Category: spirituality

Nothing is Hidden
A Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my third piece on the Gospel of Mark; the other pieces are here and here. I’ll blunder along at my snail like pace until I finish.) One reason that the Gospel of Mark seems an authentic historical document ...
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The World Needs Healing
A Buddhist Reads the Bible: Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. (This is my second piece on the Gospel of Mark, reading it not as a Buddhist or Christian but just an interested reader; the first piece is here. I’ll blunder along at my snail-like pace until I finish.) It seems that ...
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My First Teacher Was a Rabbi
A Buddhist Reads the Bible: the Gospel of Mark from the New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. Various things are conspiring to make me read the Bible, which I last read—a rather thorough reading—in 1966-7, when I was a freshman at Duke. At a recent sesshin, I did dokusan with Shohaku Okumura and he mentioned ...
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Zazen as True Religion
The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen’s Bendowa With a Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. 211 pp. “My late teacher Sawaki Kodo Roshi used to say that when we read Buddhist scriptures, we should illuminate our own mind with the ancient teachings and squeeze out the Buddha-dharma as our own expression. I have been following ...
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No Final State
How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment. Dogen’s classic Instruction for the Zen Cook with commentary by Kosho Uchiyama. Shambhala. 122 pp. $16.95. There are people in this world who believe that spiritual practice involves working and working and working, or suffering and suffering and suffering (or—on the other hand—not working at ...
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Greatest Zen Book Ever
Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. By Kosho Uchiyama, Translated and Edited by Tom Wright, Jisho Warner, and Shohaku Okumura. Wisdom Publications. 205 pp. $16.95. Factoids that I’ve picked up about Kosho Uchiyama through years of being obsessed with him: He was an expert at origami, as his father had been, and ...
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Fleeing the Beauty of Life
The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese. Harper Perennial. 345 pp. $15.99. I found this book disturbing, unnervingly so, and I’m still trying to figure out why. Writing about it may help. Nevertheless, it has all the Abraham Verghese virtues. It’s beautifully written, full of interesting detail about Verghese’s life, about medicine and his medical practice, about the ...
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Silence of the Leaving
Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End-of-Life Care. Edited by Koshin Paley Ellison and Matt Weingast. Wisdom Publications. 346 pp. $19.95. This all began when Koshin Paley Ellison’s Grandma Mimi—certainly the most adorable character in this book, and perhaps the wisest—asked if he could look after her while she stayed in New York. ...
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AIDS Comes Home
My 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 ...
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Astonishing Eloquence
Mindfulness 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 ...
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Unrepeatable Miracle
Stimp 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 ...
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Becoming the True Self
The 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 ...
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All Religions Are One
The 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 ...
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Fearful Symmetry
Blake 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 ...
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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 ...
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Beyond Belief
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 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 ...
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The Precepts Are the Mind of the Buddha
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 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 ...
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Deep Wisdom
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 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 ...
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The Process of Zazen
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 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 ...
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Zazen is a Physical Practice
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. 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 ...
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