Tonight on 19 July at 19:00, our sister platform, Buddhistdoor en Español (BDE), will be co-hosting with Padmapani Publications a conversation with acclaimed monk and author Matthieu Ricard about his new book: Enlightened Vagabond: The Life and Teachings of Patrul Rinpoche. The program is hosted in Spanish (Vagabundo iluminado: La vida y enseñanzas de Patrul Rinpoche), but Matthieu […]
Justin Whitaker
On Academic Learning and Teaching Buddhism
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged here! One of the downsides of entering the regular work of scheduling, editing, and news-writing over at Buddhistdoor Global has been a decline in free time to simply observe the world and muse in a way worthy of blogging. . . Oh, and I had a kid. And […]
Thich Nhat Hanh Gives Voice to New Climate Crisis Movie
Each of us has had a role in creating the crisis; the older we are, the greater that role has likely been.
Realizing anatta (non-self) through Travel
Visiting home. Such a strange thing, to visit one’s home. In this case a period I spent in Montana from 2015-2018. I am no stranger to travels. Despite a youth spent almost exclusively in the rural state of Montana, at age 24 I moved to Bristol, England for a Masters degree in Buddhist Studies. Afterward I […]
A Buddhist Cosmopolitanism
It should make us realize people unlike us were humans just like us, and replace superstition and suspicion—the pillars of tribalism—with curiosity and compassion.”
Seeking Truth in an Onslaught of Information
Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash A friend of mine ends each of her emails with the reminder from American economist and political scientist Herbert Simon, that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon died in 2001, but he seems to have described our current world exceptionally well. Today in my local Zen group, we […]
What the “Buddhist Poker Player” can teach us about Buddhist Ethics
Buddhist ethics can be a difficult topic to study or discuss in the contemporary age. Ethics as a category of peoples’ lives has come to seem too prescriptive, too authoritarian, too distant. The communal and developmental ideals embodied in traditional systems of thought, from Buddhist to Aristotelian to Christian, have been largely set aside by […]
Thinking of that other-other Suzuki: Beatrice Lane
Beatrice Lane Kamakura, 1915. Today I read a student essay which cited B.L. Suzuki. I was intrigued. B.L.? In college I learned about two giants of 20th century Buddhism: Shunryu Suzuki and D.T. Suzuki. I remember many times mixing them up or naively conflating them into a single person. I later did the same with […]
Tugging on Our Feelings about Climate Change?
Like many people following the news today, I find myself deeply worried about climate change. Scientists are offering more and more dire warnings about what to expect in just 10 to 20 years. And we’re actually experiencing weather events that have never or only extremely rarely before occurred: the massive Typhoon Mangkhut that slammed into […]
Moral laziness, vegetarianism, and government intervention
This month Thomas Wells, a philosophy professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, offered a plea for more active government intervention in our lives. He couches his request in the language of ethics: particularly his own moral laziness. He writes: Some years ago, for instance, I worked through the arguments around animal rights and decided […]