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Gandharva and the Buddhist Afterlife. Part I
a gandharva serenades BrahmāGandharvas play two distinct roles in Buddhist metaphysics. They are firstly minor gods usually depicted as musicians and secondly they are supposedly involved in human...
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Gandharva and the Buddhist Afterlife. Part II
In part one of this two-part essay we explored parts of the Brahmanical literature—i.e. the Vedas, Epics and Purāṇas—looking for precedents that might explain the dual nature of the gandharva in...
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The Logic of Karma
Disputes about how karma works are almost as old as Buddhism itself. Some epic intellectual battles were fought over it in India. The one thing that everyone in ancient India agreed on, was that karma...
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The Second "Hidden" Kātyāyana Sūtra in Chinese
Mahākātyāna Stele, Korea.This text is "hidden" because even though it has been translated into English (Choong 2010), it has not been discussed in relation to the other versions of the text so far as...
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There is No Life After Death, Sorry.
In this essay, I begin with a longish introduction in which I recap some important points made in previous essays about the idea of life after death. I look at the dynamics of afterlife beliefs and...
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A Sutta on Freewill
your move...This is a text I recently stumbled upon. It is quite interesting because it directly addresses the issue of freewill, something I have not come across in a Buddhist text before. The Buddha...
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Do We Have Freewill?
In the latter half of the 20th century a series of pioneering experiments by Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, demonstrated a rather startling...
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Arguments For and Against Antarābhava.
One of the features of Buddhist rebirth beliefs under the microscope, is a great deal of disagreement and dissent between various Buddhist schools of thought and even internally to each school. This...
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Harvey's Early Buddhist 'Life Principle' or 'spirit'.
National GeographicIn his book The Selfless Mind, Peter Harvey (1995: §6.5-6.12) makes a persuasive case for an early Buddhist 'life principle' (jīva) in the Pāli texts which is not permanent, but...
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The Very Idea of Buddhist History
Uni of WashingtonAlexander Wynne has been at the forefront of apologetics for taking the suttas at face value as historically accurate. He recently uploaded a copy of his 2005 article, The Historical...
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Rebirth in the Ṛgveda
Most modern discussions of the afterlife in the Vedas say that rebirth/reincarnation is not found in the Ṛgveda. Conventionally speaking, the first mention of rebirth in India literature is thought to...
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Seeing Blue.
Where does blue begin and end?There's a meme that seems to come around again and again on the internet. It is that if a language has no word for a concept then that concept must be absent in that...
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Yama and Hell
Japanese Yama (Enma)as a Confucian administrator.Yama is a fascinating figure. He rules over the afterlife, but is not one of the devas. Vedic myth names him as the first man to find his way to the...
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Convert Buddhism
Sharon Stone being "blessed"by a priest.In a forthcoming article posted in draft form on academic.edu, 'The Forest Hypothesis', David Drewes considers the question of the origins of Mahāyāna, in the...
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Manomaya Kāya: Other Early Texts
Essay no.400.For the Nikāyakāra (the authors of the Pali Nikāyas) it was devas in the rūpadhātu (or their meditative equivalents) who possessed bodies (kāya) made by the mind, or were a mind-made group...
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Further Problems in Karma Theory: Continuity and Discontinuity.
Vasubandhu 世親 (via IEP)Emerging from early attempts at systematisation of Buddhism, sectarian Buddhists, especially those who developed Abhidharma, continued to think carefully about the theories they...
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Chinese Heart Sutra: Dates and Attributions
XīnjīngOne of the important conclusions of Jan Nattier's 1992 article on the Heart Sutra was that the traditional dates ascribed to its composition could not be correct and that it is more likely that...
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Will the Dalai Lama Reincarnate?
Over the last couple of years Tenzin Gyatso, aka the 14th Dalai Lama, leader of the Tibetan people has been dropping hints about the tradition of his reincarnation. When China joined in the...
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Realities
Reality is a slippery concept. I hesitate to even mention it. Science fiction author Philip K Dick said, "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". Reality is that which...
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Avalokiteśvara & The Heart Sutra
Avalokiteśvara Huntington ArchiveAvalokiteśvara (aka Guānyīn, Kannon, Chenrezik) is probably the best known Buddhist deity after the Buddha. Avalokiteśvara makes his first appearance in Buddhist...
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