buddhism

We need people to push our buttons, otherwise how are we to know what buttons we have? Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo Ten Percent Happier podcast, February 8, 2021 Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo is a Buddhist nun interviewed on the excellent Ten Percent Happier podcast. It’s always possible to reframe situations where someone “pushes our buttons” to see it as an opportunity to better understand that there are these buttons, these sensitivities that otherwise evade our awareness.

Beginning with “The Four Noble Truths”1, “The Noble Eightfold Path”2, and so on, the Buddha was a list-maker. I recently found a wonderful book, now out of print but freely available as a pdf. By David Snyder, Ph.D., it is called “The Complete Book of Buddha’s Lists - Explained” Snyder does a brilliant job of reinterpreting these lists and framing them in the context of what the social sciences say about how we function individually and in groups.