The Eightfold Path mapped to Sandai Hiho（三大秘法） The Path Doesn't Disappear — It Concentrates The Eightfold Path is sometimes taught as a ladder: climb the rungs, arrive somewhere. But in the Nichiren synthesis, something more interesting happens. The ladder folds. The classical Threefold Training — ethical conduct (sila), meditation (samadhi), and wisdom (prajna) — organizes the Eight Factors into three functional domains. Nothing new so far. What Nichiren recognized, drawing from Tiantai's...

Huxley's Prophecy, the Attention Economy, and the Only Technology That Actually Works I. The Valve and Its Discoverer Aldous Huxley didn’t believe that the brain generates consciousness but constructs a limited and constrained framework of reality based on sensory input filtered through a "reducing valve" — a filter that screens out most of reality in order to deliver the narrow trickle of perception sufficient for biological survival. Loosen the valve, and the flow of sensory data increases....

Western Consciousness Studies as Upaya   Nichiryu Mark HerrickMarch 18, 2026 This essay was inspired by reading Michael Pollan’s A World Appears (Penguin Press, 2026). The argument it develops is my own, but it would not have been attempted without that book. I. Mind at Large, and What Stands Between In May of 1953, Aldous Huxley swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline sulfate in his Los Angeles home and sat down to watch what happened. He was fifty-eight years old, had been nearly blind...