Notes:

Latest blog posts from thinkbuddha

Rebirth? No. Rebecoming? Yes.
If there is one thing that, above all else, eventually led to me ceasing to formally identify myself as being Buddhist it was the idea of rebirth. For many of my fellow Buddhists, this seemed to be either an axial belief, or else it seemed to be an unspoken assumption �" of course there is such...
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Published 9 hours ago

Virtuosi
I was awake just after five this morning, whilst oustide it was still dark; and because I didn’t feel like sleeping any more, and had an early train to catch, I got up and went into the next door room where I sat down to meditate. It was probably the my most substantial period of meditation for...
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Published a week ago

Car Crash Journalism
This morning I stepped off the train in Stoke-on-Trent, where I was paying a visit to the university to give a guest lecture, and I found myself set upon by the BBC. I would like to pretend that this is the kind of thing that happens all the time, that the BBC are accustomed to coming direct to...
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Published 2 weeks ago

Risk
One of the more dubious pleasures of beginning a new job is that of the inevitable round of Health and Safety inductions. Of course, we all know that these sessions are important �" it’s always nice to get home from work in the evening with all your limbs intact �" but in my experience, if...
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Published 3 weeks ago

Zen, Brains and Making Friends With Your Own Head
The other day I was rummaging through an accumulation of three years of half-written blog posts that are tucked away behind the scenes at thinkBuddha: these are thoughts that have not yet come to fruition, ideas that started to emerge and then snuck back into their holes, words in search of some...
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Published 3 weeks ago

One Man Bands
Last night I went to watch One Man in the Band, a wonderful film by Adam Clitheroe, at the Leeds Film Festival. The film looks at the music and the lives of a number of musicians who prefer to go it alone, and was itself made as a piece of one man band film-making. If you’ve never seen a...
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Published 4 weeks ago

Texts, Bones and Early Buddhists
One of the reasons that I avoid identifying myself as being “Buddhist” these days is that I have become increasingly uncertain as to what this term might actually indicate. Not only this, but often other folks seem to have quite a clear idea as to what the term might mean, and more frequently...
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Published a month ago

The Dragons' Revenge...
It is probably my own fault. A couple of days ago, I wrote a blog post about the non-existence of invisible (or, for that matter, visible) dragons, and then yesterday my blog went down for twenty-four hours. What other conclusion can I draw except that a small horde of the dragons in question,...
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Published a month ago

Dragons and Levitating Monks
Several years ago, whilst visiting the Buddhist sites of India, I paid a visit to the small town of Kushinagar, where the Buddha is said to have died. Whilst in Kushinagar, I made friends with a restaurant owner and his wife who, one day in conversation, said that there was a “very powerful”...
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Published a month ago

An Afternoon in Gateshead, or The Idol in the Desert
It is hard not to agree with Rowan Williams, when he says that greed is one of the root causes of the present financial crisis. His second-in-command, the more flamboyant John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, with his gift for dramatic imagery has put it rather differently Just as the Hebrew...
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Published 2 months ago