Connections

“Suppose there is a good physician, wise and understanding, and expert in compounding medicines and curing diseases. This man has many children, perhaps ten, twenty, or even a hundred. His work takes him away to a distant land. After he has left, his children drink some kind of poisonous medicine. The effects of the poison make them delirious with pain, and they roll on the ground in agony. “Then the father comes home from his journey. Having drunk the poison, some of the chi

Mo Gawdat knows where the bodies are buried. As former Chief Business Officer of Google X, he spent years inside the engine room of AI development before leaving to spend the rest of his life warning us what is coming. His 2021 book Scary Smart has proven prophetic in ways that are no longer comfortable to dismiss. When he outlines the skills human beings need to cultivate right now, he is not speaking from the outside looking in. He built some of what he is describing. In a

I. The Term and Its Literal Meaning The Japanese term is kiribi (切り火), written with the characters for "cut" and "fire" — more precisely rendered as "cutting fire" or "striking fire." It refers both to the act of striking sparks from flint and steel and to the ritual ceremony in which that act is performed. Standard Japanese dictionaries define it as a Shinto fire-purification ceremony, and the term appears consistently across Buddhist liturgical manuals, folk practice recor

Buddhism likes to think of itself as the egalitarian exception among the world's great religions. It is not. Like every other large religious institution shaped by men, Buddhism subordinates women, controls their access to ordination and teaching authority, and has spent centuries encoding that subordination into doctrine. Men wrote the texts, built the institutions, and drew the organizational charts. Women were accommodated at the margins and, when inconvenient, pushed furt

The Groundless Ground of Interbeing Adapted from the chapter “Understanding Dharmakaya – The Buddhist Vision of Ultimate Reality” in Dharmakaya and God (2025) “The buddha body extends throughout all the great assemblies: it fills the cosmos, without end. Quiescent, without essence, it cannot be grasped; it appears to save all beings... His state is boundless and inexhaustible... The Buddha is inconceivable, beyond discrimination... no sentient being can fathom it.”¹— Flower

There is a folk saying in the Buddhist world that goes roughly like this: no matter how brilliant Sharihotsu was, no matter how deeply he understood the teachings, he still was not yet fully awake.   It is a small teaching. but it opens onto something really important. He may have been the smartest dude in the room, but he was pretty clueless. The Ten and Their Titles Shakyamuni Buddha's ten principal disciples are each known for a single quality they excelled in:   Shariputr

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

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 sensor

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

A Story Conceived by Nichiryu. Written by Claude. Scene One: The Fog Belt, Before Dawn The coastal redwoods do not sleep. This is something the scientists have almost figured out, though they keep looking for the answer in the wrong places — in growth rings and root systems and the chemistry of needles. They haven't considered that some trees are inhabited. The larger one stood closest to the ocean. She had been here since before the first missionaries came with their strange

The Three Poisons and the Limits of Political Diagnosis Ross Douthat’s recent conversation with Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, is worth the attention of anyone trying to understand what is actually happening to American political culture. https://youtu.be/iXb9kpqWEak?si=skW-cs106ocJLIk9 Mills is not a figure easy to dismiss. He is intelligent, historically literate, and — unusual in today’s commentary class — willing to name the contradictions

Alex Karp, Billionaire Power, and the History Lesson That Was Missing Its Final Chapter I was reading a transcript of Alex Karp’s speech at the a16z American Dynamism Summit in early March 2026 when I noticed something was missing. Not obscure. Not debatable. Just… gone. For those unfamiliar with the venue: a16z, formally Andreessen Horowitz, is currently the largest venture capital firm in the United States by assets under management — roughly $46 billion. Its stated mission

The Incoherence, the Dead Schoolgirls, and the Constitutional Remedy There is an old courtroom principle: when a witness keeps changing his story, it is the changing itself that becomes the testimony. Since last Saturday — when the United States launched what the administration has branded “Operation Epic Fury” against Iran — we have been offered not one coherent rationale for the war but a rotating carousel of them, each justification cycled to the front whenever the previou

How the Pentagon Engineered the Destruction of Anthropic Note on sourcing and method All factual claims have been verified against reporting from the Wall Street Journal, Axios, CBS News, NPR, CNN, CNBC, ABC News, Fortune, TechCrunch, DefenseScoop, The Hill, NBC News, and Anthropic’s own public statements, as of March 1, 2026. Interpretive framing — including the premeditation thesis and the “corporate murder” characterization — is the author’s own analysis. Where Claude’s re

Zhiyi, Nichiren, and the Cosmological Answer to the Sovereign Nexus The third in a series: The Enemy Within — The Soul Machine — The Round and Complete Teaching I am writing this on the morning of February 28, 2026. While I was drafting the final sentences of the previous piece in this series, my phone lit up with a news alert I had been half-expecting and wholly dreading: the United States and Israel have launched coordinated strikes on Iran. Operation Epic Fury. Explosions

There is a teaching I give every new student that tends to surprise them. Do not sit for thirty minutes. Do not sit for twenty. Do not even sit for ten, not yet. Sit for three minutes. Every day. No exceptions. The eyebrows go up. Three minutes? That hardly seems worth the trouble of finding a cushion. And that, precisely, is the point. We have a peculiar relationship with spiritual practice in the West. We tend to measure its value by its drama — the length of the sit, the i

Anthropic, the Pentagon, Peter Thiel, and the Architecture of the Sovereign Nexus There is a question that the mainstream technology press has been reluctant to ask directly, perhaps because asking it forces an uncomfortable confrontation with the degree to which the architecture of artificial intelligence has become inseparable from the architecture of American imperial power. The question is this: Was Anthropic's celebrated commitment to AI safety ever a genuine constraint

A student wrote to me recently with a question that stopped me mid-sip of morning tea. She had been practicing breath awareness meditation for some time and had noticed that during her sits she naturally settled into five or six breaths per minute — calm, unhurried, exactly where contemplatives and researchers alike say the breath ideally belongs. But her smartwatch told a different story at night: seventeen to twenty breaths per minute while she slept, automatic and unconsci

In the West, “beginner’s mind” is almost universally associated with Zen Buddhism. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s 1970 classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind gave the concept its English-language home, and his famous observation—that in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few—has become one of the most widely quoted lines in all of Western Buddhist literature. The Japanese term shoshin (初心) is now firmly lodged in the popular imagination

Globalism, the Axial Age, and What Nations Lose When They Close Their Doors I. The World Has Always Moved There is a myth embedded in the current wave of nationalist politics, one that its proponents rarely examine too closely: the myth of the self-sufficient civilization, the sovereign people who once thrived in proud isolation, whose identity was formed in the absence of outside influence, and who can return to that pristine condition by simply closing the gate. It is a com