The Five Paths as cumulative
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 5 minute read This excerpt is taken from the chapter ‘Kindness front and centre‘ and follows on from Remembering Loving Kindness. The Five Paths as cumulative The simplest formulation of the Buddhist path is the Threefold Way, consisting of Ethics, Meditation and Wisdom. We try to be ethical by following Buddhist precepts in our daily life, for instance by being kind, generous, content, truthful and mindful. To intensify this practice, we then meditate. When we practice samatha meditations—such as the mindfulness of breathing and the metta bhavana—we cultivate skilful mental states that lead us into dhyana, where our mind and emotions are both highly skilful and have been made ready to take in reality; thus, dhyana provides the conditions for developing wisdom. Mindfulness as a foundation Let’s now look more closely at the Five Paths and how they might be cumulative, correlating with the Threefold Way. As we saw, the Five Paths seem to literally build upon the Satipatthana Sutta because the four foundations of mindfulness are the first element of the Path of Accumulation. The four bases of success When we start to make progress with the four foundations of mindfulness, we attain to the four bases of success; states of samadhi that are naturally associated with each foundation, namely: Mindfulness of body; our desire or intention (chanda) becomes more integrated and focused[1] Mindfulness of feeling; our skilful vigour / ethical robustness (viriya) becomes well established Mindfulness of mind; our mind (citta) becomes firmly established in the skilful Mindfulness of views; our investigation (vimamsa) of views is deep and thorough Mindfulness as a spiritual faculty These states of samadhi form the basis for the cultivation–as we transition to the Path of Preparation—of the five spiritual faculties, both of which naturally correlate with the cultivation of the four foundations of mindfulness,[2] and with the Threefold Way. It is logical to assume that: The spiritual faculty of Meditative Concentration will be developed through practising mindfulness of body[3] The spiritual faculty of Ethical Robustness – and ethical practice – will be developed through practising mindfulness of feeling[4] The spiritual faculty of Confidence – and meditation practice – will be developed through practising mindfulness of mind[5] The spiritual faculty of Wisdom will be developed through practising mindfulness of views[6] We can see this correlation in the following diagram and table: The fullsome development of the ‘Spiritual Personality’ Mindfulness as a spiritual faculty addresses two needs at this stage: the need for an increasing focus on the Three Jewels,...
The theme of ‘Change’ in Postmodernism
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 8 minute read This excerpt is from the chapter ‘Postmodernism and the academic mindset’ and follows the section on Postmodernism. The theme of ‘Change’ [Mathew] Mullins gives an example of the ‘change theme’ from postmodern fiction: ‘Perhaps the best illustration of this notion of change comes from Octavia Butler’s unfinished Parable Trilogy. In the two completed novels, Parable of the Sower[1] and Parable of the Talents, Butler’s protagonist and primary narrator Lauren Olamina records her experiences in a not-so-distant apocalyptic future where the infrastructure of the US government has withered, and the rule of law has become legend. After her walled neighborhood is attacked and burned by local drug addicts, Lauren leaves her hometown and her father’s orthodox Christian religion behind and strikes out with two other survivors on a northbound journey in search of jobs and safety.’[2] Image by qimono on Pixabay. Earthseed ‘Along the way she develops the religion she had begun to craft for herself as an alternative to her father’s faith, a set of verses she calls Earthseed. The God of Earthseed is change: All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change. ‘God is change, and change is also God. Each of the Earthseed verses either directly or obliquely speaks to the nature of change, and the most important aspect of change is its ubiquity, its atmospheric, foundational, state-of-things, all-encompassing nature. …’ ‘As Lauren develops her religion, she retains the language of “God” to talk about change. Various characters question this approach: “But it’s not a god. It’s not a person or an intelligence or even a thing. It’s just … I don’t know an idea,” says a young man named Travis. ‘Her new religion changes traditional Christianity by reimagining God as an impersonal force rather than a personal being. When Travis points out that no one worships impersonal forces such as change or the second law of thermodynamics, Lauren responds, “I hope not […] Earthseed deals with ongoing reality not with supernatural authority figures.”[3] Here we are in the realm of secular religion: ‘Most of Butler’s characters do not struggle with Earthseed as a practice. They struggle with changing their minds about who or what God is. They struggle with “ongoing reality.” Postmodernism deals with ongoing reality.’[4] In other words, they struggle to accept a religion whose concern is not with discerning an ethical structure to the Universe and aligning oneself with it, but: ‘with the processual nature of...
Postmodernism
Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book… © Mahabodhi Burton 5 minute read This excerpt is from the beginning of the chapter ‘Postmodernism and the academic mindset.’ Beyond the Postmodern Mind In Beyond the Postmodern Mind, Huston Smith states; ‘The dominant assumptions of an age colour the thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and images of the men and women who live within it’;[1] he outlines three great ‘configurations’ of such basic assumptions; the Greco-Roman or Classical period—which flourished up to the fourth century CE; the Christian worldview—which dominated Europe until the seventeenth century; and the era instigated by modern science, which ‘has come to be capsulated in the phrase ‘the Modern Mind,’[2] or just ‘modernity.’ Modernism[3] The modern outlook can be summarized by identifying its three controlling presuppositions. ‘First, that reality may be personal is less certain and less important than that it is ordered. Second, man’s reason is capable of discerning this order as it manifests itself in the laws of nature. Third, the path to human fulfilment consists primarily in discovering these laws, utilizing them where this in possible and complying with them where it is not.’[4] Modernism took its cues from the new worldview that Science introduced, but Smith claims that twentieth century science has abandoned not just that worldview but worldviews generally.[5] He uses a great image to illustrate this: ‘the Modern Mind’s mistake was to think that seeing further in a horizontal direction would compensate for loss of the vertical dimension.[6] If we visualize a line that wanders upward and then downward again to silhouette the Himalayan range, it is as if Modernity grabbed hold of both ends of that line and stretched them apart. Image by 12019 on Pixabay. This collapsed the humps to a straight line along the base of the range, but Modernity reasoned that since that line could be indefinitely extended, it would enclose a volume greater than the one the line originally defined.’[7] In other words, Modernity—underpinned by the natural attitude (the philosophical stance of science)—has ‘flattened out’ values. In Chapter 1 I explored how this is inevitably the case because Science and values occupy different domains—Science deals in third-person evidence, whereas values—represented by Religion (of whatever sort)—are an ‘affair of the heart’, and are thus represented by first-person evidence. Ketumati expresses his personal impression of the state of the world in early 2022 at the beginning of his talk Ethics and Transcendence in the 21st Century–Lifeview as Primary.[8] He talks about the distasteful end of the year orgy of consumption as problematic given the general state of the planet and the mood of darkness...
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