Reflections in the Pond

Zhiyi, the sixth-century founder of the Tiantai school, taught that every single thing can be seen in three ways at once, which he called the Threefold Truth. Everything is empty, meaning nothing has a fixed nature of its own. Everything is provisional, meaning it really does show up and function in our lives. And everything is the middle, meaning it’s both of those at once, completely, without contradiction.

The middle way doesn’t make us choose between them. It holds both at once, in the same moment of mind. So when the sutra ranks the first hearer above the fiftieth, it’s telling us something about ourselves. While we may live twenty-five centuries after the historical Buddha, we can share the same moment of awakening with him.

I find retreats overrated, and sometimes misleading. So many times I’ve heard people say, “I felt so good during the retreat and just after. Now, a few weeks later, most of those good feelings are gone and my practice feels rudderless.” They wonder what went wrong. Many of us can relate.

Sooner or later, every one of us chants for something and doesn’t get it. The job goes to someone else. The marriage ends anyway. The scan comes back bad. We chanted hard. We chanted with our whole heart. And it didn’t happen. Then a little voice shows up in our head and asks the cruelest question: What did I do wrong? Am I broken?

Is any religion true and reliable? It’s a question most of us carry quietly, and it gets louder the longer we practice. Every tradition rests on words, and every tradition tells us those words came from somewhere higher than the people who wrote them down. So when we learn that we can never be certain of the words, a harder question follows: what remains for us?

I recently published an article in Lion’s Roar called “The Light That Is Always Here,” where I compared our minds to an oil lamp. While the flame never goes out, soot accumulates on the glass from our forgetful actions of daily life, obscuring the light. Our practice is how we clean it.

The conversation about meditation has changed over the past decade. The research and reporting on adverse effects show that the news that practice can go wrong is no longer news.

Understanding does come. It just isn’t required at the beginning. Say the words sour plum and our mouths water before we taste anything. Pull a wet stone out of a river and we can strike fire from it, and nothing about that stone looked like fire. Bring a lamp into a room that has been dark a thousand years and the room lights up, and the thousand years count for nothing. Understanding comes through experience. We practice our way into understanding.

I have taught the doctrine of no-self for decades. And I have watched, every time the argument succeeds, the forbidden word come back into the room — not smuggled in by the ignorant, but arriving under its own power, in people who understand the teaching perfectly and are suffering anyway. A need for something to intervene. A need for salvation.

I always laugh a little inside when I hear a dharma teacher or meditation teacher say, “don’t think about your breath, just let it come naturally.” All right — and how exactly does one not think about the breath? It is like being told not to think about a pink elephant. Super unhelpful.

Conversation about AI inevitably splits into one of two poles. It is either a panacea that solves what politics and scarcity never seem able to, or it is the apocalypse and we're doomed to extinction. Try and find some rational thinking and you'll be disappointed as the attention economy media machine is at best an echo chamber or, most likely, a mechanism of propaganda, social engineering and economic extraction driving our compulsion loops.

If you are a Nichiren Buddhist, I am sorry to be the one to tell you. He got the Three Ages of the Law wrong. Not slightly, and not in the details. He did not even live in the Latter Age.

2500 years ago, Prince Siddhartha had his own what-the-actual-fuck moment. Riding outside his palace walls for the first time, he saw an old man, a sick man, a corpse. He turned to his charioteer with the only question that mattered: is this going to happen to me too? The answer was yes. More on that in a bit. First, a confession: we're all a little like him. We are, most of us, natural egocentrists. We experience our own moment as the moment, our own crisis as unprecedented.

What we pay attention to is incredibly important. And this is especially critical in religion and spiritual matters, whose concern is life and death itself. Said more plainly, what is the meaning of life?

It goes like this. Whatever time you give to practice on a given day, whether that is chanting, sitting in silence, reciting, or reading, whatever you choose to include, let more than half of it be chanting the Daimoku. That is the whole rule. Fifty-one percent. Keep the Daimoku as the majority, and let everything else vary as the day allows.

He wrote back that the wall was the whole of the problem, and that the wall was not real, and that chanting was how a man discovers it was never real. He wrote that when I chanted Namu Myoho Renge Kyo in true faith, I was not petitioning a Buddha across a distance. The daimoku, he wrote, is not our voice calling out to the Eternal Buddha. It is the Eternal Buddha's own voice, sounding as ours. When I chanted, it was the Buddha of the remotest past pronouncing his own name thr

It is an odd question to ask of a text that tells you, in its own opening lines, exactly where and when it was written. A man called Nichiren was beheaded at midnight on the twelfth of the ninth month of last year. The writer of this article is the soul of the man. His soul came to this Province of Sado and wrote this in the snow of the second month of this year. We know where he was. We know the snow was falling. The question is not really about geography. It is about condit

The Hidden Teaching in the First Word We Chant Every recitation of the Daimoku we offer begins with a word that is not a word. Namu. We say it ten thousand times and rarely stop to ask what it carries, because its work is felt before it is understood. It is the inhale before the Dharma, the bow before the gate. But the two characters that spell it hold something the tradition has spent centuries telling us to ignore, and I want to spend this reflection listening to what they

What the Juzu Has Been Trying to Tell Us Pick up a Nichiren juzu and you are holding a symbolic universe. The 108 beads of the main loop represent the 108 defilements — the full catalog of what clouds the mind. The two large parent beads represent Shakyamuni and Taho Buddha, the dyad of the Ceremony in the Air. The tassels represent the head, arms, and legs — ourselves, present in the practice. This is the traditional account, and most of it holds up. Nichiren Buddhism emerge

What Lies Beneath the Three Poisons The Great Physician The Buddha's first teaching, delivered at the Deer Park at Sarnath, was the Four Noble Truths. Twenty-five centuries later, it has been popularized into a meme: "Life is suffering." Like most popularizations, it's close enough to sound true and just wrong enough to do damage. The First Noble Truth does not say that life is suffering. It says that there is suffering in life. The Pali word is dukkha. Suffering exists, it i