Reflections in the Pond

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

The Bodhisattvas of the Earth and the Qualities of an Open Heart There is a deeply ingrained mythos in Nichiren Buddhism about the Bodhisattvas of the Earth from Chapter Fifteen of the Lotus Sutra. A vast number of bodhisattvas that sprang up from the earth promising to share the Lotus Sutra in the forthcoming dark years of the Latter Age of the Dharma. A time predicted to be chaotic, dissolute and where the Buddha's teachings of compassion and wisdom will be forgotten. This

A Dialogue on Psychedelics, the Jhanas, and the State Mistaken for the Goal A persistent fallacy of modernity is that every problem has a solution, that if we work at it hard enough and bring the right technology to bear, anything at all can be fixed. Need to lose weight? Take a pill. Carrying therapy-resistant trauma? Take a trip. Peptide cocktails of dubious origin are all the rage, never mind that not a single longitudinal study stands behind them. Longevity and death are

Who Are these People?!? There is a moment in the Lotus Sutra that would make a great movie scene. The Buddha has just asked who will keep his teaching alive in the hard years ahead. Before anyone can answer, the ground shakes, cracks open, and bodhisattvas pour out of the earth. Not a few. So many the sutra can only count them like grains of sand in a river. All of them golden, calm, and shining as they rise into the sky. Even Maitreya, the one who will become the next Buddha

What the Lotus Sutra assures us about Practice, Presence, and the Relief of Suffering People think mental wellness is a given, and it costs them more than they realize. Something you either have, or you don't. Some lucky people are born calm and resilient, and the rest of us are stuck with whatever wiring we got. My own wiring tends to get hot and fritzy with anxiety under stress. This way of thinking has created the widespread stigma about mental illness that causes so many

The Buddha offers an explanation what is consciousness

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

“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

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

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

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