Buddha-Sasana

A monk is an anomaly in the Wild West of Buddhism, and so ends this narrative. (Through the Looking Glass 12, 4/14/2023)

Cloth management and alms for the new bhikkhu. (Through the Looking Glass 11, 4/7/2023)

I ordain as a bhikkhu, March 10, 2009, with unexpected pomp in Central Burma. (Through the Looking Glass 10, 3/31/2023)

I travel to the land of the golden pagodas to ordain as a bhikkhu. (Through the Looking Glass 9, 3/24/2023)

I seek out and am inspired by Western monks in Texas and California, and resolve to ordain as a bhikkhu. (Through the Looking Glass 8, 3/17/2023)

A brief history of Zen priesthood and how it felt to be a priest in the USA. (Through the Looking Glass 7, 3/10/2023)

I visit Japanese, Burmese, Chinese and Vietnamese temples and talk to monks. (Through the Looking Glass 6, 3/03/2023)

I ordain as a Zen priest at the Austin Zen Center. (Through the Looking Glass 5, 2/24/2023)

I decide to dedicate my life to Buddhist practice and move to a Zen monastery in California. (Through the Looking Glass 4, 2/17/2023)

I discover why forms and rituals are important and officially take refuge. (Through the Looking Glass 3, 2/10/2023)

I begin Zen meditation retreats and raise some curious questions about myself. (Through the Looking Glass 2, 2/3/2023)

I begin to tell my own “way seeking mind” story of how I first came to Buddhist practice. (Through the Looking Glass 1, 1/27/2023)

We review Buddhism’s unique roles in the symbolic/transcendent world. (Buddhism as Self-Help 18, 1/20/2023)

We look at how Buddhism fits into the symbolic structures of social cognition: the sacred, myth, ritual and community, and how meaning, motivation and supramundane experience are rooted there. (Buddhism as Self-Help 17, 1/13/2023)

Social cognition works symbolically. We continue our understanding of the constructed symbolic world in terms of myth and the sacred and their influence on human behavior. (Buddhism as Self-Help 16, 1/6/2023)

Symbolism provides the workings of social, cooperative life. We discuss the ubiquity and importance of ritual and then the ethic of living by vow, with examples from the Zen tradition. (Buddhism as Self-Help 15, 12/30/2022)

Lasting well-being is possible within the selfless, pro-social, cooperative world. We discuss moral communities, when they go wrong and the Buddhist resources that make them work. (Buddhism as Self-Help 14, 12/23/2022)

The Buddha divides thoughts into wholesome and unwholesome. The mundane unwholesome search for hedonic pleasure necessarily fails to produce lasting well-being for modern psychological and evolutionary reasons. (Buddhism as Self-Help 13, 12/16/2022)

The monastic Sangha provides a context in which social conditions that presuppose a self are excluded. (Buddhism as Self-Help 12, 12/9/2022)

A quick tour of various societal structures gives us an idea of where a non-self might be able to live and thrive. (Buddhism as Self-Help 12, 12/2/2022)

Contrary to being the ideology of global capitalism, Buddhism is only marginally about self-help under adverse social conditions, but intrinsically concerned with improving social conditions. (Buddhism as Self-Help 10, 11/25/2022)

The Buddha made clear that the success of our practice depends critically on an appropriate social context for practice. Self-help focuses on practice in inappropriate contexts. (Buddhism as Self-Help 9, 11/18/2022)

We look at the social psychology of managing our self-image in social contexts as a source for the ego-self and the authentic self, and how individualism is nonsensical. (Buddhism as Self-Help 8, 11/11/2022)

We discuss self-presentation as an individual adaptation to survival in the sociocultural matrix. (Buddhism as Self-Help 7, 11/4/2022)

Humans are fundamentally cooperative and social creatures. We show that most significant individual cognition serves social cognition, drawing significant differences between humans and other apes in this regard. (Buddhism as Self-Help 6, 10/28/2022)