Category Archives: Uncategorized

Over the last several months, I’ve been slowly (very slowly!) making my way through an incredible, dense, thought-provoking, boring, brilliant, obvious, startling book called A Secular Age, by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Part of why it’s taking so long … Continue reading →

Dosho Port over at Wild Fox Zen picked up one of the strands of the Sanjie Jiao conversation that also had a little activity here some time ago – in his latest post he links to a talk I gave … Continue reading →

A month or so ago, while Devon, Gabriel, and I were visiting my parents in Chicago, Devon and I had this amazing outing where we went and saw something called a movie.  Gabriel stayed home with the grandparents.  I’m not … Continue reading →

There’s an important book in the academic Buddhist Studies world called Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha – I’ve mentioned pieces of it in previous posts (here and here).  What was important about the book, if I understand correctly, was that it was … Continue reading →

I recently heard what may be the most important piece I’ve come across on American Zen, and though I share some thoughts about it below, the bottom line of this post is that I can’t recommend highly enough this profoundly … Continue reading →

Warning:  This blog post has nothing to do with sex. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to post here at No Zen in the West.  As my last two posts (ancient, by blog standards) mentioned, it’s that … Continue reading →

There’s been a flurry of activity in the last few weeks over at Sweeping Zen and other places in the online Zen world about allegations of sexual misconduct by Joshu Sasaki Roshi.  In reading what’s been written, I was reminded of … Continue reading →

In the weeks since my last post, the world has continued to flow from event to event to event—you’ve probably noticed.  Our cat Cosmo has recovered well from his dangerous adventure, though he’s been treating the other cats in the … Continue reading →

It’s been months since I’ve had the time to write up anything for the blog—the usual turmoil of life with an almost nine-month old—but in the past few weeks two separate occurrences have started me thinking about the mysterious and … Continue reading →

I was explaining recently to a friend in the Dharma – the inmate shuso of our San Quentin practice period, as it happens – how I think of my study of Japanese language as an act of devotion to the … Continue reading →