By Bhikkhu Cintita

ISBN 978-983-3512-54-6

IJ225/20

Size: 5.5” x 8.25”

Pages: 138 pages

This book is about Dharma, practice, and how they intersect in mindfulness. It is a nutshell introduction to Buddhism based almost exclusively on the earliest Buddhist sources, which are the historical basis for all of the diverse later schools of Buddhism, and which represent what the Buddha actually taught, as best as we can determine. It is a textbook that has been used to supplement about ten hours of class time.

In spite of its conciseness, this text provides a comprehensive overview of the range of Buddhist practice and understanding and contains practical advice on how we can integrate Buddhist practice into busy modern lives. It begins from the premise that Dharma serves solely as a support for practice and that the role of mindfulness is to enable Dharma effectively to inform practice.

By highlighting the central role of mindfulness, this book serves as a corrective to many of the modem understandings of “mindfulness,” often taught in modern Buddhism as the core of the Dharma, or even as the entirety of the Dharma, but in fact often dislodged from the Dharma as an entirely secular practice. The point here is not that these modern understandings are wrong or useless, or even that they are not worthy entry points into Dharma, but that they in themselves are woefully limiting for those of us who would folly engage the richness of the Dharma and of practice on the path to awakening. We hope here to reclaim mindfulness for the Buddha.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BHIKKHU CINTITA is an American Buddhist monk and scholar, ordained in Myanmar and currently practicing in Texas and Minnesota.

He was born John Dinsmore in 1949 in San Francisco, California into a non-religious family. He began his university studies at Berkeley in Mathematics and ended up earning a PhD in linguistics at the University of California at San Diego. After living in Germany on a research fellowship for a year, during which he took up meditation practice, he returned to the US to earn a MS in computer science at Kansas University, after which he became a professor of Computer Science at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. After a marriage that produced three children, he worked in the corporate world in research and development in artificial intelligence, which brought him to Austin, Texas.

In 2001 Dinsmore retired from his career at the age of 51 in order to devote himself to Buddhist study and practice, and eventually to teaching Dhamma, and has never looked back. He spent one and a half years at                                             

Tassajara Zen Monastery in California. Returning to Austin, he ordained as a Zen priest in 2003 at the Austin Zen Center, which he had helped found a few years before. He lived, trained and taught at the Austin Zen Center for six years before deciding to ordain as a Theravada monk.

In 2009, at the invitation of Ashin Ariyadhamma, Dinsmore traveled to Myanmar and was ordained as a bhikkhu by Sitagu Sayadaw. He lived in Myanmar for thirteen months before returning to live alternately in Austin and in Minnesota. He is highly engaged in research and writing, focused primarily on the Early Buddhist Texts. His lectures, books and essays can be found at bhikkhucintita.wordpress.com.