Buddhism
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Interested in finding out more about me, my writing and where the idea for Make the Dark Night Shine came from? Please check out my interview on the Wrote Podcast on 24 May 2024
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Originally penned in 1233 and revised in 1252 by Eihei Dōgen, The Genjō Kōan: Actualizing the Fundamental Point is considered one of the founding documents of Japanese Zen Buddhism. Written as a prose poem, Dōgen´s words are Zen itself, moving, paradoxical, enlightening and living. For almost one thousand years, Zen practitioners and scholars have written
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Everything changes. Continually. Always. Nothing is ever the same. This is the foundational teaching of Buddhism. We all know this. Yet our perceptions of how we change are often at odds with this teaching. People tend toward behaviors that attempt to hold on to conceptions of they think they are and what they determine is
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“When individuals in our society speak or act out of hatred against a whole group of people based solely on superficial appearance, it is a reflection of the mental state of our whole society. We don’t escape because we are not the ones hating. The challenges of race, sexuality, and gender are the very things
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One of my identities is as a figure skater. For twenty years now, I have been practicing, learning new skills and tricks on the ice. For me, the ice is a source of grace, intimacy, and comradery. I see it as a practice of mindfulness, of Buddha nature, of beingness. On the best days, like
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” When a fish swims, no matter how far it swims, it doesn’t reach the end of the wayer. When a bird flies, no matter how high it fileis, it cannot reach the end of the sky. When a bird’s need or the fish’s need is great, the range is large. When the need is
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The question of zen is what now? Not what’s next as in I’m bored now what do I do, but what occurs next in our perceptions of life around us. What now is the recognition that in any moment, however one subdivides that into seconds or milliseconds, until we die there is something next. It
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Impermanence update. IPhone on the bottom of Halong Bay. Causes and conditions update. Kayak with a small leak causes wet conditions in my shorts; wet shorts cause me to take out my iPhone and camera from wet pockets and places it under my life jacket. Wet conditions also temporarily (as though everything could not be
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Impermanence, that was the word that kept coming to me yesterday and today roaming the temples of Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and a host of smaller temples (already impermanent to my memory.) Angkor Thom, meaning Great City, had a population of over one million in the 1200s, making it the largest city in the world
Alan Lessik 