Category: religion
- AIDS Comes HomeMy Own Country: A Doctor’s Story by Abraham Verghese. Vintage. 432 pp. $16.00. I’m full of admiration for this book, and there’s no single reason. It’s an AIDS memoir, told from the standpoint of the doctor who cared for the patients, and who just happened to be a gifted writer who would later write a bestselling ...Read more
- Astonishing EloquenceMindfulness in Action by Chogyam Trungpa. Edited by Carolyn Rose Gimian. Shambhala. 196 pp. $21.95. In times of anxiety and difficulty—which this summer has certainly been—I find myself drifting back to the books and teachers that were foundational to me. I’ve been trying to make my way through Dogen this summer, but that’s like trying to ...Read more
- Unrepeatable MiracleStimp Hawkins, 1933-2016 My friend Stimp Hawkins died in mid-June, but I just found out, almost by accident, this past weekend. He’d gotten in touch with me several months ago to let me know about an article that had just come out about his new career as what he called a death pimp, and we agreed ...Read more
- Becoming the True SelfThe Blake Project: Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press. 332 pp. In my last post in the Blake project, I spoke of a book that my wife was reading but that I had avoided because I wanted to explore my own reading of Blake’s work. That strategy worked ...Read more
- All Religions Are OneThe Blake Project: All Religions Are One; There Is No Natural Religion; The Book of Thel; Songs of Innocence and Experience; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell I first studied William Blake in my survey of English literature course at Duke University. To say that I was excited would be a vast understatement: I had a ...Read more
- Fearful SymmetryBlake by Peter Ackroyd. Knopf. 399 pp. My re-kindled interest in Blake began, weirdly enough, when I ordered some copies of Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior for some inmates and noticed that the most perceptive Amazon review was written by a woman named Laurie from New Zealand. I clicked to see the rest of ...Read more
- Whattya Know?Don’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. [This is the seventh and final piece in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. Earlier articles are here, here, here, here, here, and ...Read more
- Beyond BeliefDon’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. [This is the sixth in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. This series has got to end sometime but hasn’t ended yet. Earlier ...Read more
- The Precepts Are the Mind of the BuddhaDon’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. [This is the fifth in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. Earlier articles are here, here, here, and here. My review of the ...Read more
- Deep WisdomDon’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. [This is the fourth in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. Earlier articles are here and here and here. My review of the book ...Read more
- The Process of ZazenDon’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. [This is the third in a series on Dogen’s Zen, inspired by Brad Warner’s new book paraphrasing fascicles of the Shobogenzo. Earlier articles are here and here. My review of the book is ...Read more
- Zazen is a Physical PracticeDon’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. Still pondering Brad Warner’s book. Dogen goes on and on. Brad does a paraphrase of the Fukanzazengi, the meditation instructions Dogen wrote (and largely cribbed from a Chinese document) when he returned to Japan ...Read more
- Zazen is For EverybodyDon’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a review of Brad Warner’s latest book, which I regard as his richest and most helpful to date. I had hoped to go into various themes ...Read more
- Stop Me Before I See More Movies!Full Frame Documentary Film Festival 2016 Thursday The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith *** Forever, Chinatown **1/2 The 100 Years Show **** The Many Sad Faces of Mr. Toledano **** By Sydney Lumet ***1/2 Weiner **1/2 Friday The Black Belt *** Trapped **** Dancing for You ***** Dixieland ** Tarikat ***** Horizons **** Two Trains Runnin’ **** Saturday Following Seas ***** Life, Animated **** Raising Bertie ** Hours spent standing in line, sometimes ...Read more
- Renegade Zen ManDon’t Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan’s Greatest Zen Master By Brad Warner. New World Library. 306 pp. $16.95. Brad Warner is that rare thing, a Buddhist teacher who primarily teaches by writing. In fact—though he leads retreats and gives lectures, does podcasts and has even appeared in a movie or two—I ...Read more
- True Zen Man IINo Beginning, No End: The Intimate Heart of Zen by Jakusho Kwong. Edited by Peter Levitt. Shambhala. 256 pp. $19.95. I like what I think of as the original teachers, the people who were prominent where I first began practicing Buddhism in 1991. My all-time favorite is Shunryu Suzuki, whose Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was the ...Read more
- She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old Lady IIThe Lady in the Van. A film by Nicholas Hytner. With Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Alex Jennings. I’m as much a fan of oldster movies as anyone—they’re about me, after all—and, like everyone else in the world, I love Maggie Smith. I especially like her as the outraged Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey, though the series ...Read more
- She Wasn’t Just a Dotty Old LadyIris Murdoch As I Knew Her by A.N. Wilson. Arrow Books. 276 pp. Those Brits do keep writing, don’t they? I look at the titles by A. N. Wilson, who is my rough contemporary (two years younger than I, actually) and I’m astonished, and somewhat ashamed, to see thirty books. (Compared to six for me. Eight ...Read more
- Get Me Outta Here: Panic as a Spiritual PracticeGoing Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me by Peter J Conradi. Short Books. 183 pp. I had high hopes for this book, which I found when I was farting around on the Internet after reading a review of Iris Murdoch’s letters. The author was a friend of Murdoch’s and became her official biographer. The ...Read more
- True Zen ManNot Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen by Shunryu Suzuki. Edited by Edward Espe Brown. Harper Collins. 162pp. $22.95. I think of Shunryu Suzuki as the quintessential Soto Zen Priest: modest, quiet, never drawing attention to himself, refusing to make great claims for practice or the results of practice, utterly devoted to zazen. Back ...Read more
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Yes You Can Go Home AgainHow to Live Your LifeYou Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft Paradise
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (198)art (110)Buddhism (163)Christianity (120)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (153)music (36)race (95)religion (181)sex (158)spirituality (168)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)