Rusty Ring

(A point I made in greater detail here .)

A lifetime sitting with the central tenet of Islam has led me to accept it. You must submit. Islam means submission in Arabic....

I've been gratified over the years to encounter a small but steady circle of fellow hermits on social media. It's always encour...

Enlightenment is the stated goal of Buddhism, possibly the only doctrine all denominations share, though variously defined. As ...

Long ago, in the first years of my Zen practice, I encountered a teaching that's remained in my mind through the intervening year...

"If you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him." This well-worn Chàn koan, attributed to Linji Yixuan, has the sting befi...

I never get used to the fact that there's exactly one religion on this planet. Or humanity's eternal frantic protest that there...

This morning a brother in my Twitter sangha posted the following five paragraphs from the Pali canon ( Dutiyaassutavāsutta, SN 12.62 ). ...

In 2015 I uploaded a post entitled Forgiveness . It's about forgiveness. Last year, after almost a decade of being roundly ignored...

For some years I've enjoyed sporadic correspondence with a fellow Zenner in England. After a few less-than-uplifting experiences with...

So another visit to the annals of early Buddhism has yielded a further bit of provocative trivia: subitism is very old. Possibly as old...

This is a preaching Buddha (not to be confused with a teaching Buddha ). As you can see, he's enumerating something on his fing...

Ānāpānasmṛti – zazen , more or less – was the practice the Buddha's own instructor taught. It's a fairly mutinous, fundamentalis...

The Buddha was a crafty devil. The stuff he most cared about (posture, vegetarianism, teachers, ordination...), he never mentioned once.

I'd been a hermit monk for 5 years when I heard on my truck radio that after the news the host would speak with a US Army chaplain j...

Chàn fascinates me. Founded in China during the 6th century CE, it's the parent tradition to the three current national schools of ...

This week I learned two things: that something called "the Buddha-like mindset" is trending among young people in China a...

I've been rereading The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching , the succinct little Thich Nhat Hanh book that amounts, so far as I...

'Way back in March of 2012 CE (how strange to have such a deep vault) I reviewed Zen at War , Brian Daizen Victoria's exposé o...

Some time ago I surfed into What You Need to Know about Mindfulness Meditation , an article made available to military personnel (an...