Podcast: Enlightenment & Epistemology

Ted Meissner, of The Secular Buddhist Association, recently invited me to discuss “what can we know about enlightenment, and how?” for their podcast series. Our conversation was based on my post about that here.

The podcast episode (“Enlightenment and Epistemology”), now available, came out really well. Ted is a skilled interviewer, and also added his own considerable insight and sensible judgement to the mix.

Ted and his colleagues, like me, want to find—I hate to use this phrase, but—a middle way between accepting traditional Buddhist beliefs uncritically, and rejecting all of Buddhism just because a fair bit of it is nonsense.

This has to be an on-going project. (In fact, it has already been on-going for a couple of millennia now, as Buddhism has undergone frequent revision and innovation.) It is not clear, and it probably never will be certain, quite how best to do that.

The Secular Buddhist podcast series presents diverse views on how Buddhism can contribute to contemporary society—and vice versa. There’s much of great interest there; check it out!