The Five Aggregates
When people first hear “the five aggregates,” it can sound like the Buddha is turning you into a pile of parts—like your living, breathing life…
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The Seven Factors of Awakening
In the early teachings, awakening isn’t treated as a single lightning strike so much as a living ecology—conditions that feed each other until the mind…
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Eight Worldly Conditions
The Buddha was brutally practical about the human heart. He didn’t need a complex psychology to name what keeps most of us reactive: we get…
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The 12 Links of Dependent Origination
Dependent origination is one of those teachings that can feel, at first, like a metaphysical diagram—twelve strange terms strung together in a chain. But the…
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Shannon Number in Chess
The Shannon number, named after the American mathematician Claude Shannon, is a conservative lower bound of the game-tree complexity of chess of 10120, based on…
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Instructions From Master Funakoshi
The word “bu” of budo (martial arts) is written with the Chinese character for “stop” within a character signifying two crossed halberds meaning to stop…
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Training Precepts from Master Funakoshi
FIRST, since karate is a martial art, you must practice with the utmost seriousness from the very beginning. This means going beyond being simply diligent…
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The Twenty Principles of Karate
Master Gichin Funakoshi, the founder of Shotokan karate, laid out the Twenty Precepts of Karate (Niju kun), which are there as a guide for all…
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Gichin Funakoshi
Founder of Shotokan Karate-Do Gichin Funakoshi was born in Shuri, Okinawa, in 1868. As a boy, he was trained by two famous masters. Each trained…
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Manners in the Zendo
Manners in the zendo aren’t about being “proper.” They’re about making the room safe for practice—yours and everyone else’s. A zendo is one of the…
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