Text below is provisional

Read Me First

Welcome to Mostly Theravada. Every Tuesday we publish a new Dharma Talk on our Home page. Inside the “Portal” on this site you’ll find more essays, along with research materials on Theravada Buddhism.

When we began to consider putting up a website in support of our local teaching and practice we immediately recognized there’s nothing local about the Internet. We’re as likely to have visitors from Iceland and Singapore as from our region of southern Ontario, Canada. Interest in Buddhist teachings is on the increase and it’s world wide.

Equally true, the Internet has become an alternative, searchable way to communicate and publish just about every subject. We’re not the first Buddhist site by any means. But we plan to approach it in a different way than we’ve seen so far. 

We’re North American first generation Buddhists who discovered the teaching out of need and circumstances. We’re well established in our practice. For those who find merit in Theravada we invite you to visit regularly.

In the tradition of Dharma teachers everywhere, we’ll be offering a Tuesday Dharma Talk every week, in tone like the one you find on our Home page today. Each talk will consider a particular aspect of Buddhism in general and Theravada in particular. To name just a few we’ll consider walking meditation, sitting meditation, body meditation, insight, serenity, absorption, loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity, the teachings of dependent origination, and many others.

Each talk will be fairly brief, take no more than 10 to 15 minutes to read, and will be accessible (as best as we are able) to anyone, no matter what their background and degree of familiarity with Buddhist teachings. We aspire to short essays which can be joined at any point to gain benefit. 

And lots of links. The talks feature many web links, both internal to this site and also out to the world wide web. The external links look like this, which in this case is to Wikipedia’s page about itself. External links always include this symbol. 

We introduce this particular link to Wikipedia quite deliberately. This site often uses links to the many Wikipedia pages on Buddhist concepts. We’re well aware Wikipedia pages are not single authored and may be plundered at any time, and therefore not always rock solid. But in our experience Wikipedia pages tend to be repaired quickly and at the same time, especially on the many Buddhist WP pages we’ve consulted, the quality while not always superb is nevertheless excellent. Wikipedia pages are an excellent place to begin further research. Therefore you’ll find many links here to Wikipedia, as well as to other sites such as Access to Insight and yet others.

Inside The Portal you’ll find a page of links to Buddhist sites we find valuable, not restricted to just the Theravada branch of Buddhism or even to just Buddhism. You’ll also find a Bibliography, a collection of books we have in our libraries and share among ourselves, with notes on why we have included them. And there’s a Glossary of technical terms with additional links. And at the bottom of many Dharma Talks you’ll find citations and fine point footnotes. The Portal also contains an archive of all the Dharma Talks by title and a Library of much longer essays we’ve written or agreed to publish on the net.

On some pages you’ll also find green links, like this one. These are “placeholders” for links we’ve yet to develop, for talks we plan but haven’t written yet. Green links don’t do anything now. As we write and publish the relevant essays they’ll turn to a conventional blue.

There is no “official” beginning for these talks so begin where you are right now. It’s in the nature of Buddhism to repeat its teachings in different contexts and at different levels. They continuously cycle like a spiral. Most readers should be able to start at any point, using the links provided to look up puzzling terms or concepts. There is really no inevitable, universal “beginning” to Buddhism. So begin where you are. Or, if you really must start at the “beginning”, then use this link to take you to the very first Dharma Talk we’ve published and from there you can continue in sequence up to the present. 

Buddhism is very much the famous rock garden in Kyoto. From any point on the long viewing platform all 15 features cannot be seen simultaneously. They hide each other. This Buddhist meditation sand garden points to this same reality in life. Only when we transcend self do we get the complete picture. We plan on revisiting certain themes again and again, looking at them from a different point of view. Buddhism is like a hologram. With very little data the image is grainy, indistinct and murky but all there. With more information the resolution improves and one can look at the hologram from many vantages, each one showing the same reality clearly but viewed differently.

So be confident you can begin where you are. All our Dharma Talks apply to both the beginner and the more experienced meditator. 

One of the prerequisites to good practice is “right understanding.” Buddhist teachings are not mastered by reading or thinking, but by the practice of meditation. However Buddhist teachings tend to be subtle. Suitable reading is a help. Even better is to have a trusted teacher/mentor you can meet with face to face, someone more experienced who can help with personalized guidance is highly recommended. You’ll find our thoughts on that subject here. In the meantime whether you already have a teacher or not, you may find the materials on this site useful. 

We’re not a commercial site. There’s nothing to buy here. We’re not selling anything. This site is entirely supported by dana, the practice of giving. There are very real costs to running a site such as this and there is no foundation or wealthy benefactor behind our site. Therefore to flourish we depend on the generosity of folks like you. Visit this page for more of our thoughts on dana.

Come back regularly. There’s a new Dharma Talk every Tuesday.

You can also contact us. We’d like to hear from you. 

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Technical addendum: We’ve designed this site to work smoothly, without fuss for the majority of computer users. However, there are a lot of web browsers out there of various vintages. If the page rendering looks strange to you, here’s a couple of things you can try. One, install the latest version of Firefox (free, PC or Mac). Chances are it will fix the majority of your issues. Two, we use a lot of Pali language quotes, including their diacritical accent markings. If you see strange symbols and ? marks in the midst of words, you probably need to install two fonts, Times New Roman and Verdana. They’re “core” web fonts installed with many browsers. If you don’t have them, here’s a cumbersome but quite legal way to acquire and install them (Mac or PC). Download and install Internet Explorer from Microsoft. The fonts come bundled. Continue to use the browser of your choice. Contact us if you have any technical issues with this site.