Goodnight, Oslo
I’m sitting in Oslo airport, where I’ve been for the past… um… five hours? Has it been six hours? I’m not really sure. I departed from LAX at 8:30pm on the night of Sunday May 26th. According to my watch it is now about 8:45pm here in Norway. My phone tells me that the date is […]
The Poison Arrow Parable Revised
There’s an old Buddhist story called the Poison Arrow Parable. It goes like this: “Suppose a man is wounded by a poisoned arrow, and his friends bring him to a surgeon. Suppose the man should say, ‘I will not let this arrow be taken out until I know who shot me; which caste he is […]
No Rank and No Identity
A long time ago, Zen Master Rinzai said, “There is a true person of no rank who is constantly coming and going from the portals of your face. Who is that true person of no rank?” A few centuries later we get the story of Yu the Doughnut Maker (aka Yu Daopo). It can be […]
Comparative Suffering
Yesterday I put up a video in which I tried to quote Zen teacher and author Charlotte Joko Beck. The way I remember the quote is, “We all have just enough suffering.” I don’t know if Joko Beck ever actually said that. I’ve Googled everything I can think of to try to find that quotation […]
Reflections on Mother’s Day
Mother’s Day has been a tough holiday for me for a long time. My mother died in January of 2007. But she had been dying for nearly twenty years by that point. Her death was at least a relief from the suffering she’d been through for many years. Yesterday was a particularly difficult Mother’s Day […]
