Nearly every Buddhist teacher I know of, okay, every Buddhist teacher I know of, presents themselves as very kind and mild mannered. Okay, Brad Warner is not at all mild mannered, but Zen does have its own, specific tradition of more flamboyant teachers. I appreciate his voice. But the vast…

Including you and me. Tibetan Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa liked to use “neuroses” as his modern, westernized term to help explain Buddhism in the modern west. Until we awaken fully, we are still a bit neurotic, at least. Our perspective on the world is at least slightly deranged from the…

Christians love to appeal to “nature,” especially when they are being nasty and picking on people. This is especially easy with transgender persons, the current political target of conservatives, the real kind and the faux, degraded, U.S. kind. The Vatican, a leading source of conservative ideology, published a few years…

Mine’s in the back. Yours may show up elsewhere. Everyone is different. We can conceive of ultimate consciousness by using the metaphor of being in a room, knowing that the entire universe lies outside of the room. …

I’m passing the proverbial hat, or the plate, as the Episcopalians of my youth would say. They were kind of like soup plates. My parents would give us coins to put in wheen we were children. The Dalai Lama has stated that compassion is a primary principle of all of…

I hate doing this. I do live a somewhat monk like existence. My apartment is a very plain, one bedroom model in a slightly grungy, but safe complex, in the Vietnamese section of town, as it happens. I have no trouble honoring the five precepts because I live a pretty…

I keep thinking that I need to advertise Red State Vihara more than I do. I suck at self promotion. I hate advertising. I am still not clear on whether any research shows that it works. …

The combination of the Buddha’s teaching that we are already awake, or enlightened, or whatever you want to call it, we just don’t realize it, with the observation that realizations are about getting a new perspective on existing information rather than adding new information really does, or can, lead to…

If you stop and think about it (!), you will notice that, when you have a thought, you necessarily already knew what you were about to think before you had the thought. This is necessarily so. Unless you have a fairy or other entity inside your head that whispers to…