For those who approach Buddhism as a system of mental development, this book is a reliable and accessible guide to understanding the significance of themes from the Pali discourses. Themes include grasping, right view, craving, passion, contemplation of feeling, happiness, and liberation. A rare combination of scholarly rigor and extensive meditation experience from the author provides veracity to these studies and explorations.
A testimony to the important contributions made by the women who were direct disciples of the Buddha-and a source of inspiration to Buddhist women today. In this book, esteemed scholar-monk Bhikkhu Anālayo examines accounts of the first female disciples of the Buddha available in the early discourses and their parallels, taking the reader back to the earliest period in the history of Buddhism that can still be accessed today. He dedicates a chapter of his book to each remarkable woman, sharing with the reader her particular insights and teachings. Both nuns and laywomen are featured in these pages, and the diversity of voices and richness of thought will serve as instruction and encouragement for modern scholars and practitioners alike"--
Join a rigorous scholar and Buddhist monk on a brisk tour of rebirth from ancient doctrine to contemporary debates. German Buddhist monk and university professor Bhikkhu Analayo had not given much attention to the topic of rebirth before some friends asked him to explore the treatment of the issue in early Buddhist texts. This succinct volume presents his findings, approaching the topic from four directions. The first chapter examines the doctrine of rebirth as it is presented in the earliest Buddhist sources and the way it relates to core doctrinal principles. The second chapter reviews debates about rebirth throughout Buddhist history and up to modern times, noting the role of confirmation bias in evaluation of evidence. Chapter 3 reviews the merits of current research on rebirth, including near-death experience, past-life regression, and children who recall previous lives. The chapter concludes with an examination of xenoglossy, the ability to speak languages one has not learned previously, and chapter 4 examines the particular case of Dhammaruwan, a Sri Lankan boy who chants Pali texts that he does not appear to have learned in his present life. Rebirth in Early Buddhism and Current Research brings together the many strands of the debate on rebirth in one place, making it both comprehensive and compact. It is not a polemic but an interrogation of the evidence, and it leaves readers to come to their own conclusions.
An insightful examination of the end of suffering that draws much-needed attention to two overlooked factors of Nirvana: signlessness and deathlessness. Nirvana is a critical part of the Buddhist path, though it remains a difficult concept to fully understand for Buddhist practitioners. In The Signless and the Deathless: On the Realization of Nirvana, scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo breaks new ground, or rediscovers old ground, by showing the reader that realizing Nirvana entails “a complete stepping out of the way the mind usually constructs experience.” With his extraordinary mastery of canonical Buddhist languages, Venerable Analayo first takes the reader through discussions in early Buddhist suttas on signs (Pali nimitta), the characteristic marks of things that signal to us what they are, and on cultivating concentration on signlessness as a meditative practice. Through practicing bare awareness, we can stop defilements that come from grasping at signs—and stop signs from arising in the first place. He then turns to deathlessness. Deftly avoiding the extremes of nihilism and eternalism that often cloud our understanding of Nirvana, Venerable Analayo shows us that deathless as an epithet of Nirvana “stands for the complete transcendence of mental affliction by mortality”—ours or others’—and that it is achievable while still alive. Advanced practitioners and scholars alike will value the work for its meticulous academic expertise and its novel way of explaining the highest of all Buddhist goals—the final end of suffering.
An incisive look into the early Buddhist teachings on emptiness, and a manual for bringing those teachings into our everyday lives. Before the growth of the Mahayana and the Perfection of Wisdom, the Buddha gave his own teachings, to his attendant Ananda, on the importance of emptiness (Pali sunnata, Sanskrit sunyata) in formal meditation and everyday practice. In this volume, renowned scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo explores these teachings and shows us how to integrate them into our lives. Bhikkhu Analayo draws from instructions found in the Greater and the Smaller Discourses on Emptiness (the Mahasunnatasutta and the Culasunnatasutta). In each chapter, he provides a translation of a pertinent excerpt from the discourses, follows this with clear and precise explanations of the text, and concludes by offering instructions for practice. Step by step, beginning with daily life and concluding with Nirvana, Bhikkhu Analayo unpacks the Buddha’s teachings on the foundational teaching of emptiness.
The Satipatthana Sutta is the teaching on mindfulness and the breath and is the basis of much insight meditation practice today. This book is a thorough and insightful guide to this deceptively simple yet profound teaching. 'With painstaking thoroughness, Ven. Analayo marshals the suttas of the Pali canon, works of modem scholarship, and the teachings of present-day meditation masters to make the rich implications of the Satipatthana Sutta, so concise in the original, clear to contemporary students of the Dharma....' Bhikkhu Bodhi
Buddhist meditator and scholar Bhikkhu Analayo presents this thorough-going guide to the early Buddhist teachings on Satipaa'-a'-hana, the foundations of mindfulness, following on from his two best-selling books, Satipaa'-a'-hana and Perspectives on Satipaa'-a'-hana. With mindfulness being so widely taught, there is a need for a clear-sighted and experience-based guide. Analayo provides it.
Disease and death are undeniably integral parts of human life. Yet when they manifest we are easily caught unprepared. To prepare for these, we need to learn how to skilfully face illness and passing away. A source of practical wisdom can be found in the early discourses that record the teachings given by the Buddha and his disciples. The chief aim of this book is to provide a collection of passages taken from the Buddha's early discourses that provide guidance for facing disease and death.
Analayo offers an inspiring biography of the Buddha, focusing on his meditative development and practice, including extracts from the early discourses, with commentary by the author. He conveys not only a focus on the Buddha as a meditator, but also that the book's readers are meditators, that this is a life of the Buddha providing inspiration and guidance for meditators. Each of the twenty-four chapters concludes with suggestions for meditative practice or conduct.
