can understand how we’re creating suffering, and then we can undo this.
(Question from audience): I work in mindfulness with individuals with eating disorders. When we talk about rumination, habits, and coming back and forth… I’m creating a module now on the power of self-compassion, so that when we go to this pattern and keep coming back, we give ourselves some grace. In recovery, it’s a stair, and we fall and we go up maybe one or two steps and we go back down. But I think that self-compassion and loving-kindness for ourselves as we’re going through our process is extremely important.
(Martine): Yes, of course. Whenever there is this kind of patterning, what is also very helpful is a mindfulness of the feeling tone, to see how often, if we overeat, it’s because we have an unpleasant feeling tone and that’s our way to cope with it. It’s a survival mechanism. But also, as you say, one of the interesting things about impermanence is what I would call the gift of change. Maybe I cannot change immediately, but I can have compassion for myself where at times it has been a little better, then it’s a little worse, then it’s a little better again. The insight into impermanence can be that softening, knowing it’s possible, knowing I have done it before.
(Bernat): I’ve been recently influenced in my Metta10 practice by a Thai teacher, Ajahn Mahā Bua11, who speaks of Metta as meeting anything with a soft and gentle mind, softening your contact to any experience. Any conscious experience you have is a form of contact, of touching the world. He says to just soften those contacts. That’s the beginning of Metta. Anytime I feel some tension, some hardening, it’s a reminder: soften. And sometimes that’s all it takes. This teacher recommends spending a long time just staying with the first stage of Metta, just abiding in Metta, generating and contacting that quality, baking in it, dwelling there. And then you start to expand it and open it. You live in it. You are Metta, and Metta is you.
Kalama Sutta: A discourse of the Buddha that encourages questioning and investigation of teachings rather than blind faith. ↩
Seon: The Korean name for the Zen school of Buddhism. ↩
Samatha: A category of Buddhist meditation practices aimed at calming the mind and developing concentration. ↩
Vipassanā: A category of Buddhist meditation practices focused on developing insight into the nature of reality. ↩
Dukkha: A Pali word often translated as “suffering,” “stress,” or “unsatisfactoriness.” Bernat Font suggests “vulnerability” as a more fitting translation in this context. ↩
Josep Maria Esquirol: A contemporary Catalan philosopher. The quote is from his work on the philosophy of proximity. ↩
Martin Hägglund: A Swedish philosopher. The quote is from his book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. ↩
Sujata: The village girl who, according to Buddhist tradition, offered a bowl of milk-rice to the ascetic Gautama, ending his period of extreme self-mortification and leading him to discover the Middle Way. ↩
Angulimala: A ruthless serial killer who is transformed after an encounter with the Buddha and becomes a monk. His story is a well-known example of the power of redemption in Buddhism. ↩
Metta: A Pali word meaning loving-kindness, friendliness, and goodwill. It is a form of meditation aimed at cultivating these qualities. ↩
Ajahn Mahā Bua: (Phonetic transcription from the talk) A highly revered Thai Buddhist monk of the 20th century, known for his direct and uncompromising teaching style within the Thai Forest Tradition. ↩