My Facebook friend John Harrison just posted Gary Snyder’s poem For All. I thought it something perfect in the moment. And, so, here I am sharing it, as well… For All Ah to be alive on a mid-September morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up, holding boots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern rockies. Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes cold nose dripping singing inside creek music,... Read more
This past weekend we were deep in sesshin, an intensive Zen meditation retreat. As we practice with koans as part of our project we have frequent opportunities for spiritual direction, a practice called dokusan. So, I was meeting with the sesshin participants when someone came into the interview who is a long-time Zen practitioner. She had never sat with our community or with me. And she said she came with a couple of questions. The first was how... Read more
PEACE THROUGH A BOWL OF TEA A talk delivered on the 19th of September, 2018 at the first Annual Dr Genshitsu Sen Lecture Series at the Huntington Library Glenn Taylor Webb (Professor Webb is both an ordained Obaku Zen priest and professor emeritus of Japanese culture at Pepperdine University, where he served as director of the Institute for the Study of Asian Cultures. He is a recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun for his contributions... Read more
I’ve been reluctant to state my views on the recent allegations of attempted rape by Brett Kavanaugh when in High School. I’m particularly concerned that Judge Kavanaugh not be confirmed because of his obvious commitment to overturning Roe coupled with his apparent near imperial view of the person of a sitting president. But, I am also committed to as best I can never being complicit in joining in a false accusation to support my cause, whatever that cause might be.... Read more
A small and increasingly vibrant literature about Zen’s koans is beginning to emerge within our English language. I have added a word or two to that body of work myself. The quality of those contributions will have to be judged by others. But, one of my favorites among these, one that I find enormously helpful, is a new book by Ross Bolleter, the Crow Flies Backwards & Other New Zen Koans. What follows here is his lovely, lovely... Read more
Out on the interwebs, at least in the corners where I tend to hang out there’s a lot of conversation about psychedelics and Buddhism and especially Zen. I am not a relentless denier of their possible uses. But, I am more than slightly negatively inclined. I’m especially disdainful of some sense that special experiences are particularly significant. That said, the truth of the matter is how more than one religion finds its source in what outsiders would... Read more
The Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst Karen Horney was born on this day, the 16th of September, in 1885. She was one of a relatively small band of psychoanalysts and psychologists who would take their original inspiration and often direct instruction from Sigmund Freud and then push on. Horney is the founder of a feminist psychology that has been a critical corrective to the domination of psychological theory from a near solely masculine perspective. And, then, there’s the Zen thing.... Read more
Huangbo said to his assembly “You are all slurping up brewer’s dregs. If you’re always wandering about, how will you find this moment? Don’t you know that in all of China there is not a single Zen teacher? One of the assembly stepped forward and protested. “But, there are people all over the country who lead communities and guide practitioners. What about them?” Huangbo responded, “I didn’t say there is no Zen, only there are no teachers.”... Read more
Today Gensan, a dear friend is ordaining as an unsui, a person of “clouds and water.” It is a type of ordination unique to our Japanese Zen inheritance, no longer based in the Vinaya, Buddhism’s ancient monastic codes, but rooted in ten, and for the Soto school within which this ordination is happening, sixteen precepts or vows. It is part of a still evolving ordination system. When ten precept ordination was introduced into Japan in the... Read more
The following was the central illustration in my sermon on the Sunday immediately following 9/11, something it felt important to notice even before we knew that day would be called 9/11. Even after. Even after all these years… Just before the first tower fell, trapped on the 105th floor where he worked for the investment bank Cantor-Fitzgerald, 32 year old Stuart Meltzer had time to make one phone call. He chose to call his wife. She wasn’t at... Read more
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