Author: Ian

Nehan-e is one of those quiet, sober days on the Zen calendar that doesn’t try to inspire us with brightness. It doesn’t lift us up…

View More Nehan-e Sesshin

In Zen, death is not treated as a special case that requires special beliefs. It is treated as the clearest case. A funeral is not…

View More Death and Mourning in Buddhism

The Avatamsaka Sutra, often called the Flower Garland Sutra, is one of the great visionary texts of Mahayana Buddhism. It is not written like a…

View More The Ten Grounds and the Fifty-Two Stages in the Avatamsaka Sutra

There is a moment that comes for most of us, sooner or later, when practice stops being something we do on a cushion and starts…

View More Thinking About Right Speech

Authentic Buddhism, as we practice it in Zen and as we can still glimpse it in the earliest strata of the tradition, does not fit…

View More The Religion That Refuses to Be a Religion

I’ve noticed that when we ask whether Buddhism “requires” monogamy, we’re rarely asking a purely ethical question. We’re asking a belonging question. Am I still…

View More Polygamy, Polyamory, and the Buddhadharma: what’s actually being asked?

Buddhist cosmology can feel like an awkward inheritance. Many of us come to practice through the door of mindfulness, ethics, and meditation, and then—somewhere along…

View More Questioning Buddhist Cosmology

When death first moved from an idea to a fact in my life, I learned something I didn’t expect: grief doesn’t arrive as a single…

View More Grief as Practice

Depression is one of those experiences that can make even simple things feel impossibly heavy. From a Buddhist perspective, that heaviness isn’t a personal failure…

View More Depression and Dharma