Renowned scholar-monk writes accessibly on some of the most contentious topics in Buddhism—guaranteed to ruffle some feathers. Armed with his rigorous examination of the canonical records, respected scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo explores—and sharply criticizes—four examples of what he terms “superiority conceit” in Buddhism: the androcentric tendency to prevent women from occupying leadership roles, be these as fully ordained monastics or as advanced bodhisattvas the Mahayana notion that those who don’t aspire to become bodhisattvas are inferior practitioners the Theravada belief that theirs is the most original expression of the Buddha’s teaching the Secular Buddhist claim to understand the teachings of the Buddha more accurately than traditionally practicing Buddhists Ven. Analayo challenges the scriptural basis for these conceits and points out that adhering to such notions of superiority is not, after all, conducive to practice. “It is by diminishing ego, letting go of arrogance, and abandoning conceit that one becomes a better Buddhist,” he reminds us, “no matter what tradition one may follow.” Thoroughly researched, Superiority Conceit in Buddhist Traditions provides an accessible approach to these conceits as academic subjects. Readers will find it not only challenges their own intellectual understandings but also improves their personal practice.
Bhikkhu Analayo offers an inspiring biography of the Buddha from the viewpoint of his meditative development and practice, based on combining extracts from the early discourses with his own commentary. The focus is on the Buddha as a meditator, so this is a life story offering inspiration and guidance for readers who are also meditators. Bhikkhu Analayo covers the period up to the Buddha's awakening and from the awakening to the Buddha's final Nirvana. Following this, he explores recollections of the Buddha, a topic that in one way or another underlies all the chapters. Each of the twenty-four chapters concludes with suggestions for meditative practice or conduct.
Analayo investigates the meditative practices of compassion and emptiness by examining and interpreting material from the early Buddhist discourses. Similar to his previous study of satipaa'-a'-hana, he brings a new dimension to our understanding by comparing Pali texts with versions that have survived in Chinese, Sanskrit and Tibetan. The result is a wide-ranging exploration of what these practices meant in early Buddhism.
In this new book, Analayo builds on his earlier ground-breaking work, Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization. Here, he enlarges our perspective on this seminal teaching by exploring the practices of mindfulness as presented in both the Pali and Chinese versions of this important discourse. The brilliance of his scholarly research, combined with the depth of his meditative understanding, provides an invaluable guide to the liberating practices of the Buddha's teaching. Joseph Goldstein, author Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening
The ensuing pages present a selection of passages from the early Buddhist discourses that provide perspectives on the cultivation of liberating insight into vedanā, "sensation," "feeling," or "feeling tone." For meditators, such passages can be of considerable help as a reference point for deepening insight. A metaphor that can offer considerable help when facing vedanās describes bubbles arising on the surface of a pond during rain...they arise and soon enough burst and disappear. Contemplation of the changing nature of vedanā provides a firm foundation for the growth of insight into not self. Such insight proceeds through successive layers of the mind's ingrained habit of self-referentiality. Based on relinquishing the explicit view of affirming the existence of a permanent self, increasingly subtler traces of conceit and possessiveness need to be successively overcome until with full awakening all selfing in any form will be removed for good. Deepening Insight is based on textual sources that reflect "early Buddhism," which stands for the development of thought and practices during roughly the first two centuries in the history of Buddhism, from about the fifth to the third century BCE. These sources are the Pāli discourses and their parallels, mostly extant in Chinese translation, which go back to instructions and teachings given orally by the Buddha and his disciples. In those times in India, writing was not employed for such purposes, and for centuries these teachings were transmitted orally. The final results of such oral transmission are available to us nowadays in the form of written texts. Bhikkhu Anālayo's presentation is meant to provide direct access, through the medium of translation, to the Chinese Āgama parallels to relevant Pāli discourses. In commenting on such passages, his chief concern throughout is to bring out practical aspects that are relevant to actual insight meditation.
In Mindfully Facing Climate Change, Bhikkhu Analayo offers a response to the challenges of climate change that is grounded in the teachings of early Buddhism and mindfulness meditation. Based on employing the teaching of the four noble truths as its main framework, it places facing climate change within the context of the eightfold path and provides detailed meditation instructions on how to build up mental resilience and balance.
See the formative years of Mahayana Buddhist literature through the lens of the Perfection of Wisdom, expertly analyzed by the venerable scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo. In this work we have a rare perspective on the early history of Mahayana Buddhism and the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajnaparamita), as far as this is still accessible in surviving texts. With his characteristic clarity and precision, Bhikkhu Analayo critically analyzes early Perfection of Wisdom literature based on the earliest extant versions of the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita, or the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, one in Chinese and the other in Gandhari—one of the oldest surviving Mahayana manuscripts discovered to date. In reading this text from the viewpoint of early Buddhist literature, the author shows that what has generally been considered a sharp rupture in the formation of the Mahayana turns out to be more of a gradual evolution. With his command of the languages of the ancient Buddhist world, scholar-monk Bhikkhu Analayo sifts through the layers of history and unveils new perspectives on the ideas and figures in early Perfection of Wisdom and Mahayana literature, covering such topics as the rhetoric of emptiness and the emerging bodhisattva ideal, as well as the status of women and the practice of self-immolation. In doing so, Bhikkhu Analayo reveals fresh insights into the gradual development that informs the emergence of early Perfection of Wisdom literature. This is a rare opportunity to peer through a window at the beginnings of Mahayana thought—before the traditions had coalesced into the familiar forms we see today.
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