It was not just his teachings on gender and class, which seem modern even today. Andrew Olendzki on all that made the Buddha one of the most radical people who ever lived. Then with the gleaming of the night, Close to the rising of the sun, All my craving simply dried up As I sat there with my legs crossed. —The Theragatha Every Buddha image we see reflects such calm, [...]
What Mindfulness Is (Not)
You can’t reduce mindfulness to just a single idea. Andrew Olendzki unpacks its many meanings in classical Buddhism. Perhaps the best way to understand what mindfulness is, from a classical Buddhist perspective, is to recognize some of the things it is not. Mindfulness does not just mean being aware or being conscious, because one is always conscious when not comatose or [...]
The Real Practice of Mindfulness
As mindfulness becomes an increasingly popular concept, it is often mistaken for just “being in the moment.” Andrew Olendzki examines the Abhidharma teachings to uncover what mindfulness practice really is and how it works. The English language is rich in many ways, particularly when explaining the features of the material world, but it is remarkably clumsy when it comes to [...]
Commentary: Walking the Talk
Andrew Olendski looks at why our wise teachers can, sometimes, behave in what appears like an unwise manner. In classical Buddhist teaching, meditation (samadhi) has always been sandwiched between integrity (sila) on the one hand and wisdom (pañña) on the other. Indeed, this is what makes it Buddhist. As a technology for the attenuation of consciousness, meditation had been [...]
No-Self 2.0
The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity by Bruce Hood Oxford University Press 2012 368 pp., $29.95 (cloth) The Self Illusion, by British psychologist Bruce Hood, offers a systematic deconstruction of the idea of the self as an essential entity. It redefines the self as a bundle of socially influenced narratives that emerges gradually during early development [...]
What is Papañca?
Papañca as defined by Andrew Olendzki, the editor of Insight Journal. papahcabkirata paja nippapanca tatbagata "People delight in proliferation, the Tathagata in nonproliferation." —Dbammapada 254 Papañca is one of those delightful Pali words that rolls off the tongue (or bursts through the lips, in this case) and hits the nail on the head. It points to something so [...]
What is Nibbida?
Nibbida as defined by Andrew Olendzki, a Pali scholar. So there you are, happily reading the primary texts of early Buddhism in order to better understand the essential teachings of the Buddha. You get to the part that talks about a person practicing in accordance with the dhamma—knowing things directly as they really are and seeing what is impermanent as impermanent with [...]
