I don’t remember when, but I do remember where, the locker room at the JCC where I worked out three times a week. I haven’t been there in years, but the locker room is still vivid. The scale was one of those where you moved the blocks until you got the balance point, a big block that moved in 50-pound increments, and the small block which moved pound by pound from zero to 50. My big block was always on 150. At my worst the small block was somewhere in the 30’s. That’s when I

When I teach Zen, am I teaching what the Buddha taught? Who knows? The Buddha taught 2500 years ago. It’s probably getting closer to 2600 years. His teaching was handed down orally for five hundred years before it was written down in Indian languages that I don’t understand. The teaching came to me largely by way of China and then Japan, bits through Viet Nam and Korea and Tibet, and then to America. Along the way the teaching was translated into more languages that I don’t u

Roshi Bernie substituted “creations” for the traditional “sentient beings” in the first Great Bodhisattva Vow. I appreciated the idea of not discriminating against insentient beings – save the rainforest as well as the whales – but it was overwhelming. The more limited “sentient beings” was itself an impossible-to-achieve goal. Bernie was pushing farther even than the trees, at least as I understand his teaching now. Creations encompass not just all the stuff created by God