Audios and Videos
The following, from the Buddhasasana Podcast, are Dhamma talks, audio courses, and readings by Bhikkhu Cintita, available also in iTunes, Spotify and other platforms.
Buddhism as Self-Help
Final notes. We review Buddhism’s unique roles in the symbolic/transcendent world. (Buddhism as Self-Help 18, 1/20/2023)
The transcendent dimension. We look at how Buddhism fits into the symbolic structures of social cognition: the sacred, myth, ritual and community, and how meaning, motivation and supramundane experience are rooted there. (Buddhism as Self-Help 17, 1/13/2023)
Ordering the world symbolically. Social cognition works symbolically. We continue our understanding of the constructed symbolic world in terms of myth and the sacred and their influence on human behavior. (Buddhism as Self-Help 16, 1/6/2023)
The serious life. Symbolism provides the workings of social, cooperative life. We discuss the ubiquity and importance of ritual and then the ethic of living by vow, with examples from the Zen tradition. (Buddhism as Self-Help 15, 12/30/2022)
Supramundane experience. Lasting well-being is possible within the selfless, pro-social, cooperative world. We discuss moral communities, when they go wrong and the Buddhist resources that make them work. (Buddhism as Self-Help 14, 12/23/2022)
Mundane experience. The Buddha divides thoughts into wholesome and unwholesome. The mundane unwholesome search for hedonic pleasure necessarily fails to produce lasting well-being for modern psychological and evolutionary reasons. (Buddhism as Self-Help 13, 12/16/2022)
The Sangha of non-selves. The monastic Sangha provides a context in which social conditions that presuppose a self are excluded. (Buddhism as Self-Help 12, 12/9/2022)
The sociocultural non-self. A quick tour of various societal structures gives us an idea of where a non-self might be able to live and thrive. (Buddhism as Self-Help 11, 12/2/2022)
The Dharma strikes back. Contrary to being the ideology of global capitalism, Buddhism is only marginally about self-help under adverse social conditions, but intrinsically concerned with improving social conditions. (Buddhism as Self-Help 10, 11/25/2022)
Practice in a social context. The Buddha made clear that the success of our practice depends critically on an appropriate social context for practice. Self-help focuses on practice in inappropriate contexts. (Buddhism as Self-Help 9, 11/18/2022)
Self-presentation. We look at the social psychology of managing our self-image in social contexts as a source for the ego-self and the authentic self, and how individualism is nonsensical. (Buddhism as Self-Help 8, 11/11/2022)
The sociocultural self. We discuss self-presentation as an individual adaptation to survival in the sociocultural matrix. (Buddhism as Self-Help 7, 11/4/2022)
Individual and social cognition. Humans are fundamentally cooperative and social creatures. We show that most significant individual cognition serves social cognition, drawing significant differences between humans and other apes in this regard. (Buddhism as Self-Help 6, 10/28/2022)
Buddhist self/modern self. We discuss Buddhist practices for deconstructing the thing-self, and then how modern Buddhism is interpreted in terms of the modern authentic self. (Buddhism as Self-Help 5, 10/21/2022)
The rise of the authentic self. We discuss how the ego-self is produced through appropriating assets as “me” and “mine” in Buddhist thought, and then how the historically evolved self in the west became the authentic self. (Buddhism as Self-Help 4, 10/14/2022)
The history of the self. We discuss the thing-self in Buddhist thought, and the evolution of the self in European history. (Buddhism as Self-Help 3, 10/7/2022)
Buddhist self/modern self. The Buddha analyzed the self at two levels: the thing-self and the ego-self. We use the ego-self, produced in becoming, to begin the analysis of the evolving western sense of self and its shadow sense of lack. (Buddhism as Self-Help 2, 9/30/2022)
Buddhism as self-help: introduction. Has Buddhism become “the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism”? (Buddhism as Self-Help 1, 9/23/2022)
Buddhist terminology
Five talks. Please click on image
Rethinking the Satipaṭṭhāna
Twenty-two episodes, please click on image.
A Culture of Awakening
Fourteen episodes, please click on image.
Talks on the Buddhist Path
Twelve talks, click on the link.
The Buddha’s Method
The Buddha’s Method: insubstantial and conditional. (Second of two talks) The Buddha’s methodology furthermore involves regarding the world as both insubstantial and conditional. (7/30/2021)
The Buddha’s Method: practical and subjective. (First of two talks) The Buddha clarifies an explicit methodology which is nonetheless often overlooked by students of the Dharma. Much of this has to do with the practical and experiential orientation of the Dharma. (7/23/2021)
A history of emptiness
The teaching of emptiness is often considered to be an innvation of Nagarjuna or of the Prajnaparamita Sutras. However this important teaching had been expounded by the Buddha many centuries before, but has become obscured. But how? (7/16/2021)
Talks on Dependent Co-Arising
Twenty-five talks, click on the image.
Talks on the Buddhist Life
Twelve talks, click on the image.
Samadhi talks
Four talks, click on the image.
Was the Buddha a biologist?
“If consciousness were not to descend into the mother’s womb, would name-and-form take shape in the womb?” “No.” The most common traditional interpretation of this famous passage (from DN 15) is that consciousnessis travels into the womb to unify with the fetus of name-and-form at conception. I argue that this interpretation is untenable.
Empathy talks
Three talks, click on image.
Mindfulness, where Dharma meets Practice
How I became a Buddhist
Smart but not wise, I took up Buddhism as a rather step-by-step process of rational exploration. That is, until it swept me up to reveal things rather unanticipated.
What did the Buddha think of women
Two talks, please click on the image.
Understanding the aggregates
The aggregates are a foundational teaching of the Buddha, but they are rarely properly understood. This talk shows how to identify all the aggregates in your own experience and explains their role in contemplative practice.
What is the Buddha-Sasana?
The Buddha-Sasana is Buddhism as a living tradition, something that evolves, spreads to new lands, dies out in old lands, rather than Buddhism as the Dharma, which is much more static. A key question for the Buddha seems to be is how well the Buddha-Sasana would retain the authenticity of the Buddha-Dharma.
The story of my ordination
A narrative account of BC’s 2009 bhikkhu ordination in Burma. This story appears in his 2012 book, Through the Looking Glass, which can be found under “books” on this site.
The beauty queen
This talk examines three simles for mindfulness, two of the Buddha’s and one of my own, and discusses how our meditation needs to venture beyond the breath.
The seven factors of awakening
An oft neglected causal chain of factors described by the Buddha that arise one by one in meditation practice and link mindfulness and concentration.
The ‘trinsic motivation sermons
Four talks, please click on the image.
Interview with Bhikkhu Cintita: Sitagu Sayadaw, the coup and Burmese Buddhism (1/5/2022)
Please click on the image.
Video course: Mindfulness, where Dharma meets practice
Six videos, click on the image.
Buddha-Sāsana 