Being Into Zen
I write you this entry on an intercity train bound for Amsterdam Centraal calling at Wageningen and… Jeez I don’t know. Some other places. Utrecht, I think, and a few other Dutch towns. I just finished two days of talks in Nijmegen, Netherlands at a place called Jewel Heart, which is a Tibetan Buddhist center. […]
Unmasking the Gurus?
Liebe Freunde, I send you this missive from Deutsche Bahn train ICE 628 from Wurzburg to Dusseldorf calling at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof and… uh… elsewhere I assume. I missed the announcement about the other stops. A friend will meet me in Dusseldorf to drive me to the Netherlands. In an hour and a half or so, […]
Never Check Facebook on a Zen Retreat
I’m leading a retreat this week at Benediktushof, a retreat center in Southern Germany. While I’m here I’ve been working on the talk I’m going to give to the people of London soon (see below for details, you’re welcome to join). As part of preparing for that talk, I needed to know about the way […]
The Four Elements and Me
Here’s an interesting question I received via email recently: I’ve been practicing following the breath and it occurred to me that the air being breathed is as much or even more “me” than the lungs within this body. I hope this is a correct assumption. With this realization I’ve been trying to understand the four […]
The Eyes of Dogen
One of my favorite quotes from Dogen is also one of his weirdest. It goes like this. “(In the) words of the ancient, ‘the whole universe in the ten directions is one eye,’ and furthermore, there are thousands of eyes on the tips of the fingers, there are thousands of eyes of right Dharma, there […]
