Illuminating the Mind to See One's Nature: The Root of Taoist Inner Practice An Excerpt from Taoist Inner Alchemy By Master Huang Yuanji & Ge Guolong Translate by Mattias Daly About This Excerpt Taoism and Buddhism, specifically Chan Buddhism, share many similar ideas including the concept and practice of inner cultivation, the nature of emptiness [...]

Taoist Influences on Ch’an Meditation An Excerpt from China Root Ch’an practice was not simply about cultivating an abstract understanding of Taoist ontology/cosmology and the nature of consciousness; it was about actually living that understanding as a matter of immediate experience. And at the center of Ch’an practice was meditation. Indeed, Ch’an (禪), a transliteration [...]

The Babylike Sweetness of Love An excerpt from Love Unveiled Let me see if I can give you some feel, some taste, some flavor of what love is like when it is active, manifesting, and we are feeling it. When we say “I love you” to somebody, what do we usually mean? Many of us [...]

Notes on Practice, Love, and Social Action Excerpt from The World Comes to You Love 1 By love, I don’t mean just between people—I mean a love for invention, architecture, neighborhoods, water, whales, soil, technology, farmers, etc. I’m talking about a love that doesn’t leave anything out. When we look deeply at the physical world, [...]

Essential Teachings An Excerpt from Budōshoshinshu Budōshoshinshu and Hagakure are the most influential treatises on samurai philosophy from the Edo period. The two books were written at about the same time and both address the warrior’s role in times of peace. While Hagakure was mostly a secret book of the Nabeshima clan until the twentieth [...]

My Story of Becoming the First African-American Man to Receive Soto Zen Transmission An Excerpt from Zen beyond Mindfulness My Beginnings I was born in 1939 in Chester, Pennsylvania, an industrial town just outside of Philadelphia that was working class and extremely diverse. Based on this background, the path I ended up taking was exceedingly [...]

Bhartrihari the Poet, Bhartrihari the Linguist Nalanda Everything known for certain about India’s poet Bhartrihari could be engraved on a grain of rice. He steps into the wavering historical record like a ghost out of the mist in 671 C.E., when the Chinese pilgrim I-Tsing (Yijing in the newer way of spelling) jotted down his [...]