Buddha-Sasana

Practice in a social context

The Buddha made clear that the success of our practice depends critically on an appropriate social context for practice. Self-help focuses on practice in inappropriate contexts. (Buddhism as Self-Help 9, 11/18/2022)

Self-presentation

We look at the social psychology of managing our self-image in social contexts as a source for the ego-self and the authentic self, and how individualism is nonsensical. (Buddhism as Self-Help 8, 11/11/2022)

The sociocultural self

We discuss self-presentation as an individual adaptation to survival in the sociocultural matrix. (Buddhism as Self-Help 7, 11/4/2022)

Individual and social cognition

Humans are fundamentally cooperative and social creatures. We show that most significant individual cognition serves social cognition, drawing significant differences between humans and other apes in this regard. (Buddhism as Self-Help 6, 10/28/2022)

Buddhist self/modern self

We discuss Buddhist practices for deconstructing the thing-self, and then how modern Buddhism is interpreted in terms of the modern authentic self. (Buddhism as Self-Help 5, 10/21/2022)

The rise of the authentic self

We discuss how the ego-self is produced through appropriating assets as “me” and “mine” in Buddhist thought, and then how the historically evolved self in the west became the authentic self. (Buddhism as Self-Help 4, 10/14/2022)

The history of the self

We discuss the thing-self in Buddhist thought, and the evolution of the self in European history. (Buddhism as Self-Help 3, 10/7/2022)

Buddhist self/modern self

The Buddha analyzed the self at two levels: the thing-self and the ego-self. We use the ego-self, produced in becoming, to begin the analysis of the evolving western sense of self and its shadow sense of lack. (Buddhism as Self-Help 2, 9/30/2022)

Buddhism as self-help: introduction

Has Buddhism become “the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism"? (Self-Help 1, 9/23/2022)

Locating “mindfulness” in the early Buddhist Texts

I argue that modern “mindfulness” corresponds pretty closely to ‘samādhi’ in the early Buddhist texts. (9/16/2022)