The Buddhist attitude to any such revelation would be that of accepting what is true, good and sound and rejecting what is false, evil and unsound after a dispassionate analysis of its contents without giving way to prejudice, hatred, fear or ignorance.

K. N. Jayatilleke outlines three broad means of spiritual knowledge, where Buddhist thought fits in, and how this compares to the major religious thought at the time of the Buddha.

The three means are: revelation, reason, and direct experience. Jayatilleke places Buddhism squarely in the third category. He then explores these means of knowledge as viewed by the materialists, Jains, and followers of the Vedas, comparing them with Buddhist thought.

Wasn’t Bulgaria, in all of its dinginess and provincialism and unpredictability, exactly the kind of frontier I was looking to explore, where the clock was still ticking forward toward some unknown horizon?

We describe three patients from different religious backgrounds in Sri Lanka whose possession states were strongly influenced by their religious beliefs. Patient A was a Buddhist who claimed to have special powers given by a local deity named Paththini. Patient B was a Catholic who experienced spirits around her whom she believed were sent by Satan. Patient C was a Muslim and believed she was possessed by spirits. The religious beliefs also influenced the help-seeking behaviour and the rituals or treatments to which they responded.

We make ourselves in our own scientific image of the kinds of people it is possible to be.

A series of case studies on the interaction between mental illness and modern society.

Many people have this paradigm of seeing it all as natural, but…

A metaphor can also die when it becomes so common that we forget it is a metaphor. It no longer functions as a figure of speech; its meaning is taken to be literal. This is what happened to the computational theory of mind

An extended meditation on what it means to be a sentient being in this disenchanted era.

How do you know the natural world is real?

The Buddha’s provisional worldview could not be purely materialistic. He established this point with the line that his followers posted in the first line of the Dhammapada: “The heart/mind is the forerunner of all phenomena.” With this line, the Buddha rejected the worldview in which the mind is simply the passive recipient of sense data, or in which its functions are nothing more than the after-effects of physical processes.

In order to end suffering, a provisional worldview was adopted by the Buddha. This article discusses that view and the strategic reasons for adopting it.

… even consciousness is shared, to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, so death stops seeming like the enemy and starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining. And to go from the terror [of death] into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social, economic, and cultural things.

A passionate defense of the importance of Buddhist philosophy in charting a path out of the Anthropocene.

We need to turn towards the Earth rather than think so much about abstract, higher worlds. This is the world that has made us, and it’s a creative world. It’s truly an extraordinary place, and we haven’t given it enough credit I think, or appreciation.

Nearly incontrovertible in its conclusion, the book inspired a revolution in charity in the West and encouraged many (me included) to donate more to charity than they ever had before.

The tenth anniversary edition is available for free online.