Category: Zen Buddhism

In the Buddha’s first great teaching, the Four Noble Truths were offered not as a creed to believe in, but as something closer to a…

View More The Four Noble Truths – A Brief Introduction

Zazen has never been a hobby for me. It has been closer to a long, quiet marriage with something that doesn’t flatter, doesn’t rush, and…

View More My Zazen

Rohatsu arrives in the Zen world the way winter arrives in the body: not as an idea, but as a change in the air. In…

View More Rohatsu

Most people don’t arrive at Zen looking for ceremonies. They arrive because something in life has become loud enough that they need a different kind…

View More Two Ceremonies, Two Ways of Saying “Yes”: Sanbō Tokudō and Jukai in Zen Practice

Zen is famous for a certain kind of iconoclasm. We tell stories about Bodhidharma staring at a wall. We repeat lines about “a special transmission…

View More Why Liturgy and Ceremony Still Matter in Zen

Most of us come to Buddhism because something hurts. Sometimes it’s obvious—grief, anxiety, loneliness, anger that keeps flaring up. Sometimes it’s quieter: a persistent sense…

View More Generosity in Buddhism: The Door That Opens the Whole Path

Anger is one of those honest human fires that can warm a room or burn the house down. Buddhism doesn’t begin by shaming it or…

View More Approaching Anger

We sit because something in us knows the difference between being alive and merely being occupied. Zazen is not a self-improvement project, not a productivity…

View More Just Keep Sitting

In Zen training, we talk a lot about clarity—about sitting down, letting the world be the world, and discovering that the mind does not have…

View More The Five Hindrances