Category: Zen Buddhism

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

Consistency is the quiet power behind zazen. Not because Zen is a self-improvement program, and not because sitting every day earns you points with the…

View More Consistency

In Zen, the paramitas (often translated “perfections,” but more helpfully “ways of crossing over”) are not a ladder you climb to become holy. They’re the…

View More The Paramitas

I am Jewish. Not as a costume, not as a mood, not as a vague ancestry note on a family tree. I’m Jewish in the…

View More I’m a Buddhist—and I’m still Jewish

Zen talks about emptiness the way a seasoned sailor talks about wind. It isn’t an abstract theory, and it isn’t a poetic garnish on top…

View More Emptiness in Zen

The Four Noble Truths point with gentle clarity to what hurts, why it hurts, what relief feels like, and the way of living that supports…

View More The Eightfold Path: A Gentle Way of Living That Leads Beyond Suffering