To Provide Compassionate Care for the sick & terminally ill and create a supportive, nurturing environment for people to consciously face their illness and/or end-of-life journeys.
ancestors |
-
0 comments
A Successful Encounter
At the turn of this century, the only English-language Buddhist magazine published on the West Coast was The Light of Dharma (1901-07). The magazine was produced under the auspices of the Japanese Pure Land (Jodo Shin) Buddhist Mission temple in San Francisco, which was established in 1899 by priests sent from the Nishi-Honganji headquarters in Kyoto, Japan. Unlike the temple's monthly Japanese publication, Beikoku Bukkyo (Buddhism in America), which was read primarily by newly arrived Japanese immigrants, The Light of Dharma had both a wider readership and a greater range of contributors. More » -
0 comments
Remembering R. H. Blyth
Reginald Horace Blyth was born near London in 1898, the only child of working-class parents. By the start of World War I, he was eighteen and already an eccentric in his contemporaries’ eyes: he ate no meat, loved George Bernard Shaw, and became a conscientious objector to the war, for which he was jailed. After serving a three-year sentence of hard labor and fed up with the rigidity of Britain’s class system, he left his homeland for what he thought would be a life of wandering. More » -
0 comments
The White Buddhist
Each year on February 17, Buddhists throughout Sri Lanka light brass lamps and offer burning incense to commemorate the anniversary of the death of an American-born Buddhist hero. In Theravadan temples, saffron-robed monks bow down before his photographs, and boys and girls in schoolhouses across the country offer gifts in his memory. “May the merit we have gained by these good deeds,” they meditate, “pass on to Colonel Olcott, and may he gain happiness and peace.” More » -
0 comments
The Mushroom Monk: Nyogen Senzaki
“THE LAND OF THE WHITE BARBARIANS is beneath the dignity of a Zen master," argued Soyen Shaku's monks when Soyen was invited to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. But the Japanese abbot already had high expectations for the new world. Disregarding the objections of his monks, Soyen Shaku (1859-1919) became the first Zen priest to visit the United States. In Chicago, he represented Zen Buddhism with diplomatic discretion. Privately, however, Soyen felt that Zen in Japan had grown impoverished, sapped of true spiritual inquiry. On Soyen's horizon, the future of Zen rested with the barbarians in the West. For the first half of the twentieth century, Zen activity in the United States was carried out by Soyen Shaku's lineage alone, its influence continuing through his two messengers to the West: the world-famous D. T. Suzuki (1869-1966), who became the popularized voice of Zen, and the little-known Zen saint and monk Nyogen Senzaki (1876-1958). More » -
0 comments
Alan Watts Reconsidered
At the meditation center where I used to practice, my teacher told a story about a time when he had lived in Korea and studied with a Zen monk. One of the nuns in the community had died, and at her funeral the monk wept uncontrollably and hysterically, in a way that was almost embarrassing. My teacher, relatively new to the practice, was surprised that the man hadn't shown more equanimity, and brought the matter up at an interview. The monk burst into laughter. That nun had been a dear friend of his, he said. They had joined the community at the same time, and he was sad she was gone. He had expressed his grief when he felt it, and now could go on. Liberation wasn't a matter of acting some particular way, but feeling how you felt, whatever the situation. More » -
0 comments
Still Speaking
Students of Zen Buddhism come to me with a variety of "first books" in their past and among them, with some frequency, is Dwight Goddard's durable anthology of translations, A Buddhist Bible, originally published in 1932 and then republished in its present, enlarged form in 1938. More »
