Consciousness. We don't think about it, we don't act upon it. It's just there. We awaken in the morning and go to the bathroom and do those things, make coffee, eat a donut, take the dog out … and ...

Chan (Zen) is often viewed in one of two ways: as a religious institution, characterized by its lore, rhetoric, canonical texts, monastic customs and beliefs, or as a mystical/ascetic tradition which ...

The mystical realm of Chan cannot be discovered without the precondition of suffering.  Some people think that this is a pessimistic view, or a perverted view, of a practice (meditation) that can be ...

Attachment, we are told by all Buddhist sects, is the central cause of suffering.  Not the kind of suffering we endure when we have a cold, or accidentally slam the car door on our hand, but the ...

If there is one word with which we can summarize the beauty of Buddhist thought, that word is Dharma. We cannot read a book about Buddhism without encountering this term, yet its definition is as ...

Suffering is integral to the Zen path. It is, in fact, a prerequisite. Zen is not an easy path and we must be highly motivated in order to travel it. In physics as in Zen, every action has an equal ...

How do we begin with Zen? We don't start climbing Mt. Everest from the third base station. We start at the very bottom, climb a bit, set up camp, wait for a few days to let ourselves adjust to the ...

In her bestselling spiritual memoir "Eat, Pray, Love", Elizabeth Gilbert tells a delightful story of a great Hindu teacher who led his followers in daily meditation in his ashram. The only problem ...

Students who come to my weekly Dharma talks (or who meet regularly with me in private) are often confronted with my insistence that they view the world more holistically.  This is typically ...

Meditation is a key factor in Chan / Zen and Buddhism in general -- and yet we have no monopoly on the concept of meditation as a spiritual pursuit. Every religion has a tradition approaching ...

The Great Way is gateless, approached by a thousand paths. Pass trough this barrier, you walk freely in the universe. One of the principal Zen texts from thirteenth century China is a collection of ...

Consider our first multi-day meditation retreat. After a couple of days of discomfort, both physical and psychological, the rebellious ego begins to question the authority of the "strange Oriental ...

What is a "precept"? We Buddhists are all very aware of the five precepts (ore more or less depending on what school we associate with) we have taken when we chose to become Buddhists. But it seems ...

Right Speech is not just about morality, or even limited to wisdom teachings. It is also about Right Mindfulness and contemplative discipline, about identifying, labeling, and being mindful of ...

Buddhism brings many of us to understand that individualism does not exist and is a delusion: that there is no birth, no death, no self, no "I" that exists as an independent reality. We come to ...

The universe, physicists tell us, has no edge, yet the mass, and other “stuff” like dark matter, are all more or less uniformly distributed throughout. Even stranger, if you take a long journey ...

The universe, governed by power and the law power obeys, conforms to a dualistic principal of yin and yang, eros and logos, shakti and Shiva. We cannot separate them. Only through spiritual labor can ...

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical ...