100 Days Chanting Meditation – Part 1

A few days ago Sensei Kanjin Cederman offered this challenge to us and our practice for the last remaining 100 days of the year.  I would like to offer as a companion to this an accompanying meditation to engage in as we make our way out of 2018 and into 2019. If you’ve read my book on The Magic City you will know that I am fond of and engage in a couple of mystical…

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Contemplating Disease – Part 3b – Balance, Harmony, and Whack – August 24, 2018

Chih-I refers to the Four Elements as snakes, he wasn’t the first to do so, yet it is his work we are exploring.  An explanation for the metaphor of four snakes can be found in the Suvarnaprabhasa Sutra which offers a parable of a man who fleeing from the two bewildering forms of life and death spies a rope (life) and climbs down into the well of impermanence.  In this well are two mice who…

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Why and How Deep Conversations – Three Themes to Guide Me – April 24, 2017

Three Themes to Guide Me  http://ryusho.org/blog/?p=7155 The title is perhaps a bit misleading in that I don’t propose to have all the answers.  At best I have a few strategies which you may or may not find helpful.  I think the best outcome I could hope for would be that this somehow prompts you to think about your interactions with people and how they might be different.  To even consider what is missed in conversations…

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Incarcerated Lotus – #9 – Anger

Anger is one of the Ten Worlds and, therefore, a very real part of our whole self. The question for us as Buddhists is not to eliminate anger; that is impossible. I believe we serve ourselves well, and thereby improve our lives if we examine when we are the master of anger and when anger is our master. When anger so consumes you that you act without thinking or, act in ways you would not…

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