In answer to the title…well, that depends on the practitioner. However, Insight meditation does aspire to it, although perhaps to a different version of it than does the yoga meditation of my last post. So, to get down to basics, Insight meditation is a contemporary name for Vipassana Meditation, which…
Buddhism
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Dalai Lama During this last entry in my series on Buddhism, I’ll discuss three final concepts within Buddhist philosophy. Anatta: The Concept of No Self While few of us would admit to personality variances of the same degree as the fabled Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, many of us do manifest different…
Anicca: The Buddhist Concept of Impermanence As promised, in this post, I’m going to begin an explanation of five key Buddhist philosophies. So grab your prayer wheels and meditation cushions…Here we go! Dukkha, or Suffering/Dissatisfaction Aside from reincarnation, probably the most well-known Buddhist philosophy is that dissatisfaction or suffering is…
Buddha 400 to 500 years before the birth of Jesus, a sage of an entirely different tradition was born in the foothills of the Himalayans, in what is now called Nepal. Called the Buddha (or the awakened one) by his followers, he grew up as the pampered son of a…
If we wish to attain what the Buddhists call nirvana and what the Hindus call moksha—the state in which we transcend our personal identity and become enlightened, it is said that we should engage in certain practices. Both Buddhists and Hinduism’s Patanjali cite eight categories of these, which include truthful…