Thursday’s session will be our last class; Joan and I are going out to California a week from Wednesday to spend some time with our grandson and his parents, and I’ll miss the last scheduled session.

Throughout the course, as we’ve looked at the various topics that Buddhist scholars, historians, practitioners and teachers tend to spend most time discussing and working to understand, we’ve used, almost as our exclusive source for the core teachings regarding those topics, the discourses recorded in the Pali Canon. On Thursday, we’ll look at just what that is: what texts compose the canon, how they were chosen, how they were recorded, their relation to other Buddhist texts, and where they fit into the various traditions that define Buddhism today.

Unlike some of the other topics we’ve discussed, this one is not particularly challenging intellectually (although I do think that it’s enormously interesting, and important to an understanding of the sort of thing that Buddhism is). What I hope we’ll be able to do is make relatively short work of reviewing the basics, which I’ve covered in a relatively short essay I wrote several years ago, have revised several times since, and is now posted on our Dharma Study website. Then we’ll use the bulk of the class for a more general discussion, in which we can air some of the questions that have arisen through the past six weeks, and review what we’ve learned and where we hope to go with that.

I look forward to seeing you on Thursday.

I’ve written a page on the Squidoo site about the Gotami Sutta and how to integrate the lessons it teaches into your meditation practice. I just came across Squidoo a couple of days ago; it’s an interesting concept, and it looks like it might be a good way to publish stuff that’s a little bit longer, a little bit more complex, and has a slightly longer useful life span than a typical blog post, and that’s more likely to be discovered by more people than a typical Page on a minor Wordpress blog like this one. Another advantage is that the links to books go to Amazon, from whom Squidoo collects a small referral fee. 5% of that fee goes to charity; about half comes to me; and Squidoo keeps the rest. (We’re talking pennies here, not dollars; you pay no more for the book than you’d pay if you found it through an Amazon search.) Like I said, an interesting concept.

I’m mainly interested in what you think of the article itself, especially those of you who find meditation practice appealing and may actually have started to do some meditation on your own. There’s a Guestbook module at the bottom of the Squidoo page (which, for some weird reason, they call a “Lens”). Leave me a comment if you have something to say.