Category: Zen Buddhism

Fear is one of the most basic human experiences. It arises in the body before it becomes a thought. The heart tightens, the breath shortens,…

View More Fear and a Buddhist Response

Zen likes to say there is nothing to attain. Just sit. Just this. And yet, anyone who has actually tried to practice knows how quickly…

View More The Ten Oxherding Pictures: A Zen Picture Story

Indra’s Net is one of those images that, once it really lands, you start seeing it everywhere. It comes to us from the great Mahayana…

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This is a transcript of the Dharma talk I delivered at the Amherst Zendo Nehan-e Sesshin on Saturday, February 21, 2026. Tonight, on Nehan-e, we…

View More Dharma Talk: Nehan-e 2026

Right Livelihood is one of those teachings that sounds simple until you actually try to live it. Most of us spend more of our waking…

View More Right Livelihood: Earning a Living Without Selling Your Heart

Hate is a strange kind of fire. It feels like power, like clarity, like certainty. It can even feel like righteousness. But it is not…

View More On Hate

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…

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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