Overview of the Buddha’s Teaching

We see many general teachings attributed to the Buddha, and some nice expositions of individual Suttas. But it’s rare to see an overview of the whole teaching of the Buddha in an understandable format. Educated people love charts and graphs, so here is a chart depicting the overall view of the Buddha’s teaching in the Theravāda Suttas.

Ordinary life is an obsessive process of becoming driven by ‘I’-making and ‘mine’-making, culminating in failure, loss and suffering. The cause of this suffering is the sequence of paṭicca-samuppāda, or Dependent Origination, discovered by the Buddha. Ordinarily, at each death the cycle of becoming begins anew; that is saṃsāra, the round of birth and death. Release from this cycle is possible via a special process of becoming, leading to the end of becoming. That is the Buddha’s teaching, this very Noble Eightfold Path.

An interesting feature of the Buddha’s teaching is that the cause of suffering and the cause of release are the same process of becoming. Only becoming in saṃsāra is done in ignorance, and becoming on the Path is done in full knowledge.

For more on Dependent Origination and the source of this diagram, see Practical Dependent Origination by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu.

Rebirth: Context of the Buddha’s Teaching

Some notes and links on the subjects discussed in the video:

Neo-Abhidhamma and VR

For some time I have been considering the feasibility of an online ontology (OWL, RDF + Reasoner + NLP… stack) of the Buddha’s teaching in the Suttas. I’m not happy with the structure of the Abhidhamma. It’s supposed to be a sort of ontological analysis of the Suttas—but it’s not terminologically consistent or ontologically coherent enough for behavioral computer analysis and natural-language interface. I wanna be able to talk with the Buddha in VR!

Matrix Learning

Compulsory Education Spoils Success

We all want to live our dreams. What gets in the way, more often than not, is our education—or actually, the lack of one. Schooling is not education. In fact, in many ways it is the opposite. According to John Dewey of Decimal System fame, one of the founders of American education policy:

“Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven.” — Dewey, Pedagogic Creed (1897)

Underground History of American Education

John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education is an eye-opener. It describes the origin and design philosophy of the American public school system.

“The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn and it isn’t supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason’s words, ‘the control of human behavior’.”

That is why we developed Matrix Learning based on the original teaching of the Buddha.

John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education
Download EPUB File: https://db.tt/e9lRqyLU

The Character of a Village—John Taylor Gatto

“Before I went to first grade I could add, subtract, and multiply in my head. I knew my times tables not as work but as games Dad played on drives around Pittsburgh. Learning anything was easy when you felt like it. My father taught me that, not any school.

The State of The Dharmasar Solution

The Dharmasar Solution is a big piece of work: a bridge from western philosophy to the teaching of the Buddha. I’ve been developing it for over two years now, and it’s nowhere near done. The basic arch is complete; to make it useful, now we have to build the rest.

Becoming Genius 5: Metacognition

This is our new series on learning. The Buddha showed the example of experiential self-education based on phenomenological observation, radical reflection and deep ontological analysis. In Becoming Genius we abstract this style of learning from the Buddha’s teaching.

Technical Note: This is a Chapterized AAC file. Besides the audio there is a series of slides which you can see by playing the file in Quicktime Player.

Becoming Genius 5: Metacognition [32-MB M4A]

 

 

Buddhist Ontology Challenge

WebProtégé, a new online ontology editor, facilitates collaborative projects. From the site:

“WebProtégé is an ontology development environment for the Web that makes it easy to create, upload, modify, and share ontologies for collaborative viewing and editing. WebProtégé fully supports the latest OWL 2 Web Ontology Language. The highly configurable user interface creates the perfect environment for beginners and experts alike. Collaboration features abound, including sharing and permissions, threaded notes and discussions, watches and email notifications.”

I challenge any readers inspired by the Becoming Genius series to join me in a WebProtégé project to input and analyze the ontology of the Buddha’s teaching, as described in the episode on Ontological Analysis. Anyone game?