Category: meditation
- Catholic Means UniversalPope Francis: A Man of his Word a film by Wim Winders. **** I was moved and inspired by the new movie about Pope Francis, which opened recently to almost no acclaim whatsoever. The IMDb site has virtually nothing on it, including no quotations, and if any movie ever deserved to have quotations, like maybe every ...Read more
- He Wore a Special BraThe Buddha: An Alternative Narrative of his Life and Teaching by Mukunda Rao. Harper Element. 192 pp. $14.99 ***? I agree with the basic premise of this book. The Buddha’s life is exemplary, not strictly factual, and we can fill it in any way we want. (Thich Nhat Hanh, to mention one more “biographer,” created a ...Read more
- Unlikely HeroDeepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentaries by Kosho Uchiyama. Translated by Daitsu Tom Wright and Shohaku Okumura. Wisdom Publications. 318 pp. Last week at our temple a priest gave a talk about Kodo Sawaki’s famous remark “Zazen is good for nothing,” which is startling the first time you hear it. We know ...Read more
- Drunken SaintThe Dharma Bums from Road Novels 1957-1960 by Jack Kerouac. Edited by Douglas Brinkley. Library of America. 864 pp. ***1/2 Jack Kerouac is the spiritual father of every whacked-out hippie who ever stumbled his way through the Sixties, head bobbing in mild agreement, mouth perpetually grinning, a beard flowing around his collar. Kerouac himself was a ...Read more
- Choosing LifeThe Light That Shines Through Infinity: Zen and the Energy of Life by Dainin Katagiri. Shambhala. 229 pp. $16.95. Jesus’ Son Stories by Denis Johnson. Picador. 133 pp. $15.00 It was unnerving for me to read Denis Johnson’s excellent but disturbing book of stories at the same time I was reading the new book of lectures by ...Read more
- Samadhi as a Way of LifeRamakrishna and His Disciples by Christopher Isherwood. Vedanta Press. 348 pp. $16.95. **** “God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times, and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with whole-hearted devotion…One ...Read more
- True LoveSingle White Monk: Tales of Death, Failure, and Bad Sex by Shozan Jack Haubner. Shambhala. 208 pp. $14.95. I was not a big fan of Shozan Jack Haubner’s first book, Zen Confidential. I thought it was overwritten, and that he often seemed to be trying too hard. I did appreciate his honesty, and the way he ...Read more
- The Father and I Are OneA Buddhist Reads the Bible (and Finds the Buddha): The Gospel of John One of the more interesting reactions to my piece on Jesus the Jew was from my brother Bill, a scholar of languages and the Bible who reads in both Greek and Hebrew. He said that the Synoptic Gospels were about the Galilean Jesus, ...Read more
- Hasid from GalileeJesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels by Geza Vermes. Fortress Press. 286 pp. ***1/2 “Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.” –Leopold Bloom to a group of hecklers, in Ulysses. This book is another suggestion from my friend Laurie, the mysterious woman from New Zealand who wrote a number of ...Read more
- Can an Authentic Teacher Be Rich?The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. New World Library. 235 pp. It seems strange to write about a book that not only came out many years ago, but that became an international bestseller and made its author a spiritual superstar. But a few weeks ago, when I felt on shaky ground because of some things ...Read more
- Should Buddhism Be Secular?Or Could We, on the Other Hand, See Every Moment of Life as Religious? American Nirvana by Adam Gopnik. The New Yorker Magazine, August 7 & 14, 2017. I don’t know at what moment I realized that the goofy little practice that I stumbled into at my wife’s insistence in 1991, surrounded by a bunch of misfits ...Read more
- Only God Is GoodA Buddhist Reads the Bible (And Can’t Stop Thinking About It) Ever since I read the story in the Gospel of Mark about the man that Jesus loved—the wealthy man who asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life—I have puzzled over Jesus’ statement, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” ...Read more
- The Dharma of F.M. AlexanderThe Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life by Pedro de Alcantara. The Crowood Press. 128 pp. I have never thought of the teachings of Buddhism and Taoism as the esoteric observations of a few ancient teachers. I think of them as the truth about life. The first canto of the Tao Te Ching, for instance, comes ...Read more
- The Paradox of DesireThe 10,000 pages of the Pali Canon (Most of which I haven’t read) I have spoken before of an Amazon reviewer that I stumbled across some years ago, a woman named Laurie from New Zealand who writes wonderfully informed and opinionated reviews. Most of them are favorable, but occasionally she gets puckish, especially with contemporary spiritual ...Read more
- Absolute Belief in ZazenEmbracing Mind: The Zen Talks of Kobun Chino Otogawa. Edited by Judy Cosgrove and Shinbo Joseph Hall. Jikoji Zen Center. Kobun Chino Otogawa came to the United States for the first time to train the novice monks at the Tassajara Mountain Monastery, which had just been founded. After a couple of years he returned to Japan ...Read more
- It Sure Ain’t a ScienceThe Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. 123 pp. $14.99. It’s hard for me to imagine having the nerve, at the age of 56, to publish a book entitled The Art of Loving. This from a man who grew up with a mother who adored her only child to the point of ...Read more
- How Long, Baby How Long, Has That Evenin’ Train Been Gone?The Grass Flute Zen Master: Sodo Yokoyama by Arthur Braverman. Counterpoint. 148 pp. $16.95. How much time should we give to spiritual practice? It’s a question I often ask myself. Twenty minutes twice a day, as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi suggested? A forty minute sitting, ten minutes of walking, and a thirty minute sitting, as we do ...Read more
- Doing Nothing for No Good ReasonDogen Zen. Translations by Shohaku Okamura. Kyoto Soto Zen Center. 1988. $198 pp. Hara: The Vital Center of Man by Karlfried Graf Durckheim. Inner Traditions. 202 pp. $14.95. I have been known to complain—mostly to myself—that many of the works of a man I consider one of the great religious minds of the twentieth century have not ...Read more
- Dat Fig Tree Had It Comin’A Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my eighth and final piece on the Gospel of Mark; the other pieces are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) There are any number of things toward the end of the Gospel that I don’t understand, ...Read more
- What Does It Mean to Love God? Jesus and the Bean CountersA Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my seventh piece on the Gospel of Mark; the other pieces are here, here, here, here, here, and here. I’ll blunder along at my snail like pace until I finish.) The pace of the Gospel of Mark has ...Read more
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And Is He PissedLooks Pretty Good to MeShe Wasn’t Crazy. The World Was.Elmore the GreatWriting Like God
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (121)American literature (213)art (112)Buddhism (167)Christianity (124)creative process (244)death and dying (137)meditation (122)movies (158)music (36)race (104)religion (185)sex (167)spirituality (170)the art of narrative (251)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)