householder zen

the cartoon bad guy in the first ironman movie, the one who lives in a cave, wants to be bigger than the khan brothers. the coked-up scriptwriters around the conference table in hollywood have him tell the kids in the viewing audience that the mongol empire was bigger than rome, bigger than alexander. but the […]

koans are old time stories about the process of working on enlightenment after you get to first base. they are called public cases in the sense that the teachings involved are meant to be accessible to anyone, not just monks training in zen communities under the auspices of teaching masters. the blue cliff record is […]

i work in neuro, but only enough to cover my food budget. when i was 28, i thought about going into molecular biochemistry. i worked with a guy named jack shepherd for about a year. jack was not much older than me, but was in a network of maybe a dozen people globally who were […]

in the baseball analogy of enlightenment, first base is initial insight, second base is true equanimity in the sense of uniform nonreactivity, third base is called skill in means, and crossing home plate is called going beyond. the base paths are called the four knowledges. the path to first base involves acquiring the great perfect […]

first, let’s acknowledge a certain level of desperation in your writing to an online newspaper columnist of no particular accomplishment for advice on this matter. second, let’s acknowledge that you are not alone in these concerns, and that, for proper solutionizing, we should recognize that this is a structural problem, not a personal problem. you […]

‘proper’ is the english translation used by robert thurman in his 1976 rendering of the vimalakirti nirdesa sutra, commonly called the householder sutra. it may be difficult to imagine going through the world without categorical discrimination and its extension through relational or associational thought. what would your experience of your own mind be like, without […]