Arrival and surrender
“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
—Matsumoto Basho
You have already reached your destination.
What Is It Like?
“What is it like to be you? Just feel how wide consciousness goes out when we’re just here, when it’s not going back and forth all the time. Past, present, future . . . to be here. What is this time like?”
– John Tarrant, Pacific Zen Institute
Then let it go.
Read MoreZen Talk: The Second Arrow
Sometimes physical pain can make it hard to sit in meditation. Read more here.
Read MoreZen Talk: One Thing at a Time
This is a talk I gave about the koan in which Joshu told one of his followers to wash his bowls.
Read More'Being alive is enough'
In an Oct. 11 dharma talk delivered at a day-long retreat at Still Mind Zendo in Manhattan, Sensei Marisa Cespedes quoted Roshi Shunryū Suzuki: "Being alive is enough."
Read MoreAllen Ginsberg's instructions for meditation
The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s once explained to a skeptical interviewer how to sit in Zen meditation. It begins and ends with the breath. Like life.
Read MoreLook at the sky
Some advice from Pema Chödrön.
Read MoreYou must be breathing
Reflecting on some Buddhist wisdom found in a BBC series from 1977.
Read MoreZen Talk: The narrators in my head
I gave a version of this talk on July 1, 2025, at Still Mind Zendo, where I am a senior student.
Read MoreZen quote: Poco a poco
“There is a beautiful expression in Spanish, poco a poco, little by little. Our life is always poco a poco, and the way we practice poco a poco is zazen. In each moment, in each little step by step, the Buddhadharma is completely revealed. So little is not little, it is boundless.”
— Bernie Glassman
Read MoreZen Quote: Touch your beard
I cam across this line in Kōun Yamada’s commentary on Case 4 of the Mumonkan.
Read MoreZen Talk: Reflections on the Great Bodhisattva Vows
“Creations are numberless, I vow to free them.” This is the first of the great bodhisattva vows for all. This is the text of a talk I gave about the vows at Still Mind Zendo in April 2025.
Read MoreZen Talk: Noticing, allowing, breathing
Notice. Allow. Breathe. Together these words form a powerful koan. This is the text of a brief talk I gave in December 2024 at Still Mind Zendo on the subject of breathing meditation and the biological phenomenon of habituation.
Read MoreQuotation: Solzhenitsyn on Ideology
“Ideology -- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.”
Read More'Civilizations come and go. Civilization continues.'
The quote in the headline is from an essay by Stewart Brand, “The Elements of a Durable Civilization,” recently published by the Long Now blog, a site devoted to long-term thinking about the future of life, including human life.
Read MoreZen Talk: Panshan's Cut a Fine Piece
I have been working with some of the 300 koans collected by the Japanese Zen Master Ehei Dogen in his Shobogenzo. This short talk is about one of them, Case 21: Panshan’s Cut a Fine Piece.
Read More'Cash Me Outside: How to Keep Your Cashmere Slaying' (by ChatGPT)
I enjoy giving stupid prompts to the not-really-intelligent large-language model ChatGPT.
Today’s prompt: “Write a 250-word blog post in Gen Z TikTok slang about how to care for cashmere. Give it a headline with a bad pun.”
Read MoreZen Talk: On breaking a favorite mug
"Flowers decompose, but this does not prevent us from loving flowers. In fact, we love them more because we know how to treasure them while they are still alive."
That is a quote from the Thich Nhat Hanh, the writer and Zen teacher who died in 2022. It is from an essay he wrote on the topic of impermanence.
Read More