How I View After-Death Experience
A friend of mine recently asked me how I view after-death experience. This is a somewhat awkward question for a Zen teacher to answer. On the one hand I view after-death experience as irrelevant to how I decide to live my life. The Buddha aptly categorized the issue...
The Paradox of “Taking Refuge” in a Non-theistic Religion
When someone wishes to become a Buddhist, they “take refuge” in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, after passing through the “gateway of contrition.” Yet Buddhism is not a theistic religion, and the Buddha’s last teaching was “be a lamp unto yourself.” Who or what is...
Willpower and the Buddhist Perfection of Virya, or Energy
When you want to make a change in your life, have you ever wished you skip over the willpower part? If only you could leap directly to that deep conviction that you are intimately connected to all beings, so anger wouldn’t arise in the first place and you...
Changing Reality With Positive Thinking
Much of the time we observe the world around us and pass judgement on it. Something we observe may appear good, bad or neutral, but we usually feel like we are simply drawing a conclusion from the data of our experience. We may qualify our judgement by acknowledging...
Paying Attention No Matter What
When the ability to be fully present in our life eludes us, it is usually because we cannot possibly believe the mundane or frustrating experience in front of us merits our attention. This bowl of cereal? This tax form? This stop-and-go traffic? This irritating...
The Experience of Not-Self
Last week our Sangha worked with the mindfulness task of watching our hands as if they belonged to a stranger. This reminded me of the Buddhist teaching of not-self. As I did this task, I noticed that it was very easy to imagine my hands belonged to a stranger. They...
Conundrum and Koan
If "koan" was a more widely used and understood word in English, I would have described this blog as "Essays on the Koan of Life." In Zen, a koan is a question, problem or situation that requires (sometimes demands) resolution, but cannot be...