Monkey Do, in Spite of Populace

In addition to the Shobogenzo, another source of my reading as of late has been Journey to the West. Journey to the West is fascinating enough for its own sake as literature, but it is also interesting how it weaves together the three major spiritual traditions of China into one unproblematic mythology, raising Buddhist questions [...]

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Oh, that Dharma, it is `emergin

…Our people are foolish, narrowminded, and petty. They cling tightly to transitory successes and delight in surface virtues. Will such a people, even if they do sit in meditation, succeed in quickly realizing the Buddha Dharma?”

“American Buddhism” is a curious creature. One of the constantly touted accomplishments of Buddhism is that it has transitioned to [...]

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Buddhist Americans

Ven Jian Dan giving a lecture (from Awakening Mind Zen blog)
The Pew Forum recently published a survey of American religion, and this sparked an interesting discussion in the Buddhist community. If you want to see PhDs analyze it to death and tear it apart, go visit H-Buddhism. I’m going to refrain from tossing in my [...]

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It; The Shobogenzo

Recently, I have found myself doing something that I had hoped for but had never thought possible: reading the Shobogenzo and loving it.
Let me explain. I have a long standing difficulty with koans because they are commonly [and perhaps unfairly] characterized as having an alien logic all their own, designed to allow those who consider [...]

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The Romantic Urge of Meditation

Man wanders lonely as a cloud; meditates.
Like many folks, one of the Buddhist websites that opened a whole new world for me was Access To Insight. In addition to being an incomparable resource for sutta translations and the writings of the Thai Forrest Masters, it also contains some of the clearest and most helpful Buddhist [...]

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Vietnamese Theravada?

Recently, I was cleaning up the list of Theravada Buddhist monks on Wikipedia. Sometimes names get accidentally sorted by their honorific. For example, Ṭhanissaro Bhikkhu should be sorted by ‘T’, and not ‘B’, since bhikkhu is a title, not a last name. I was making sure each name was sorted right. It’s fun because you have to [...]

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Commit to Sit

My practice of meditating every morning and evening fell apart about a week before the deadline for filing taxes. I’d kept it up every day for a month, but for the past couple of weeks I’ve been avoiding it. All this on-and-off meditation reminded me of one of Tricycle magazine’s cover articles: Commit to Sit.
Commit to [...]

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Buddhist Youth Conferences

I was looking over Dharma Forest and on the top was a mention of the recent DRBY conference. Back when I was in college, we had always hoped to make a national Buddhist youth conference. I did attend one, in fact, for the Student Buddhist Network in Boston.
The SBN conference was a tradition that died [...]

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Perhaps About Much More Than Potatoes

I would love to tell you a story about seasoned potatoes, but in order to tell that story I need to share some clunky theoretical stuff. Care to humor me?
In most strains of Buddhist practice there seem to be two somewhat opposite and complementary notions: one being that a wholesome intention empowers any action to [...]

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Searching for the Sound

Recently I had the opportunity to look over a manuscript of a collection of Buddhist parables that was going through the editing process. I was reading a plain spoken rendition of the Sutra to Vacchagotta on Fire, when something just didn’t seem right.
One thing I noticed is that the story from the manuscript I was [...]

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