Gautama Dhamma

During our winter retreat, our monastic community undertook Vinaya training. As part of this effort, we relied heavily on The Buddhist Monastic Code I by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu as a practical reference manual for understanding monastic rules and procedures. The text served its intended purpose well in many respects: it is detailed, systematic, and highly useful…

In recent decades, mindfulness has spread across the globe with remarkable speed. It now appears in hospitals treating chronic pain, in schools helping children focus, in corporate wellness programs, and in therapy rooms supporting emotional balance. These applications bring real benefit: they calm agitation, sharpen attention, and make daily life more manageable. Yet beneath this…

excerpt from my new book: The Complete Mindfulness Training Toward Liberation: The Union of Satipaṭṭhāna (Foundational Mindfulness) and Anussati (Higher Mindfulness) Within Buddhist meditation traditions, two broad paths of training are often described. Both aim at liberating wisdom, yet they differ in how concentration and insight relate during practice. One proceeds from mindfulness directly into insight;…

Nature’s Revelation of the Noble Becoming The Teaching Written into Living Form Across cultures, continents, and millennia, the butterfly has been universally revered as the supreme emblem of liberation, transformation, and the soul’s ascent. From ancient Greek psyche (meaning both “butterfly” and “soul”) to Aztec and Native American traditions where butterflies carry the spirits of…

The poster for The Silence of the Lambs (1991) offers a striking visual metaphor for the formation of the self: a pale, asymmetrical face with vampiric red eyes, sealed by the imposing Death’s-Head Hawkmoth over the mouth. This enforced silence—lips literally closed by a symbol of death, transformation, and suppressed desire—speaks volumes without words. The…

The poster functions as a mirror to the film’s core inquiry: evil as a distortion of human nature, rooted in trauma, unsatisfied desire, and the rejection of empathy. It reveals the shadow self through layered symbols, particularly illuminating the darkness embodied by the two central antagonists—Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill (Jame Gumb)—while echoing Clarice Starling’s…

In the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter offers a chilling analysis of the serial killer Buffalo Bill. He tells Clarice Starling: “There is no correlation between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive. Billy is not a real transsexual, but he thinks he is. He tries to be. He tries to…

Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) stands as one of cinema’s most unflinching meditations on the human condition, exposing the profound and perilous tension at the heart of our existence: the primal animal inheritance we carry from our evolutionary past versus the divine inheritance we are called to realize and fully embody. The…