FIRST THINGS FIRST – ESSAYS ON THE BUDDHIST PATH

Contents

• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Honest to Goodness
• In the Eyes of the Wise
• Did the Buddha Teach Free Will?
• First Things First
• The Karma of Now
• The Streams of Emotion
• Worlds & Their Cessation
  • Mundane Right View
  • Transcendent Right View
  • Release from Worlds
• Wisdom over Justice
• All Winners, No Losers
• How Pointy is One-pointedness?
• The Limits of Description
  • By Definition
  • A Distinction without a Difference
  • Further Implications
  • Why Does the Not-self Strategy Work?
  • The Right View of One Beyond Training
• The Names for Nibbāna
• Glossary
• Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

Many people have read earlier versions of these essays and have kindly offered suggestions for improvements. In particular, I would like to thank the monks here at the monastery, as well as Addie Onsanit, Nathaniel Osgood, Balaji Ramasubramanian, Dale Schultz, Isabella Trauttmansdorff, and Barbara Wright. Any mistakes that remain, of course, are my own responsibility.

Some of these essays, in earlier incarnations, have appeared in Tricycle, Buddhadharma, and Lion’s Roar. I would like to thank the editors of these journals for their help in making the writing clearer and more coherent. The fact that the essays were originally written on different occasions for different audiences explains the difference in style among them, the occasional overlap in content, as well as the inconsistent use of Sanskrit and Pāli terms: karma/kamma, dharma/dhamma, and nirvāṇa/nibbāna. I hope that this is not a problem.

These and other essays on buddhist practice are available on the internet at www.dhammatalks.org.