Chandima Gangodawila

Dispositional mindfulness is "a non-judgmental state of purposeful awareness that brings attention to the present moment and allows for recognizing and considering internal and external experiences without the pressure to alter the moment or take action". Eating behaviors are classified as restrained, emotional, and external eating. External eating alludes to uncontrollable eating when food triggers such as favourite snacks or sweets are present. Emotional eating is when a person consumes an excessive amount of food in response to negative emotions or negative psychological moods. Restricted eating results in a person eating less food or feeling guilty after eating as a result of being overly concerned with their body weight or shape. In this review, a literature search was performed on PubMed with the keywords "Dispositional Mindfulness" and "eating". Six out of the sixteen papers met the selection criteria. The literature shows that high dispositional mindfulness levels are related to reduced emotional and uncontrolled external eating irrespective of the clinical variables put in place by each study. The negative psychological mood was associated with reduced dispositional mindfulness, which led to an increased emotional and external eating rate. Substance abuse is another factor that leads to low dispositional mindfulness levels. High levels of dispositional mindfulness are related to frequent exercise and high sleep quality. The review demonstrates that interventions that promote dispositional mindfulness can be utilized to treat persons who engage in negative eating behaviours.

While Buddhist traditions articulate a parallel moral vision in the early discourses of the Pāli Canon, Western traditions usually locate the roots of ethical reasoning in Socratic inquiry. Especially in their approaches to bodily care, spiritual well - being, and moral responsibility, this article contends that both Socratic and Early Buddhist ideas converge on fundamental principles in medical ethics. Through a comparative textual and philosophical study, the paper examines how Socratic dialectics and the Buddha's diagnostic approach to dissatisfa ction/ suffering (dukkha) both produce frameworks for ethical healthcare anchored in the development of virtue, wisdom, and care for the integrity of life. A more comprehensive understanding of cross-cultural medical humanities is facilitated by the comparison, which offers complementary insights into patient autonomy, ethical intervention, and the moral character of the physician. This comparative perspective expands our understanding of cross-cultural medical humanities, displaying how classical traditions provide complementary insights for revisiting both personal caregiving practices and larger systems in places like the Philippines where the politics of policy and institutional form also shape the very meaning of what it means to “care.”

This article examines the intricacies of abandoning the monastic training rules (sikkhāpaccakkhāna) in key Pāli sūtta and Vinaya texts to better understand how these textual sources, in addition to early modern Sri Lankan monastics as well as the contemporary saṅgha, have understood the abandonment of the training rules not as a spiritual failure, but rather as a set of pragmatic monastic principles that emphasize the retention of monkhood and the continuity of the Buddhasāsana. To demonstrate this, I propose an innovative approach to examining the first pārājika (concerning sexual intercourse) in relation to the sikkhāpaccakkhāna by considering Pāli sūttas, Vinaya texts, and the example of noncelibate seventeenth-century Laṅkān gaņinnānse (nonbhikkhu monks). I conclude by arguing that the contemporary Sri Lankan saṅgha can use sikkhāpaccakkhāna to avoid falling into the first pārājika, which provides a basis for reordination and thus a more human-centered framework for supporting the stability and duration of the Buddhasāsana.

In this article, I argue that the Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna of the Ratnamālāvadāna presents six key aspects of the development of Buddhist thought from the Pāli canon to the Sarvāstivāda tradition: childlessness, the arrival of a fetus through the propitiation of gods, presence of heretics, the impact of Buddha’s intervention and a child bodhisattva, soteriological elements of the story’s didactics, and the Buddha’s peculiar smile. These six key aspects were chosen to reflect and explore the content of Sarvāstivādin society and teachings concerning its source narratives of the Kusīdāvadāna of Avadānaśataka and the Pāli canon. This helps us to understand the composition of Sarvāstivāda doctrine as recounted in the Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna, which varies from its source the Kusīdāvadāna of Avadānaśataka. It also aids in the identification of the avadāna and avadānamālā forms of Sarvāstivāda, as well as the impact of the Pāli canon and Brahmanical thought on them. The Kusīdāvadāna of Avadānaśataka, which is the source of the Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna and the Pāli canon, will be utilized to examine the six aspects of the societal and doctrinal development of the Buddhist thought of Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna. The final portion is the very first annotated translation of Kauśīdyavīryotsāhanāvadāna based on Takahata’s 1954 original version.