Buddhism and the Soul Concept — On Anatta and Rebirth — A clear explanation of why the concept of an eternal soul is rejected by Buddhism, with teaching on karma, rebirth, and consciousness as process, drawing on the Pali Canon.
Buddhism and Vedanta — Six Points of Convergence — A 1991 soc.religion.eastern post arguing that Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism are essentially identical philosophies, with six parallel points of doctrine and a practitioner's note on meditative experience.
Conditioning and Meditation — Buddhist Psychology in Practice — Sridhar Pingali of UMass Amherst explains on soc.religion.eastern in May 1991 how conditioning operates through the five aggregates, how mindfulness functions as deconditioning, and why effort remains central to the path.
Desire and Enlightenment — The Buddhist Typology of Aspiration — A Sri Lankan-born practitioner at the University of Houston distinguishes ego-desire from wholesome aspiration, mapping the Buddhist typology of motivation from chandha through the seven enlightenment factors to the equanimity that releases even the longing for liberation.
Introduction to soc.religion.eastern — A scholarly introduction to the soc.religion.eastern newsgroup, one of Usenet's most substantive forums for cross-traditional dialogue on Buddhism, Vedanta, and other Eastern religious paths.
Karma and Rebirth — A Nichiren Buddhist Perspective — A practitioner's explanation of karma, rebirth, and the eternal nature of life from a Nichiren Buddhist standpoint, drawing on the Lotus Sutra and the teachings of Nichiren Daishonin.
Madhyamika, Vedanta, and the Five Aggregates — On the Limits of Comparative Philosophy — Rebecca Radnor of Northwestern University responds to a discussion comparing Buddhist Madhyamika and Advaita Vedanta on soc.religion.eastern (May 1991), arguing that the comparison ignores context, genre, and the actual existential concerns of the traditions — and offering a careful account of the Five Aggregates and the Four Noble Truths.
On Choiceless Awareness — Three Cores of Krishnamurti's Teaching — Sitanshu Kumar of Intel, drawing on seventeen years with the teachings, outlines the three core principles of Krishnamurti's path — choiceless awareness, effortlessness, and compassion — and closes with a pointed critique of spiritual hierarchies. Posted to soc.religion.eastern in June 1991.
On Gurus — Self-Reliance and the Question of the Teacher — Tom Simmonds of Siemens Research argues on soc.religion.eastern in May 1991 that reality needs no intermediary — that teachers can help one get unstuck, but cannot transmit what must be found in one's own experience.
Overcoming Differences — A Lecture at Cornell University — His Holiness the Dalai Lama's full lecture at Barton Hall, Cornell University, March 26, 1991, on compassion, anger, genuine friendship, and world peace, followed by a Q&A session covering forgiveness, Tibet, and Buddhist practice.
Realizing Non-duality — Buddhist and Vedantic Paths Compared — John Wheeler of Ready Systems argues on soc.religion.eastern in May 1991 that Madhyamika Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, though beginning from different premises, converge on the same non-dual realization — using a hand metaphor to illustrate the unity beneath subject and object.
Seven Couplets from the Thirukkural — An original translation with full Tamil grammatical glosses of seven couplets from the Thirukkural — the classical Tamil ethical text — covering non-violence, equanimity in adversity, the relationship between effort and fate, and the primacy of learning. Posted to soc.religion.eastern in June 1991 by a University of Waterloo scholar.
Song of the Poppadum — A verse translation of Ramana Maharshi's Tamil poem for his mother, in which the recipe for making poppadum serves as a complete metaphor for the spiritual path — from the grinding of the ego-self to the frying in the butter of the Supreme. Shared on soc.religion.eastern in June 1991.
Spiritual Discrimination — A Seeker's Account — A first-person account of twenty years spent searching for a genuine spiritual teacher, with practical criteria for discriminating authentic teaching from technique and performance. Posted to soc.religion.eastern in June 1991 by a practitioner at The Santa Cruz Operation. Includes passages from Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj and Sri Atmananda of Trivandrum.
The Dharma Disease — On Conditioning, Self-Knowledge, and the Ego That Was Never Real — John Wheeler of Ready Systems argues on soc.religion.eastern in May 1991 that Krishnamurti's doctrine of mental conditioning misunderstands both the Buddha and Ramana Maharshi — and that freedom requires not unconditioning the mind but recognizing that the ego never existed.
The Direct Path — Spiritual Discrimination and the Question of Practice — A practitioner's reflections on why long spiritual practices may not lead to enlightenment, drawing on Bankei Zen, Huang-Po, Hui Neng, Dattatreya, Ramana Maharshi, Sankara, and Kabir. A sequel to the archived post on spiritual discrimination.
The Enlightened White Belt — On Gurus, Photographs, and the Leap Alone — A newcomer to soc.religion.eastern reflects on the paradox of the word 'enlightened,' an ashram where followers meditated before a photograph of their absent guru, the experience of 'reading samadhi' with D.T. Suzuki, and why the ultimate step must be taken alone. Posted in June 1991.
The Five Precepts and the Ten Virtues — A comprehensive exposition of Mahāyāna Buddhist ethics: the Five Precepts, Ten Virtues, Six Paramitas, and Four All-Embracing Virtues, posted to soc.religion.eastern in 1991.
The Golden Light — First-Hand Accounts of Mystical Experience — Three spontaneous mystical experiences reported to soc.religion.eastern in 1991 by Velu Sembugamoorthy, a South Indian researcher at Bellcore, including a vision of golden light washing through each cell of the body and the mind as a shrinking black leaf.
The Heart of the Matter — On the Nature of the Knower — A 1991 soc.religion.eastern post in which John Wheeler walks the reader through a meditative thought experiment, arriving at four reasons why the one who knows thought must be fundamentally different from thought itself — the Advaita Vedanta concept of the witness-consciousness.
The Stream and the Ripples — A Zen Response on the Nature of the Knower — Tom Simmonds offers a sustained Zen critique of the Advaita concept of a permanent 'knower' behind experience, arguing through the metaphor of a stream and its ripples that subject and object are a conceptual division, not a metaphysical reality.
The Upanishads — A Note on the Ten Principal Texts — A 1991 scholarly note posted to soc.religion.eastern identifying the ten principal Upanishads, their associated Vedas, key commentators, and the sruti/smriti distinction.
The Wisdom of Insecurity — On Consciousness, Impermanence, and the Necessity of Practice — Sridhar Pingali of UMass Amherst presents the Theravada position on soc.religion.eastern in May 1991: consciousness itself is impermanent, the wisdom of insecurity is the real foundation, and no teacher can give you freedom — it must be won by sustained practice.
Three Awakenings — Personal Encounters with the Spiritual — A Northwestern University scholar shares three first-hand mystical experiences — a Zen roshi encounter, a Meister Eckhart reading epiphany, and a vipassana breakthrough — alongside a careful reflection on attachment to spiritual experience.
Three Categories of Spiritual Evolution — On Unity and Why Teachers Differ — A Bellcore engineer offers a three-tier model of spiritual evolution to explain why some teachers require a guru and others do not — arguing that Krishnamurti spoke from the second category to first-category students, and proposing a cross-traditional map that places Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma alongside the Christian Trinity. Posted to soc.religion.eastern in June 1991.