Robert Chodo Campbell and Koshin Paley Ellison co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (zencare.org), the first Buddhist organization to offer fully accredited chaplaincy training in America. They co-developed and co-lead the Buddhist Track in the Master in Pastoral Care and Counseling degree program at New York Theological Seminary. In July 2013 they taught at BCBS on the Buddha's remembrances about aging, illness and death. In February 2014, they will teach Love, Compassion, … [Read more...]
News - Article
Secular Buddhism: New vision or yet another of the myths it claims to cure?
September 18, 2013A hundred years ago, almost exactly, Karl Kraus, an eminent Austrian publicist and the German language's foremost satirist, famously claimed in his newspaper that Psychoanalysis is the very mental illness it claims to cure.1 Amusing and bitingly unfair, Kraus turned his violent dislike into a crafty aphorism. Today, we know how prejudiced and superficial his knowledge of psychoanalysis was when he wrote this, how personal slight rather than understanding led to what has become famous not for its … [Read more...]
The Essence of Dhamma
August 20, 2013This month's Insight Journal includes both an article by Ajaan Thanissaro, "The Essence of the Dhamma," and a brief interview with him about the article. The article challenges us to re-examine the way we look at the Dhamma through eyes conditioned by the 18th century Enlightenment, along with the modern and post-modern attitudes it has spawned. We have been brought up in a bifurcated culture. On the one hand, modernism assumes that knowing the world through science will make you happy. On the … [Read more...]
“Seeing” the Āsavas
July 22, 2013The Sabbāsava Sutta (M 2) is one of the most important and practical teachings in the Pāli Canon. It summarizes our most deeply entrenched patterns of delusion and suffering and it points to the methods by which these are managed and overcome. This is what it's all about—seeing our patterns and working with them skillfully. Thus, one might say that the Sabbāsava Sutta outlines the whole of the practice. The key word here is āsava, often translated as "taint" although there have been … [Read more...]
Meeting Your Thoughts At a Resting Place
June 21, 2013There is a particular discourse, titled, Vitakkasanthāna Sutta, that is taught as the Buddha's way of working with thoughts in meditation, for when I teach in a more traditional or orthodox setting, I encounter people who swear by it and take me to task on it. So, I am now going to face my biggest critic, the Buddha himself, as he is interpreted by scholars and lay meditation teachers alike. When this discourse is viewed with unprejudiced eyes regarding thinking in meditation, the Buddha may … [Read more...]
New rivers, new rafts: The Secular Buddhism Conference
May 24, 2013Here some clansmen learn the Dhamma—discourses, stanzas, expositions, verses, exclamations, sayings, birth stories, marvels, and answers to questions—and having learned the Dhamma, they examine the meaning of those teachings with wisdom. Examining the meaning of those teachings with wisdom, they gain a reflective acceptance of them. They do not learn the Dhamma for the sake of criticising others and for winning in debates, and they experience the good for the sake of which they learned the … [Read more...]
Wheels of Fire: The Buddha’s Radical Teaching on Process
April 25, 2013Ādittapariyāya Sutta: The Fire Sermon, SN 35.28 "Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye—experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain—that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with … [Read more...]
Unburdened With Duties & Frugal In Our Ways
December 27, 2012The Personal Economy Of Right Livelihood For contemporary western lay practitioners of the Buddha's way, Right Livelihood (samma ājīva) is hardly the most compelling factor on the Eightfold Path. For us, livelihood is most often simply equated with our job, with what we do for a living, how we make our money. In the midst of our practice, we might pause for a quick mental check to confirm that we aren't supporting ourselves through any particularly egregious line of work, but we then move right … [Read more...]
The Busier You Are, The Slower You Should Go
November 27, 2012When I lived in South Korea as a Zen nun, I heard about a nun called Songou Sunim and went to practice with her for three months. She was known for her simplicity and dedication to practice. Once she practiced in a hermitage for many months and decided to eat raw food to make things simpler. She sat on a zabuton (flat cushion) without a zafu (round cushion) again to make things simpler and become less dependent on external things. I tried it but I could not do it. I had to renounce this … [Read more...]
The Arrows of Thinking
October 29, 2012Papañca & the path to end conflict In a striking piece of poetry (Sn 4:15), the Buddha once described the sense of saṃvega—terror or dismay—that inspired him to look for an end to suffering. I will tell of how I experienced saṃvega. Seeing people floundering like fish in small puddles, competing with one another— as I saw this, fear came into me. The world was entirely without substance. All the directions were knocked out of line. Wanting a haven for myself, I saw … [Read more...]