Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan was born in Moscow on this day in 1914. She was the eldest of the Indian Sufi teacher Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan and his American wife Ora Ray Baker’s four children. Noor spent only a few years in Russia. The family relocated to England ahead of the war, and then finally settling in France. She studied at the Sorbonne and the Paris Conservatory. Noor was a highly accomplished musician, poet, and children’s book author, perhaps best known... Read more
(The essay “Sufism & Zen” is taken from a collection of Nyogen Senzaki Sensei’s lectures and writings which was published in Japan in 1936 as ON ZEN MEDITATION by the Rinzai priest Nanshin Okamoto. It describes the Zen teacher’s encounter with the Sufi master Inayat Khan. As both teachers inform my spirituality, I’m particularly taken that there was a direct connection between them at one point in their lives. It should be noted that a lot of water has flowed... Read more
The other day Jan and I and Jan’s mom went to see Lion, the film based upon Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home. I admit I was a wary. I understood the story was to be about someone adopted from India, who returns as a young adult to find his lost birth family. The possibilities for a cheap emotional rollercoaster ride were pretty strong. Still, we went. And, I’m glad we did. This seems a movie made for our... Read more
Me, I’m quite glad to be done with 2016. And, I’m not massively positive about what we’re facing in 2017. When I was in High School I wrote a Christmas column for the school paper. It was essentially a litany of all the bad things that happened in that year, which as I recall was in fact quite a bad year. I then ended it with a cherry “merry Christmas.” It was well received. And I learned as a writer... Read more
I’ve just been informed that the scholar Huston Smith died yesterday, the 30th of December, 2016. Me, I’m deeply saddened. A great loss to us all. And, for me, an unfortunate coda to the unpleasantness that has been 2016. Professor Smith was the great interpreter of the world’s religions to the general public, his book Religions of Man published in 1958 and later retitled the World’s Religions was two generation’s introduction to the range of religion on our planet. Including me.... Read more
It was on this day in 1879 that Venkataraman Iyer was born in what is now Tiruchuli in Tamil Nadu state, India. At the age of sixteen he had a transformative experience that led him on a spiritual path. Eventually he would come to be known as the sage Ramana Maharshi of Arunachala. In 1911 a Westerner living in India named Frank Humphreys wrote about him. Then in 1931 an Indian national B. V. Narasimha wrote a biography. And finally,... Read more
I’ve just read Seth Zuiho Segall’s contribution to the current issue of Tricycle, “A More Enlightened Way of Being.” I’m quite taken with it. A psychologist and teacher of psychology as well as a Zen priest, Dr Segall addresses the fact that a large percentage, I would even hazard possibly a majority of our Western convert Buddhists, do not adhere to the traditional Buddhist understanding of rebirth. This issue has been a bone of contention at least from the 1997... Read more
A while back someone suggested to me how the relationship between “spiritual and religious” might be a koan. My immediate reaction was no and yes, well, sort of. No, because when people use that word “koan” they usually mean it in the sense of a paradox or, increasingly, a thorny question. And, I think that was how my friend meant it. Now, he was simply using the definition that has been put upon it in its short history as an... Read more
I stumbled on this in my archives. I have no memory of having written it, but it doesn’t look like I can blame anyone else. So, for your entertainment, and who knows, maybe even some small spark of illumination, a look at a passage from Genesis treated in the manner of a Zen koan. The Text Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God... Read more
In Eastern Orthodox circles today is the feast of James the Just. I usually mark it out as a particularly special day. In fact I notice that a couple of years ago I even shared a little reflection I called “my personal conspiracy theory about the origins of the Christian church.” Actually my understanding about James the Just, also called James the Brother of Jesus is in fact a pretty mainstream view within the academic community, or, at least it... Read more
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