Category: Zen Buddhism

A few years ago, while training under one of America’s prominent Zen teachers and preparing for ordination, I hit a rough stretch that I didn’t…

View More Falling and Getting Back Up

When people first hear “the five aggregates,” it can sound like the Buddha is turning you into a pile of parts—like your living, breathing life…

View More The Five Aggregates

In the early teachings, awakening isn’t treated as a single lightning strike so much as a living ecology—conditions that feed each other until the mind…

View More The Seven Factors of Awakening

The Buddha was brutally practical about the human heart. He didn’t need a complex psychology to name what keeps most of us reactive: we get…

View More Eight Worldly Conditions

Dependent origination is one of those teachings that can feel, at first, like a metaphysical diagram—twelve strange terms strung together in a chain. But the…

View More The 12 Links of Dependent Origination

Manners in the zendo aren’t about being “proper.” They’re about making the room safe for practice—yours and everyone else’s. A zendo is one of the…

View More Manners in the Zendo

One of the Buddha’s more quietly radical teachings is that we are always being fed. Not only by what we put on a plate, but…

View More Understanding the Four Nutriments

When you first hear the word priest, it’s almost impossible not to import a whole set of assumptions from other religions. In the West especially,…

View More Robes and Responsibility: Understanding Zen Priesthood

Dharma transmission is one of those Zen terms that almost begs to be misunderstood. The word sounds mystical—like a secret spark passed from mind to…

View More What is Dharma Transmission?

Kodo Sawaki (1880-1965) is one of the names Zen students eventually run into, even if they did not start in a Japanese Soto temple. You…

View More Kodo Sawaki