Category: spirituality
- #MeToo Meets Déjà VuMaking Enlightened Society Possible (but not Probable) “Why does a dog lick his balls? Because he can.” –old joke. “Men are addicted to ejaculation.” Statement of a man on NPR’s Fresh Air, explaining male sexual behavior. I will sound naïve to say so, but I was utterly shocked by the sex scandal that recently rocked Shambhala International, and ...Read more
- Stumble He DidThe Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha by Stephen T. Asma. HarperOne. 256 pp. $14.99 ***1/2 Talk about your feeble excuses for reading a book: I was getting my computer worked on when I noticed this book on a nearby work desk. I picked it up and flipped through ...Read more
- The Other Side of AddictionNow What? Reading Sabbath’s Theater has gotten me started on the subject of addiction again. I’ve read books about sex maniacs before, I’ve even written one, but never have I come across a character like Mickey Sabbath, who masturbates on his mistress’ grave, showed up at her house (when he was alive) with an erection already ...Read more
- Communion of Saints[1]Won’t You Be My Neighbor? a film by Morgan Neville. With Fred Rogers, Joanne Rogers, Joe Negri, Francois Clemmons. ****1/2 Fred Rogers was one weird dude. In all of show business, people on television, people who perform, who work with children, I’ve never seen anyone like him. He had a television show in which, for all ...Read more
- ReligiousWhat Is That? “ is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said.” –Paul, to the Athenians, in the Book of Acts. “If you want to experience the unnameable, you need to be a person who is the unnameable. Since ...Read more
- Trusting the MindThe Buddha’s Ultimate Message Some years ago, a publisher asked me to write a Young Adult biography of the Buddha. It was an obvious assignment in a way; two of my novels had been published as YA’s (though I hadn’t written them that way), and I’d written a fair amount about Buddhism as well. I could ...Read more
- God Is in the BellyHara: The Vital Center of Man by Karlfried Graf Durckheim. Inner Traditions. 202 pp. $14.95. **** Years ago—27 years this fall, it would seem—when I got my first meditation instructions at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, Larry Rosenberg told us we had our choice of where to follow the breathing. Some people follow it at the ...Read more
- 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
- 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
- Is That a Promise?Ruminations on Star Wars: The Last Jedi a film by Rian Johnson. With Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega. ***1/2 For the critics who are now active and influential, the Star Wars movies were their first epics, the movies they grew up on and worshiped. I’m trying to think of what might ...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
- Who You Really Are (You Knew All Along)Coco a film by Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina. With Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach. ***** I went to this movie as an act of desperation. Every day I read in the New York Times about the marvelous movies that are arriving for the holiday season and the great reviews they’ve gotten, ...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
- Servants of LifeIn the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman. Picador. 497 pp. $17.00 ****1/2 This is the last book—the last of many—that my friend Levi recommended to me. He always recommended books as if to say: Go buy this and start reading it tonight (though I never did that). He went on and on ...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
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You Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are Golden
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (197)art (109)Buddhism (163)Christianity (119)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (152)music (36)race (95)religion (180)sex (157)spirituality (167)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)