Demand, Desire and Motive Force

Welcome, everybody.  I’m not sure I need to give a talk today because we heard members of the bird family preaching the Dharma quite clearly. They sang it all. That’s all there is. We can go home (laughs). I’m not kidding. Michael Moore executive produced a film called Planet of the Humans. There’s been a…

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This is the Stone

  this is the stone drenched in rain that marks the way –Santōka (1882-1940)     Church bells are ringing in San Miguel, all of them, for the last ten minutes. This cobblestone city is 500-years old and it feels medieval, these bells filling the air, tolling the last public Catholic mass as we await…

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From Particle to Participation to Particularity

As threats to our planet and to the life it sustains are intensifying, and toxicity and violence are spreading like wildfires (and with wildfires), I’ve been wondering why it’s so difficult for us to realize that our wellbeing and freedom co-arise with the wellbeing and freedom of other people, the earth, and its creatures. Why…

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Woman at the Roadside

Part I I find her sitting under a tarp on the corner of Cinco de Mayo and Las Moras, selling nopal salad and avocados, her greying black hair, straight hair very long, covered with a head cloth. She wears a blue sweater for the morning chill, a flowered apron underneath, brown hands moving deliberately, trimming…

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Enduring Together in Synchrony: Suffering, Karma and Poison.

Thus have I heard: The corona virus is exposing and revealing fault lines of great suffering, the cause of suffering, the path to transforming suffering, and the main component of that path (view). It is also revealing how karma works and the role of delusion, one of the three poisons (intimately related to the other…

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Vast and Wide

Master Yunmen said, “See how vast and wide the world is! Why do you put on your seven-piece robe at the sound of the bell? This koan is from The Gateless Barrier, a collection of verses and stories compiled by Master Wumen. Gateless? Essentially yes, but when we are hitched to conceptual formulations, investing our…

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Your Liberation is Bound Up with Mine

Bodhisattva means awakening being: In process of awakening, awakening others, and cultivating his own awakening. It is commonly thought that the Bodhisattva postpones his full enlightenment until all beings have become enlightened. Or, he is already fully enlightened but devotes his energies to others’ awakening rather than refining his own. These seemed dualistic, a bit…

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Unleashing good

I was watching on Democracy Now a group of homeless mothers who have moved with their children into a home kept vacant for years by real estate speculators in Oakland. There are many such homes, the Mothers 4 Housing said: It’s not right for them to be kept vacant as their value builds past affordable…

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Walking the Path

I’m happy to announce that there are still spaces in our cohort. Walking the Path is an opportunity to be part of a supportive cohort to learn Buddhism through a program of study and practice.  November, 2018 – June, 2019 Program components * Daily meditation practice at home. * Readings: An article or book chapter,…

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