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 Buddhism in books, film, TV, and popular media
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    Sex, Sin, and Zen Paid Member

    Brad Warner is known around the Buddhist world as the proprietor of the rollicking blog Hardcore Zen (hardcorezen.blogspot.com), and a contributor to the alternative adult site Suicide Girls (suicidegirls.com), as well as the author of irreverent and very personal books about Zen practice, most recently Sex, Sin, and Zen. More »
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    Get Outta My Head Paid Member

    By Elizabeth Gilbert
    Meditating at an Indian ashram, ELIZABETH GILBERT struggles to keep it together with no help from her brain. The following morning, I arrive right on time for the 4:00 a.m. meditation session that always starts the day here. We are meant to sit for an hour in the silence, but I log the minutes as if they were miles—sixty brutal miles that I have to endure. By mile/minute fourteen, my nerves have started to go, my knees are breaking down, and I’m overcome with exasperation. Which is understandable, given that the conversations between me and my mind during meditation generally go something like this: Me: Okay, we’re going to meditate now. Let’s draw our attention to our breath and focus on the mantra. Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shiv— Mind: I can help you out with this you know! Me: Okay, good, because I need your help. Let’s go. Om namah Shivaya. Om namah Shi - More »
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    Land of Illusions Paid Member

    By Amy Tan
    Land of Illusions In this scene from AMY TAN's latest novel, the cynical ghost of murdered San Francisco socialite Bibi Chen tells the story of her friends’ trip to Burma. CROSSING THE BORDER into Burma, one can spot the same pretty flowers seen from the bus window in China: yellow daisies and scarlet hibiscus, lantana growing as plentifully as weeds. Nothing had changed from one country to the next, or so it appeared to my friends. More »
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    What They're Reading: Sharon Salzberg Paid Member

    By Sharon Salzberg
    I am reading Jonathan Cott's book On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering, an expansive and exciting investigation of memory and its role in forming our sense of self. Cott, a successful journalist and author, is a friend of mine. Several years ago I witnessed his struggle to recover from a deep depression. I have also seen the terrible effect ECT treatments [electroshock therapy] have had on his memory, and know Cott's uncertainty about whether that memory loss might affect his ability to write. More »
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    How to Be Good: A moral philosopher breaks down the self Paid Member

    Posted by Sam Mowe on 08 Sep 2011
    You are in a terrible accident. Your body is fatally injured, as are the brains of your two identical-triplet brothers. Your brain is divided into two halves, and into each brother's body one half is successfully transplanted. After the surgery, each of the two resulting people believes himself to be you, seems to remember living your life, and has your character. (This is not as unlikely as it sounds: already, living brains have been surgically divided, resulting in two separate streams of consciousness.) What has happened? Have you died, or have you survived? And if you have survived who are you? Are you one of these people? Both? Or neither? What if one of the transplants fails, and only one person with half your brain survives? That seems quite different—but the death of one person could hardly make a difference to the identity of another. More »
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    Beyond Language Paid Member

    By Zoketsu Norman Fischer
    A seemingly inescapable fact of my life is that I am a poet, or, at least, that I keep writing poems. Why would I feel the need to do this? I am fascinated by language. But language is fascinating to everyone. It is through language that we describe and therefore create the world we live in, and it is through language that we describe and therefore create ourselves. If the world is difficult and life is difficult, it may not be that there is something wrong with life or the world—it may be that there is something wrong with our descriptions.We usually think that there is something and then there is talking about something, and that the something is substantial and real and the talking about it is secondary. But for the human mind there is no way to separate something from talking about something. Even perception is, to some extent, a process of talking about something. More »