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Whenever I see an article or blogpost called “The Zen of…” or “The Buddhist Take On…” I quickly look for something else to read. (James Ure’s Buddhist Blog is a rare exception to this rule.) Lost, Twin Peaks, Star Wars—they’ve all been scoured for possible dharma references, but it’s hard to say why. Do we […]
This past Saturday I drove up to Metta Forest Monastery in Valley Center, California with my friend Sally. (Ok, she drove.) The abbot, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, known as Ajaan Geoff to his students (Ajaan is a Thai word for “teacher”) gave a two-hour teaching centered on the Introduction to his book The Wings to Awakening. There […]
So it seems the Naga Jolokia pepper is the hottest in the world, with a Scoville scale rating of about 1,000,000. (Jalapeños clock in at 2,500 to 8,000, according to Wikipedia, but I bet that doesn’t mean the Naga Jolokia is 125 to 400 times as hot as the jalapeño. Numerical scales can be very […]
You remember the uproar a year ago about a missing branch of the Bodhi Tree? As far as I know it was never resolved—maybe the branch wasn’t missing at all, and if it was, there was no clear trail to who took it, or damaged the tree. Here’s an update that doesn’t answer any interesting […]
The Wall Street Journal, which recently said ‘No, thanks’ to Rupert Murdoch, pontificated today on what satisfies us. We constantly hanker after fancier cars and fatter paychecks—and, initially, such things boost our happiness. But the glow of satisfaction quickly fades and soon we’re yearning for something else. Well, gee, this assumes we get the fancier […]
Check out the English version of pravda.ru for a Buddhist tie-in to the Virginia Tech killer. (They have an interesting take on the Imus situation too. If you’re at all interested in how this Pravda connects with the well-known Soviet publication, see here. I’m guessing the Soviet one was a little less lewd, though the […]
Buddhist monks are planning to stage a rally in central Bangkok on April 25th to pressure the Constitution Drafting Committee to enshrine Buddhism as the state religion. The military regime currently controlling Thailand is resisting this move, and urging all involved to carefully consider what they are asking. The monks involved do not seem to […]
The title of this post is (allegedly) the complete text of a speech made by D.T. Suzuki at U.C.L.A. back in the day. The story of this and other Buddhist ha-ha’s here. (I realize ol’ D.T. Suzuki is way way way out of fashion in contemporary Buddhist thinking, and is so for a lot of […]
China’s at it again, extending its railroad network from Lhasa to Shigatse, seat of Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, traditional seat of the Panchen Lama (a political prisoner of the Chinese government since 1995.) The railroad China built to Lhasa has a lot of superlatives attached to it, longest, tallest, coldest, whatever. Anyway, it’s a great achievement. […]
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