Reflections in the Pond

Sentience is a core survival function. Sentience, like consciousness, is not a person, place or thing, it is an activity, a function, a response. It is what allows anything to exist at all in an impermanent universe. Impermanence is not the problem sentience must overcome. It is the condition that calls sentience into existence.

Consciousness is an emergent property of dependent origination. Consciousness does not reside in matter, does not float above it, does not constitute it, and is not an illusion generated by it. It is not a substance. It is not a property of a substance. It is an event, and like all events, it arises, performs its function, and ceases.

I was utterly captivated watching Sister Noella, a Benedictine nun, make cheese in episode four, “Earth,” of Michael Pollan’s documentary “Cooked.” I felt a profound resonance with how she described her faith’s engagement with the world and celebration of creation in all the small daily details of being present. How work becomes a sublime act of celebrating God’s creative force. It just felt right and true to me, and not dissimilar to my own view of faith and practice express

Panjiao, Fowler, and Why Nichiren's Critique Was Never Just Sectarian There is a passage in the Nirvana Sutra that compares the progression of the Buddha's teaching to the processing of milk. Milk becomes cream. Cream becomes curdled milk. Curdled milk becomes butter. Butter becomes ghee. Each stage is real. Each stage is nourishing. And each stage, consumed as the final product, falls short of what the process was always moving toward. Tiantai patriarch Zhiyi used this image

A declaration on Chapters 16 and 20 of the Lotus Sutra Every morning and evening, practitioners of Nichiren Buddhism offer the Jiga-ge, the verse section of Chapter 16 of the Lotus Sutra, which starts with the two characters: Ji-ga. I myself. The first words out of the mouth are a first-person declaration. And everything that follows, the immeasurable kalpas since the attainment of Buddhahood, the constant abiding in this world, the pure land that is not destroyed even when c

Isolation, the Algorithm, and the Paranoid American Mind People subjected to prolonged sensory deprivation inevitably hallucinate and grow delusional. Our brains crave stimulation and once we remove the richness of the external world, the neurons keep firing, leading us into an alternative universe of buzzing confusion, perceptual warps, weird what-ifs, and, ultimately, paranoia. — Jonathan Kellerman, Jigsaw Kellerman wrote that passage about a single fictional woman who had

“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