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I have stopped publishing articles here and moved to a new site Clarke Scott's website

Clarke Scott is a fully ordained Buddhist monk trained in the Tibetan tradition. A student of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Clarke has received personal instructions—direct one-to-one instructions—on Madhyamaka philosophy and meditation from His Holiness. Recently Clarke moved to Tasmania to pursue a Ph.D in Buddhist philosophy from the University of Tasmania.

More News and a New Website

Well, I am back in Hobart. Normality has return to life and I am working on my thesis again—currently I am researching the history and development of the notion of the self in ancient Indian philosophy, looking at the Rig-Veda and Upanishads in particular.

My retreat went well and was mostly peaceful. New Years Eve was a great night for meditation on impermanence. For most of the day it was hot, then came a massive storm around 9.00 pm. Needless to say, I stopped, opened the windows and doors to let some cool air inside. I took some photos with a low-resolution camera. Here is one in which you can see the tail of a lightening strike.

A few new, and I would say, exciting things have taken place over the Australian summer one of which is a new website. The other, I will have more to say about after the what and the why.  (note: if you are reading this in an email you will need to follow the links to the website to see all the details).

A New Website

The new website in a way represents the refocusing of my long term energy—after the PhD, of course. The new website the domain of which is my western name will come at the same problems addressed by the Buddha yet for modern Western culture. It is therefore unlike LodenJinpa.com which is more or less an explanation of the ancient texts. This new website will be a rephrasing of ancient issues pertaining to the human condition coupled with a modern scientific style of inquiry—more on this later. And of course, there will be news and stuff about what I am up to.

The reason for returning to the use of my western name is, in part, because western universities—UTas in this case —for legal reasons can not allow the use of my monastic name in their IT systems. I have no problem with this, as a name is really just a label but, it does create confusion over what to call me. For instance, at first people here at UTas knew me as Loden Jinpa, yet my university email address was in my western name. So, at some point, I stopped using my monastic name, even though I still blogged here. Even then people contacting me didn’t know whether to call me Loden, Jinpa, Loden Jinpa or Clarke. I came to realize I was going to have this problem long term if I was to have two names. What’s more I thought, if I was going to publish anything in the future then this problem would most likely continue.

Then came along a new opportunity. One that I feel very excited about, and in which there may be work for me after my PhD. As I have written about how this all unfolded over at the new website, I will not go into the details here. Suffice to say, as I mentioned above, the new website is more about presenting Buddhist thought empirically and in Western terms—cognitive science etc. Therefore, given my interest in presenting Buddhism to modernity, starting a new website with a western name, seems oddly enough now that I think about it, quite fitting.

So, I feel it is a good time to begin afresh. I have taken some of the articles from here to the new website. While the website will remain available for those coming from Google, this will be one of the last articles I will write for this website.

For your convenience, I will add those of you who receive my articles via email to the new system. You should receive an email asking you to confirm your interest in receiving articles from the new website—ClarkeScott.org. If you do not click to confirm you will no longer receive news from me. Of course, I would like to see everyone move over to the new website but, I understand that some may not.

So, without further delay here is ClarkeScott.org

The article detailing the new project and how this all unfolded is here: The Little Island that Could.

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