It’s only in the last century that folks have been told that meditation alone will make them kinder and more generous. (On the contrary, meditation has been taught in Japan to help warriors and businessmen be more ruthless.)

I often come back to the five basic precepts: not harming, not stealing, not committing sexual misconduct, not lying, and not being too intoxicated to care.

As Joe further pointed out, “We’re navigating five different worlds at once: Traditional Buddhism, traditional Western Buddhism, secular mindfulness, hardcore empiricist neuroscientists, and neuroscientists who are into Buddhism,” each of whom may have different worldviews and operating assumptions.

For the Buddha of the Pali Canon, the goal is liberation: the cessation of suffering, the end of the endless hamster-wheel of dependent origination, of mental formations leading to desire leading to clinging leading to suffering and so on. Nibbana, or nirvana, was not originally conceived as some magical heavenly world, or even a permanent altered

When the thinking mind and desiring mind are slowed down enough, this love and compassion arise naturally, without any prodding or effort from me. (I’m very bad at prodding myself to be nicer; for me, the only way that works is to actually become more loving, sincerely.)

Basketball players and tennis players do different things—but they can both be star athletes. Likewise in contemplative practice.

to understand, intuitively and deeply, that what Buddhists call “conditioned formations”—i.e., stuff, ideas, people, emotions, and everything else—are incapable of providing lasting, deep happiness.

Formations change all the time. The joys they bring—though often wonderful, profound, and amazing—are short-lived. Even when we get exactly what we want, it gets old after a while, and we want something else.

Water the garden of greed, and you get greedier; nourish the saplings of compassion, and eventually they grow instead. Such is the core of the Buddha’s “four noble truths”: that suffering exists; that clinging, craving desire is its cause; that it is possible to end suffering; and that there is a systematic, step-by-step, empirically verifiable