(Senior dharma teacher with Empty Moon Zen, Dr Chris Hoff offered a meditation on the fine art of boredom at our Saturday Zazenkai on the 3rd of August, 2024. I asked if I could share this at my Monkey Mind blog, and he graciously consented. A worth while read for anyone who cares in any way about the spiritual life…) All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. – Blaise Pascal... Read more
My book the Intimate Way of Zen: Effort, Surrender, and Awakening on the Spiritual Journey was officially released by Shambhala Publications on the 23rd of July! It’s my sixth book. And the first not published by a non-profit house. Which has had small but discernible consequences. Mainly in that there is actually staff trying to get publicity for the book and arranging for me to speak here and there. There have also been nice reviews at Publisher’s Weekly and Spirituality... Read more
I find myself thinking of Daniel Defoe. I’m one of those who like to celebrate co-religionists. For me that means a couple of things. Buddhists and Zen Buddhists, of course. But also Unitarians and especially Universalists. So, yes, Defoe was a Presbyterian. But this was in a time when the Unitarians had not yet institutionally differentiated from that body in England. In North America it was a bit different. There Unitarianism the institutional movement derived principally out of Congregationalism. While... Read more
On July 24th in 1901 that William Sydney Porter was released from prison. He tried his hand at a number of jobs. He was at one time or another a pharmacist, a bank teller, and even a journalist. But it was Porter’s work as a bank teller that led to his indictment for embezzlement and the sequence of events leading to this day. He fled to Honduras, returning to America only when he learned his wife whom he had planned... Read more
The 22nd of July is marked out as a feast for Mary Magdalene. As a person of the Zen way, but also marked profoundly by my natal Christianity, I am deeply interested in several threads of the Christian tradition. And very high on that list is Mary Magdalene. Over the years I’ve paused to reflect on this most remarkable and in some ways mysterious woman, especially on or around her feast day. Each time I do I find a need... Read more
Book burning is a thing. Many of us still are angry about the fires at Alexandria. And I personally find it hard to conceive of the destruction of the university at Nalanda at the tail end of the twelfth century. The burning of the great Hindu and Buddhist repository is said to have taken months. And, the 21st of July has a place in the annals of book burning. It was on July 21st, 1683, that its last officially sanctioned... Read more
It was on the 16th of July in 1228 that the Roman Catholic Church formally acknowledged their child Francis of Assisi as a saint. I’ve always been fascinated by Francis, and over the years when this day, or more often, when his feast, the 4th of October rolls around, I find I have something to share. I’ve been building it for, well, years now. And, honestly, as I seem always to have a new thought, or a small wrinkle, I... Read more
It was on the 9th of July, in 1969, that Gertrude Dixon, Trudy to her friends, died. While not widely known outside her San Francisco Zen center community, she is in fact one of the truly important figures in helping to shape the beginnings of Zen Buddhism’s interest among the larger North American English speaking community. And Trudy deserves to be known more broadly. She’s part of a group of people who did something kind of wonderful. It... Read more
On the 7th of July, in 1456, a retrial of Joan of Arc found her innocent of the charges of heresy. It was twenty-five years after the Maid of Orleans had been tied to a stake and burned alive. Give it another four hundred years and she would be declared a saint. And. Who she really was and what she believed and what she experienced have been burned to ash with the bonfire. However. I read somewhere someone say “Joan... Read more
In the liturgical calendars of the Eastern churches, as well as among the Anglicans and Lutherans, the 1st of July is celebrated as feast for Abba Moses the Ethiopian, perhaps more commonly known as Abba Moses the Black. The Latin calendar observes this feast on the 28th of August. I try to notice when his feast rolls around in the calendar and to share a few words about him. I’ve mentioned on occasion how important Thomas Merton’s Wisdom of the... Read more
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