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Writing that isn’t about code — Buddhism, practice, and whatever else is worth thinking through slowly.

• August 15, 20267 min read

  Take the Arrow Out First

  A monk gives the Buddha an ultimatum: answer ten questions about the cosmos and the soul, or I leave. The answer is a man refusing surgery until he knows who shot him — and a test for which questions are worth asking at all.

  • Method
  • Leaving religion
• August 15, 20268 min read

  Not-Self Is Not No-Self

  Anattā gets rendered as “there is no self”, which sounds either obviously false or bleak. The actual argument is neither, and it is not about metaphysics — it is about whether any of this takes instruction.

  • Kamma
  • Method
• August 15, 20268 min read

  Unskilful, Not Sinful

  Same action, same regret, two completely different accounts of what happened. Sin is a legal word with an offended party behind it. Akusala just means unskilful — and what corrects an unskilful act is practice, not pardon.

  • Kamma
  • Leaving religion
• August 14, 20266 min read

  Thus Have I Heard: Ānanda, and What Hearing Everything Is Worth

  Ānanda spent twenty-five years at the Buddha’s side and remembered more of the teaching than anyone alive. He was still not awakened when the council convened to recite it. The gap between hearing and knowing, in the person who heard the most.

  • The Buddha
• August 14, 20266 min read

  Kamma Is Intention, Not a Ledger

  The Buddha defined kamma as intention, and explicitly rejected the idea that everything you experience was caused by past action. What the law of kamma actually claims — and the three things people are sure it says that it does not.

  • Kamma
• August 9, 20266 min read

  Nobody Can Purify Another: On the Third Fetter

  Theravāda names attachment to rites and rituals as one of the first three things to fall away — not an advanced obstacle, an early one. Why that landed hard for someone raised in a tradition built on them.

  • Leaving religion
  • Method
• August 9, 20269 min read

  Thirty-One Realms, and Why None of Them Is the Goal

  Theravāda maps thirty-one planes of existence, from hells to formless absorptions lasting aeons. Read as a menu of destinations it is bewildering. Read as an argument that there is no good destination, it snaps into focus.

  • Kamma
• August 9, 20269 min read

  Why Buddhism Still Holds

  It holds — as a description of how wanting actually works, not as a tradition worth being polite about. Which parts still bite, which part got harder, and where the popular version drops half of it.

  • Leaving religion
  • Method
• August 9, 20265 min read

  Leaving the Palace — Twice

  Siddhattha Gotama gave up everything he had to become a wandering ascetic. Six years later he gave that up too, and the second renunciation is the one I keep thinking about.

  • The Buddha
• August 9, 20265 min read

  The Sixteen Steps: What Ānāpānasati Actually Instructs

  Mindfulness of breathing gets summarised as watching the breath. The instruction in the sutta is far more specific than that — sixteen steps in four groups, in an order that turns out to be the point.

  • Meditation
• August 8, 20267 min read

  Why the Breath Comes First: Ānāpānasati, the Kālāmas, and Pāyāsi

  Three Theravāda texts I'd been reading separately — a meditation practice, a teaching about how to decide what to accept, and an argument with a materialist prince — that turn out to be closer to one continuous thought than three.

  • Meditation
  • Method