Bhikkhu Santi
Timeless monastic dharma
for an ever-changing world
Santi
I am a monk (bhikkhu) ordained in the Thai forest tradition, a meditation-centered branch of Theravada Buddhism. I teach meditation and offer inclusive dharma teachings approachable from a wide range of Buddhist, Buddh-ish, and secular outlooks.
I also write and teach on the intersections of Buddhism, science, philosophy, modernity, and personal life; on renunciation and monasticism in contemporary contexts; on the conscious use of technology; and on other spiritual and practice-related themes.
Santi means “peace.” As a monastic name, it’s an encouragement to value and foster peace, which I aim to develop in concert with understanding, its inseparable counterpart on the Buddhist path.
Themes in my writing, teaching, and contemplative life
I offer a renunciatory perspective on these themes through various forms of engagement and dialogue.
Enlightened Awakening
We can develop our understanding and practice of the dharma in harmony with naturalism and liberal values: reason, science, critical inquiry and dialogue, social justice, individual freedom, equality, and progress. The path to the Buddhist ideal of transcendent understanding (bodhi, “Awakening”)—the ancient path of ethical conduct, spiritual development, and wisdom—balances these (European) Enlightenment values with collective harmony and shared purpose. We can cultivate the timeless dharma in accord with these values and in the context of modernity.
Renewing Monasticism
The dharma does not support the authoritarian, hierarchical, patriarchal, and supernatural assumptions we may misunderstand traditional monasticism to require us to accept. We can rethink the institutions, customs, and practices of traditional monasticism to better serve our modern situations and to better respect the integrity of tradition and the intentions of its visionaries. We can renew the renunciatory dharma at the heart of monastic tradition. This dharma is for everyone, progressives and traditionalists, laypeople and monastics, devotional types and rationalistic types.
Conscious Use of Technology (CUTe)
We are engulfed in a crisis of distraction and anxiety exacerbated by technology. These mindstates, and the worse ones they fuel, hinder or preclude the mindful collectedness on which our flourishing depends. Dharma perspectives and practices offer a path to balance in our personal and collective relationships with technology, and to regulating the information diet our technologies promote. We can learn to engage technology more consciously, shaping a mental environment conducive to our well-being and growth.
Other current interests…
…as they inform Buddhist dharma, and as the dharma illuminates them:
•Academic Buddhist scholarship
•Consciousness and philosophy of mind
•Depolarization and bridging divides
•Discourse of “Two American Buddhisms”
•Epistemology
•Ethics and eudaimonia
•Interdisciplinary and interfaith dialogue
•Meditation
•Neuroscience
•Pastoral and spiritual counseling
•Physics and cosmology
•Psychology, CBT, and “third wave” therapies
•SBNR and other spiritual identities
Knowing that someone who has devoted themselves to practice, study and contemplation as intensively as you has the opinion that you have feels so freeing to me—like I don’t have to be hard on myself for not being able to accept the orthodox teaching, or keep struggling to find a way to accept it when I just don’t seem to be able to.