With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley

Two English professors discuss this ode to new beginnings.

gazing into coals,
I skydive and pass through
stages of youth

If we agree that “illusion” is a negative and the prefix “dis-” a kind of minus sign, then logically and by mathematical analogy “disillusion” and “disillusionment” must be positives, no? And yet in common parlance they’re anything but.

at the farthest reach
of my watering
hose stream
a cabbage white
flutters a while

… an important technical contribution to English-language poetry written in the Japanese style in Canada.

I was the angry one, and I was the sad one,
and I am the head shaking in wonder

How “Buddhist” do you think this poem is? Can it be interpreted in multiple ways? How does it make you feel about the world?

i have so much hope for the future

i hope everyone gets everything they deserve

It’s holding a little, obsidian shard of the experience of being human. And because it’s gone into print, other people can read it and they can laugh with me at all our hope and uselessness

The poem is the evidence of the survival. And that comes as a great comfort when we’re not sure if we’ll survive what has been asked of us. I have come to really value this quality of humility as something that helps me get through the day.

Woke feeling nauseous—my wife’s soft breathing
beside me. Outside the immense Sierra dark and silence,
a sky still glittering with a strew of stars

… memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection

… even consciousness is shared, to a large degree, with a lot of other creatures, so death stops seeming like the enemy and starts seeming like one of the most ingenious kinds of design for keeping evolution circulating and keeping the experiment running and recombining. And to go from the terror [of death] into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social, economic, and cultural things.

A passionate defense of the importance of Buddhist philosophy in charting a path out of the Anthropocene.

In that structure of feeling well, we had started taking acid…

A long and wide conversation on the author’s life and on our collective, possible futures.

A blur in the periphery,
like the mind if the mind
were airborne, a buzz…

… in this state of not knowing, curiosity and engagement with the world arises. And that engagement, that curiosity is intimate and very, very alive.

A defense of taking seriously the life in things and expanding the range of “normal” ways of being with the world.

I think if we had more of that kind of sensibility operating in our world today we might not be in the pickle we’re in now

On cultivating a sensitivity to our relationships with objects and the material world.

However many lives I’ll have to suffer,
I’ll never give my heart you again.

Three poems composed by famed, Thai modernist Angkarn Kallayanapong translated into English by a famed, American modernist.

Love of hate acts as an axis uh huh
First it wanes and then it waxes
(Hmm so, procreate and pay your taxes)

… slender citrine lip onto which I place, gently, this first handful of hair

I swear, you will wake–
& mistake these walls
for skin.

A song on the cycle of life and death.

If you’re going to tell yourself a story,
Why not tell yourself a story of freedom?

A deeply American meditation on (not translation of!) the Therigatha.

Read this book critically, alongside a real translation, so that you can see for yourself how the poems changed the originals. Consider what was lost, what was added, and how the tone shifted. What does this collection say about American Buddhism?

It regards our planet and the life upon it. It stands outside of historical time. To another race, it would communicate: This is what you would see if you came here.

~ From Roger Ebert’s review

Growing tolerance toward Asian peoples and cultures was fostered in a mass-mediated environment in which the role of the visual image took on increasing importance. While this environment allowed a popular engagement with Asian religious traditions, it also relied on and reinforced certain racialized notions of Asianness and Asian religiosity. These notions form patterns of representation that, because they are linked to such positive images, go unchallenged and unseen.

This fascinating and compelling history of the “Oriental Monk” figure in 20th century American media shows how Americans came to have certain feelings and expectations (that is to say, stereotypes) about Eastern spirituality in general and monks in particular which continue to shape Buddhism to this day.

We call that “Progress”
But it’s just movement

An upbeat song about spiritual perspective.

Yeah, we’re locked up in ideas
We like to label everything
Well, I’m just gonna do here
What I gotta do here
‘Cause I gotta keep myself free

A fun anthem on ignoring the haters, and on not taking words too seriously.

On my electric pottery wheel, a lump of freshly kneaded gray clay has already been set out for me, a gift that always makes me feel more than a little incompetent.

The wife of a Soto Zen priest writes about pottery, her Japanese community, American family, memories and loneliness in this gorgeously well-written diary of her year (mostly) apart from her beloved husband during his formal monastic training in Japan.

Zen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this

This modern classic of Japanese Buddhism has introduced several generations of Westerners to the simple yet challenging beauty of Zen practice.