One of the genuine pleasures for me in coming to live in New England is my near annual pilgrimage to Waldon Pond. I circumambulate, stopping here and there, but particularly to contemplate at the site of his little shack, and to add a pebble to the slowly growing pile which I think of as a stupa, to consider Henry David Thoreau, the person and the thinker, and what he brought to me and, of course, to all of us. For... Read more

I’ve never been to Tassajara. And who knows, maybe that’s a good thing. It looms large within my imagination unencumbered by things like memories of heat or cold, bugs or getting up too early too many times, not to mention the physical aches and pains of Zen retreat. Tassajara is all about Zen. Fortunately, and it is fortunately, I have other places that fill those spaces in my heart and my mind. For me Tassajara is the dreamscape of the... Read more

Stephen Batchelor’s Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist came out in 2010. I didn’t order it in advance of publication, but did acquire it soon after. It went right on top of my pile of bedside books. And then I ignored it. Too much on my plate, or book pile. Finally, a month ago I picked it up and started reading. Interestingly as I started reading it I was attending a Buddhist teachers conference and so found myself during the day... Read more

A friend in a recent blog posting referred to a deep question he was pondering as an “honest koan.” As later today Jan & I are going to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see an exhibition of the work of the great koan master Hakuin Ekaku, it set me to thinking, once again, about how the word has been transformed within American English. He, and a host of others, including Zen teachers, although Zen teachers who’ve not... Read more

Tenzin Gyatso was born on this day in 1935. Fondest wishes for many more to come… Read more

Forty-one years ago, on this day in 1970 along with five other young aspirants to the great Zen way I was ordained unsui, literally a person of clouds and water. My training career to this date was brief, although increasingly intense. It would lay the foundation for the rest of my life. And I remain eternally grateful to my preceptor, the Venerable Houn Jiyu Kennett. Forty-one years… A while back a friend from those days sent me a photograph of... Read more

When we’ve forgotten how to hate… When we see we’re a part… And there is no one not held… Love for it all… Here it is… Read more

Still in the Big Orange… Visiting family, and as it has been twenty years since we lived in California, enjoying being tourists. Still on East Coast time it very early local time and I’m catching up on emails and such on my mother-in-law’s antique, and it appears steam operated computer. Today is the Fourth. It will be another hot Southern California day. Temperatures hitting a hundred here and there, mitigated by the low humidity. The high spot will feature a... Read more

Jan & I are spending the week wandering around the lovely and weird in the Big Orange. Randy is right, and, as is often the case, things are even more complicated… Here I’m finding the heart of the nation in all its variety… Read more

Here are two presentations regarding the Anglican mystic and writer on mysticism Evelyn Underhill by Dana Greene, professor of history at St Mary’s College in Maryland, editor of Fragments of an Inner Life: Notebooks of Evelyn Underhill and the studies Evelyn Underhill: Artist of the Infinite Life and Evelyn Underhill: Modern Guide to the Ancient Quest for the Holy, as well as, I find particularly interesting, author of a standard biography of the Universalist minister Olympia Brown. Underhill was a... Read more