Graham Lock Last December, I took part in an 8-day metta meditation retreat at the Hong Kong Insight Meditation Society’s meditation centre at Fa Hong Monastery on Lantau Island. The retreat was led by Visu Teoh, an experienced and well-respected teacher of vipassana and metta meditation based in Penang, and well known in Hong Kong […]
Graham Lock
David Loy and Donald Trump
Graham Lock Having recently reviewed David Loy’s latest book, I wasn’t intending to talk about him again so soon. Nor was I intending to add my voice to the howls of anguish following the election of Donald Trump. However, Raymond Lam, Buddhistdoor’s senior writer, recently sent me the transcript of a talk called “The Bodhisattva […]
On Exploring Karma and Rebirth by Nagapriya
Graham Lock As some people said they liked my review of David Loy’s book (well, two people actually), I thought I would again present some musings on what I have been reading. Nagapriya’s Exploring Karma and Rebirth is not a new book (it was published in 2004), but I came across it only recently in […]
On Reading David Loy’s “A New Buddhist Path”
Graham Lock I have recently finished David R. Loy’s latest book A New Buddhist Path: Enlightenment, Evolution and Ethics in the Modern World (2015, Boston: Wisdom Publications). While reading it I found myself frequently saying, “Yes! yes!” and furiously underlining passages to read again later (though, knowing me, I probably won’t). I’ll try to briefly […]
My Difficulties with the Lotus Sutra
Graham Lock I have recently been studying the Sutra of the Lotus Flower of the Marvelous Dharma (妙法蓮花經), usually called the Lotus Sutra in English. This sutra has been and still is enormously important and influential in East Asian Buddhism. As far as I understand it, the sutra makes three main points: firstly, that the […]
Am I a Buddhist?
Graham Lock I have recently seen a few YouTube vids of talks and discussions in which renowned Dharma teachers assert that there can be no Buddhism without rebirth, and in a couple of cases they go as far as to say that those who don’t believe in rebirth shouldn’t call themselves Buddhists. Debates about this […]
Giving to charity and the trouble with empathy
Graham Lock I recently realized that, assuming I do not live too long beyond the age at which statistics say I ought to depart, I can enjoy a perfectly comfortable retirement on less money than I had originally budgeted for. There was therefore no reason why I should not be a bit more generous with […]
On Killing People
Graham Lock Watching scenes of barbarity on the news or reading about them in the newspaper, I have sometimes wondered whether there are any circumstances in which I would be willing to kill someone, or more realistically in my case (if I had a gun in my hand I would probably shoot myself in the […]
On Alan Wallace
Graham Lock Over the last few years I have participated in a number of retreats, ranging from two months to a few days. And I have developed some pretty firm views on what is most useful to me and is what least useful to me. On my list of ‘least useful’ comes the dharma talk. […]