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Sunday, August 5, 2012 at 7:58PM 
Photo by Nicolas SchossleitnerKobun Chino came to America in 1967 at the request of Suzuki Roshi and spent the next thirty-five years helping spread the dharma in the West. Shoho Michael Newhall recalls his teacher’s life.
Kobun Chino Otokawa Roshi, who is often referred to simply as Kobun, was born to an esteemed temple family in the mountainous snow country of Japan.
Sunday, August 5, 2012 at 7:50PM 
Photo Courtesy of SFZCIntroduction by David Chadwick
The teacher was ready; the students came. Without a plan, Shunryu Suzuki arrived in San Francisco on May 23, 1959. The Zen garden of America had been fertilized by Nyogen Senzaki, Paul Reps, D.T. Suzuki, the Beats, Alan Watts, and the First Zen Institute of America in New York. Instant satori and the inscrutable orient were on people’s minds.
Sunday, August 5, 2012 at 7:37PM 
Illustration by Stacy InnerstAll he wanted was an egg. Instead Sam Guthrie got a close-up look at his compulsive need for order.
When I was seventeen, I would wake up at 4:30 in the morning and put on my ripped black jeans, drab olive T-shirt, blocky engineer boots, and black leather jacket bristling with punk rock safety pins. Then I’d stagger out of my cluttered studio apartment, get on my motorcycle, and ride through the dark, silent Minneapolis streets to the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, where I’d sit like a statue in meditation until the morning sun poured through the windows and made blazing yellow rectangles on the hardwood floors.
Fall 2012 Monday, July 30, 2012 at 5:11PM Wearing the Buddha’s teachings, says Geoffrey Shugen Arnold Sensei, is like wearing your skin. It’s not something you can take on and off.
Each morning we chant the Verse of the Kesa: “Vast is the robe of liberation, a formless field of benefaction. I wear the Tatagatha’s teachings, saving all sentient beings.” The “robe of liberation” is the o-kesa, the monastic’s robe, or the rakusu, received with the precepts and worn by both monastic and lay practitioners. That robe is the Tatagatha’s teachings, the Buddha’s teachings. We should all strive to wear the Buddha’s teachings.
Monday, July 30, 2012 at 5:10PM Q There are times on the path when I feel isolated from society and the people around me. Perversely, this always seems to be when I am meditating the most and really clearing my head. Superficialities and consumptive tendencies seem very exaggerated, and I find myself feeling alien in the world around me. I don’t think this is the proper response. What can be done to combat this?
Monday, July 30, 2012 at 5:08PM 
Photo by Sabina Schulz SteeleRalph Steele asks us to consider what a racially and culturally diverse American Buddhist community would be like.
I remember the days of being a retreat addict, chasing that sweet sensation of getting high. The dharma teachings often tasted dry, like dust in my mouth. However, hearing teachings was not my primary motive in attending Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan retreats for more than four decades. Doing ngondro practices, chanting 108 Hanuman chalisas, sittin g long hours in sesshin, practicing vipassana right through lunch, sitting and walking until 10 p.m. or even through the night—these were sweet times of being neck deep in the addiction of making love to, or getting drunk on, God.
Sunday, July 29, 2012 at 8:53PM 
Photo by Russ MorrisBuddhism In the Modern World
Edited by David L. McMahan
Routledge, 2012
$39.95; 352 pages
Reviewed by Annabella Pitkin
For years a private entertainment of many Buddhists I know has been to collect funny or irritating instances of collisions between the mass media and Buddhist images, words, and ideas. There is in fact a website partly devoted to this pursuit, theworsthorse.com, whose author, Rod Meade Sperry, has immortalized such collisions under the label “Dharma-Burgers.”
Saturday, July 28, 2012 at 9:08PM by Michael Sheehy
Norman Waddell translates the letters of the seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master and revitalizer of the Rinzai tradition, Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1786), in his new book, Beating the Cloth Drum (Shambhala 2012). The letters are Hakuin’s personal correspondence with monks and lay practitioners, as well as his dharma heirs. Described by one of his chief disciples as having the gaze of a tiger who moved like an ox, Hakuin was likely an intimidating character. However, what becomes evident through reading his letters is the extreme care and concern he expressed toward his community.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 11:08AM Wisdom Mind and the Birth of Samsara
I bow to my own Wisdom Mind
which is my best wisdom teacher,
the source of all visible and invisible qualities.
Sentient beings are always in time and place.
Commentary: Three Levels of Transmission
Recently I empowered two of my senior students—Rinso Ed Sattizahn and Kuzan Peter Schireson—as full-fledged independent Zen teachers, in a weeklong ceremony we call dharma transmission in the Soto Zen tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. The ceremony has many aspects, but two are paramount: lineage and precepts. As I studied these aspects of the ceremony, I found it useful to understand each of them as having three levels: outer, inner, and innermost.
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