The Wheel Of Life

Contemporary Glimpses of Traditional Buddhist Ideas - a series of talks on Friday evenings, presented by western scholars who will explore their work through Buddhist eyes.

Fridays  7.30 - 9.30 pm  May 16, 23, 30; June 6, 27; July 4, 11, 25; August 1, 8

The first lecturer is Pamela Lyon, who completed a PhD at the Australian National University in 2006 with a thesis that tested the Buddhist proposition that all sentient beings have minds, using contemporary scientific evidence. This work was directly inspired by study of the 12 Links of Dependent Origination at the Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath.

She now holds an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Adelaide, in philosophy. Pamela is a devoted student of Kangyurwa Khensur Lobsang Thubten Rinpoche since 1992, when he was the resident spiritual teacher at Buddha House.

In this 10-week course Pamela presents the Wheel of Life within the context of current science. The Wheel of Life, or the 12 Links of Dependent Origination, is often described as the content of the Buddha's enlightenment. This is what the Buddha realized such that he 'awakened'. The Four Noble Truths were his first public teaching based on this realization. The 12 Links provide the unique Buddhist account of causality (how certain conditions give rise to certain effects) in answer to the basic human existential questions: Why are we here, and why do we experience what we do? 

The 12 Links thus provide the closest thing Buddhist philosophy has to a formal theoretical framework.

Breaking this chain of causation is what the myriad forms of Buddhist practice are about. Although they may construe each of the Links differently - most especially the first one (ignorance) - all schools of Buddhism, from Theravada to Zen, have the 12 Links in common.

The unique Tibetan presentation of the 12 Links is summarized in the iconography of the Wheel of Life: four concentric rings held in the grasp of a fanged monster representing death.

The course presents the 12 Links according to the Gelukpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism but within the context of current science (e.g., physics, biology, psychology, neuroscience). The effectiveness of this Buddhist teaching is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in its consilience with knowledge emerging from the sciences right now. 

Facility fee: $15 per session, $120 for all sessions of the Wheel of Life lecture series
Tea/coffee included