Once, when I was about 12, my father came into my room holding a book. He was in his forties at the time. “I want to show you something,” he said. The book was an autobiography of the poet Robert Graves. On the front cover was a photograph of Graves as a young man: black-haired, […]

In Japan, people will often refer to “the paradise of the Pure Land,” leading to the belief that paradise and the Pure Land are one and the same, but I don’t think this is the case. The Pure Land is not paradise. Rather, paradise and hell – its opposite – refer to this world in […]

Zen and the Art of Transmission