Crossing Nebraska

The most fundamental truth in all of Buddhism is that of the emptiness of all things. Enlightenment is the realization of this truth. Oh, but if only the depths of this reality were as easy to understand as to define! If the truth of emptiness ( sunyata ) were as easy to grasp as that of, say, 2+2=4, we wouldn’t need to speak in terms of enlightenment, or awakening ( bodhi ). It would be obvious to all but the least educated amongst us. But since the deepest understanding of emptiness is more akin to an understanding of Einstein’s theory of general relativity than simple arithmetic, we give it a special name. Just as we have a special name, of a sort, for those who understand relativity. Namely, genius! Indeed, some can speak intelligently about certain aspects of general relativity. Far fewer, though – even after a century of commentary, experimentation, study, and reflection – have grasped its intricacies. So groundbreakingly monumental was Einstein’s theory that whe...

Koku is one of the shorter fascicles of Dogen’s Shobogenzo . Notwithstanding its brevity, it is still as dense and difficult to comprehend as many of his other works. One can glimpse the nature of this difficulty by contemplating for a moment the various English translations of the one word title alone: Space (Nishijima, 2009), On the Unbounded (Nearman, 2007), and, of course, Universal Emptiness (Nishiyama, 1975). Each of these reveals a slightly different way of thinking about the Buddhist concept of shunyata (Sanskrit) or ku (Japanese). According to Okumura (2012) koku actually has three different possible meanings. In our very ordinary way of looking at things it can refer to the empty space that is between objects or which is bounded in some way. It can also refer to space which does not lose its nature on account of being occupied. Yet another meaning, however, points to the most profound of Buddhist teachings, i.e. the emptiness of all phenomena. As Okumura says: ...

I suspect that anyone who’s lived an appreciable number of years will have come to know that darkest of places that we can know – with life as we’ve known it but a fast-fading memory, and life as we think it will be forevermore seeming like the darkest, coldest hell that can ever be imagined. Do you know this place of which I speak – the Void ? I was still a teenager when I first encountered it. Whatever Christian faith I’d known up to that point had crumbled and I’d not yet cultivated much of anything to take its place. In that place of in-betweenness was everything abhorrent to the human mind: meaninglessness, aloneness, joylessness… Some might be quick to refer to such an experience as “ the dark night of the soul ”; but to label it as such is at once to minimize it. For to assume that one’s soul is experiencing some tribulation that will eventually bring it closer to God, or to oneness, or to whatever it is that one might still believe in is to presume that there is ...

Alan Watts , erstwhile Episcopal priest and Buddhist scholar, died at the relatively young age of 58, prior to ever seeing the Buddhist teachings that he helped disseminate in the West reach the level of acceptance and maturity that we know them to have today. I have the sense that people of about my chronological age represent the last generation of spiritual explorers to see his writings on bookstore shelves with any regularity. Regardless of your familiarity with Watts, however, you will almost certainly enjoy a very delightful, and delightfully animated, lecture snippet of his referred to as The Earth is People-ing (animated by Chris Brion and Todd Benson). The Earth is People-ing challenges us to move beyond our usual way of thinking about the arrival of intelligent life here on earth in order to reflect upon the possibility that the intelligence that resides in people is actually a manifestation OF the Earth and not merely a characteristic of the beings that...

Readers of Part 1 might find it interesting as they read on that my unconscious mind was able to construct a far more refined metaphor for practice than the “sitting with a belly full of crap” one that my conscious mind was able to come up with. As you may recall, “sitting with a belly full of crap” refers to the fact that so much of our lives is comprised of situations and circumstances that we would just as soon flush away, if only we could. However, as stated in Part 1 : “We can change our mind, we can even change our behavior; but the repercussions of our past mental and physical activity continue until such karma has been exhausted.” And so our practice becomes one of working with and working through our residual negative karma, all the while trying to refrain from creating such negativity anew. I had a dream one night during sesshin. It began with me flying over a very picturesque city – with many lakes and streams, beautiful buildings and walkways, lush foliage and green...

Not too long ago, the post that I’ll refer to here as A Defense of Ritual brought to a close a three-part exploration of what I termed ‘the dichotomy between universality and ritual,’ i.e., the dichotomy between the universal practice of zazen (seated meditation) and those idiosyncratic rituals that, directly or indirectly and to varying degrees, support it. Regular readers will recall that I used the chanting of the Three Refuges as an example. I noted then that, while the act of reciting “I take refuge in the Buddha... I take refuge in the Dharma... I take refuge in the Sangha...” might have everything to do with the practice of Buddhism, it simply does not rise to the level of universality. What it does do, however, is provide a philosophical context for the universal practice of zazen – context that many practitioners require in order to feel grounded in their sitting practice. The reason for revisiting this ostensibly closed exploration of the dichotomy between universali...