Nehan-e Sesshin
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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Death and Mourning in Buddhism
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…
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The Ten Grounds and the Fifty-Two Stages in the Avatamsaka Sutra
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…
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Thinking About Right Speech
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…
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The Religion That Refuses to Be a Religion
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…
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Zero Trust: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Start
For many years, organizations built cybersecurity around a simple assumption: if someone or something was inside the network, it could generally be trusted. Firewalls protected…
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Polygamy, Polyamory, and the Buddhadharma: what’s actually being asked?
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…
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Questioning Buddhist Cosmology
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…
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Grief as Practice
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…
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Depression and Dharma
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…
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