here is part 2 of the january buddhist carnival. you can find part one here.

t he first two posts will be particularly interesting to people who are just starting to explore buddhism. samuel bryson talks about living in the now – the philosophy of happiness with a twist of zen at his blog total wellbeing. here is one of the things he explores in this post; it’s a question that often comes up in discussions of buddhism:

there are certain ideas within the buddhist tradition which are of great interest to me. one of these is the idea of living “in the now”. many people’s instinct would probably be to say “but what does this mean, sam? does it mean we should always do things that we enjoy and therefore become hedonistic?

simply put, no. we should not by this theory become hedonistic in a material sense and indeed the buddhists also have a theory of balance known as “the middle way” which also suggests one avoid extremes.

samuel’s post on the nature of happiness pursues this topic further.

jonathan reynolds presents buddhism’s emptiness, dependent-arising, karma, and no-self posted at meditation vinyasa yoga. it’s a little introduction to buddhism for people who feel attracted to buddhism but aren’t quite sure why. his article on practicing with pain is also interesting.

to be honest, one of the things that has always attracted me to zen buddhism are all the wonderful teaching stories. anmol mehta tells us one in true meaning of zen and of life? in just 3 words. here, zen master blumise asks his students to help him answer the question, “what is the true meaning of zen?” so … what is it? you’ll just have to read the article. after anmol reveals the answer, he issues this challenge: can you drop the apple and not take the next bite?

anmol also offers a video on how to practice zazen (zen sitting meditation)

albert foong, the urban monk, has an in-depth article on compassion and self-esteem, part of a whole series on compassion. in it, he explains that self esteem is very much the same as self-love. he refers to tonglen meditation, a wonderfully loving buddhist practice advocated by one of my buddhist “heroes”, pema chodron.

finally, we have tupelo kenyon, who submitted three posts. they’re not directly about buddhism but i’m sure people who read this blog will find them interesting: consciously programming your subconscious mind before sleep; balancing desire with contentment and how to live the life of your dreams through intuition. as usual, tupelo reminds us that you can “enjoy soothing instrumental music as you read plus songs with lyrics related to each article.”

a big thank-you for all the articles! if you have a post about buddhism, please submit it here for the next carnival. it’s scheduled for february 15.

(this image above is by ottmar liebert. this is kind of a neat story: as usual, i was browsing through flickr’s creative commons section for an image that i can use. i wanted something to illustrate the telling of zen stories, so i looked for “zen teacher”. this one seemed just perfect – and it turned out to be by ottmar liebert, whose music i used to listen to most avidly back in the 80s.)