Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation! Every Friday at Noon EST, Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for Reading & the Good Life (Register here), a casual space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living.
Who was the Buddha?
The Buddha (c. 450 BCE) is the individual whose teachings form the basis of the Buddhist tradition. These teachings, preserved in texts known as the Nikāyas or Āgamas, concern the quest for liberation from suffering. While the ultimate aim of the Buddha’s teachings is thus to help individuals attain the good life, his analysis of the source of suffering centrally involves claims concerning the nature of persons, as well as how we acquire knowledge about the world and our place in it. […]
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The following video briefly explains The Four Noble Truths:
Dear Readers,
This Friday, we’re concluding our search for Buddhist wisdom through the Dalai Lama’s book The Four Noble Truths. As always, the passages below will help guide the discussion at our next meetup (Register here). As you read these passages, consider reflecting on the following questions:
(1) How can you embody these lessons in daily life?
(2) What might stand in the way of implementing these ideas?
(3) How can the following insights help you live the “good” life?
***Next month’s (March) book is The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
If we accept that liberation is an achievable goal, how is it possible to achieve it? This question brings us to the fourth Noble Truth, which deals with the true path. …
The experiential knowledge of emptiness must, in turn, be based on an intellectual understanding of emptiness, developed through inference. Indeed, without that, it is impossible to attain a meditatively based experience of emptiness. That initial stage of developing intellectual understanding is part of what is known as the Path of Accumulation. The threshold of this path is the point where the practitioner develops a genuine aspiration to attain liberation – and this we consider to be the very beginning of the Buddhist Path. […]
— Dalai Lama, The Four Noble Truths (Ch. 5)
