whispered lineage

Published 2008 Colloquy #15:  www.colloquy.monash.edu.au/issue015/kovan.pdf

This is a tripartite essay excerpted from a longer text which explores some of the central issues of a contemporary Buddhist ethics: how viable are Buddhist claims to awakening in relative terms? In which senses can they address the multitude of precipitous cultural, economic or religious determinations of different peoples with their often heterogeneous concerns? It asks how we read the ultimate metaphor of awakening in real terms, and in the asking, turns the question back onto the way in which our reading of it transforms, or fails to transform, our lived experience.