Indra’s Net
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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Dharma Talk: Nehan-e 2026
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…
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Right Livelihood: Earning a Living Without Selling Your Heart
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…
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On Hate
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…
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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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