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    Back to Basics: What Do Buddhists Mean When They Talk About Emptiness? Paid Member

    By Thanissaro Bhikkhu
    Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to, and takes nothing away from, the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them. This mode is called emptiness because it is empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience in order to make sense of it: the stories and worldviews we fashion to explain who we are and the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that the questions they raise—of our true identity and the reality of the world outside—pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. Thus they get in the way when we try to understand and solve the problem of suffering. More »
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    On Having No Head Paid Member

    By Douglas E. Harding
    The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head. More »
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    Remembering How to Walk Paid Member

    By John House
    In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud. -Wallace Stevens, "Of the Surface of Things" More »
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    What Body? Paid Member

    By Shantideva
    What we call the body is not feet or shins, The body, likewise, is not thighs or loins. It's not the belly nor indeed the back, And from the chest and arms the body is not formed. The body is not ribs or hands, Armpits, shoulders, bowels, or entrails; It is not the head or throat: From none of these is "body" constituted. If "body," step by step,Pervades and spreads itself throughout its members,Its parts indeed are present in the parts, But where does the "body," in itself, abide! More »
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    The Other Side of Appearance Paid Member

    By Caitlin Van Dusen
    Antony Gormley is an acclaimed British artist whose sculpture has revolutionized the expression of the human body in art. He has gained particular recognition for making casts of his own body and manipulating them to challenge viewers' perceptions of space, identity, and time. A former student of the renowned Vipassana teacher S. N. Goenka's, Gormley found that his experience with meditation heightened his awareness of the body and influenced its expression in his work. More »