That’s the short story. Even German Chancellor Merkel recently said that even though the big national banks are working together (that’s how scared shitless they are), and the stock markets bumped up last week, this is not over – a marathon, said she. Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World does a great job explaining how we got into this teetering tower and pointing to some of the fault lines in whatever is keeping the financial world upright. However, if... Read more
My recent post, Satisfying Hunger with Koan: A Critical Review of Foulk’s Scholarly Perspective, got some discussion over at the Zen Forum International, especially about koan and shikantaza, a topic that’s been much discussed in those parts of cyberspace. And here too, for some good reasons. Shikantaza, the actualization of the matter at hand, is a practice that is rather hard to pin down or to be done with. Maezumi Roshi, in his commentary to Dogen’s “Universal Recommendations for Zazen,”... Read more
Not destroying false views. For shikantaza or koan zen, that says it all, imv. There’s a perfect circle hidden in the swirl of views. The line is from the Suramgamasamadhisutra: The Concentration of Heroic Progress, p. 176. I pulled this sutra off the bookshelf after it came up in our Dogen study group. Sometimes translated as the Heroic March Samadhi Sutra, it is regarded as a meditation manual and has been highly valued in the Zen/Chan tradition. Read more
How can we satisfy hunger? Beyond the basics of just enough food, clothing and shelter, we still crave. More. However, it looks like we’re heading into a protracted period where economic growth will no longer fuel the illusion that we can satisfy our craving through more and more stuff. According to a piece in today’s NYTimes, “Older, Suburban and Struggling, ‘Near Poor’ Startle the Census,” there’s a new measure of poverty (a family of four with an income in the... Read more
The Florida Dogen Lovers Conference from November 12, 2011 are already posted at the Ancient Dragon Gate. Talks include the usual Dogenophile suspects – Bodiford, Faulk, Leighton, Okumura, and Heine. I haven’t listened to any myself yet but they’re loaded on my iPhone and ready for the commute. Read more
Click here to read the cartoon. And here’s a nice piece about the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement from the Huffington Post. Just doing my little piece here to keep focus on what’s important lest it get buried completely by post-GOP debate coverage, grieving for Paterno, etc. The Huffington article’s Zen-and-martial-arts thing about dodging and weaving strikes me as rather odd, however. Neither the movement nor Zen seem vague to me. OWM is about economic injustice. Zen is about occupying... Read more
On Wednesday night I saw Lucinda Williams at a club downtown. The last time I was at this place, Jimmy Carter was president and disco was big – and that might have applied to a bunch of the grey-hairs enjoying the show. There were young people too, some dancing in the old hippie free-style, only the way a young body can do it. Brought back the memories. Anyway, Lucinda and her band were wonderful, simple and powerful. I’m a big... Read more
Dogen, the transmitter of the Soto Zen lineage to Japan, entered the following koan to express and explore shikantaza: Once when the great master Yueshan was sitting, a monk said, “Thinking in mountain-still sitting is what?” The master responded, “Thinking is not-thinking.” The monk said, “Not-thinking is how thinking.” The master responded, “Thinking ‘no’.” Above is The Healing Point of Zazen’s preface and prime topic. In what follows, Dogen illuminates numerous facets of the above koan, playfully demonstrating what zazen.... Read more
For an introductory class we’re teaching, T dug up a list of suggestions I had put together years ago aimed at helping people get going on the Zen path. It could be also titled, “Walking Straightly on a Crooked Path.” I thought it’d make for a quick and easy blog post so I could get the dog out for his morning walk (he’s still laying nearby looking at me expectantly), but then I found that I wanted to trim the... Read more
Wild Fox Zen
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In