The Responsibilities of Being a Zen Student
A Zen teacher is someone who has done zazen for a long time and allows — tolerates may be a better word — others to join their practice. A few years ago I did a talk at a Zen center in New York City where several people seemed to be hostile to what I had […]
Greed for Good
In one of my dokusans at my recent retreat in Lammi, Finland a guy named Larri made an interesting observation. In a talk at the retreat I’d mentioned the formula used by Buddhists to talk about the three poisons. They are usually listed as “greed, hatred and delusion” or sometimes “greed, anger and delusion.” There are a few […]
Zen Economics
A couple days ago my friend Gesshin Greenwood forwarded this article from Tricycle Magazine to me. The following is my response to her. As you will note, I was unable to reread the Tricycle article before sending this reply. I have decided not to reread it before posting this on my blog, so there may […]
Enlightenment and Cat Poop
I’ve had a few male cats in my life. There was the late, lamented Shithead who would hump my foot every morning. There was Crum who lived with me in Akron and liked to bite my then-girlfriend’s toes in the morning when she slept over. There was Boy Kitty with whom I shared an apartment […]
Message from the Darkness
While I was in Germany on my current European tour, I found a special double-disc edition DVD of the Godzilla movie commonly known in the US as Monster Zero. This version has a bunch of extras available only in Germany and I’m a geek so I bought it. In Germany the movie, originally called Kaiju Daisenso (The […]
