The Jewish Contribution to Western Buddhism

I’ve found it curious that many of the pioneers of Western Buddhism – those who brought Buddhism to the West and helped popularise it – are Jewish. Frank Descher details this phenomenon in his 2017 essay ‘Jewish Converts to Buddhism and the Phenomenon of “Jewish Buddhists” (“JuBus”) in the United States, Germany and Israel’. Rodger Kamenetz,…

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The Meaning of ‘Skillful’ and ‘Unskillful’ in Buddhist Ethics

In Buddhism, actions that are deemed good or bad are framed as being ‘skillful’ or ‘unskillful’. In this conception of ethics, morality is distinguished from other religious traditions, such as Christianity – where we find the concept of sin – or common notions of morality where we speak of actions being morally right or wrong.…

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