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

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

Vignettes Along the Silk Road A Work of Fiction For all who carried ideas in their saddlebags alongside the silk and the cinnamon. “The camel does not know what doctrine it carries, but the merchant does, and the monk beside him.” — Attributed to no one; remembered by everyone I. The Gymnosophist’s Question Taxila, 326 BCE The Greek soldiers called them gymnosophistai—the naked wise men—because they could not fathom why anyone would stand unclothed in the sun for hours on end

An Unexpected Doorway This is perhaps not the most common starting point for a dharma reflection, but contemplative life has taught me that insight arrives through unexpected doorways. A chance observation, a phrase overheard, the peculiar shape of light through winter branches—the mind trained in meditation learns to attend to these moments when two seemingly unrelated domains suddenly reveal themselves as expressions of the same underlying pattern. What emerged from this pa

How later Buddhist innovations inverted an earlier doctrinal consensus—and why Nichiren was right to object One of the most consequential doctrinal disputes in East Asian Buddhism concerns a seemingly simple question: What is the relationship between Śākyamuni Buddha—the historical teacher who walked the dusty roads of ancient India—and Vairocana (or Mahāvairocana), the cosmic “Great Illuminator” who appears in later Mahāyāna texts? For the Shingon tradition founded by Kūkai

Nichiren and the Kamakura Pathmakers How five reformers carved new paths through petrified forests—and why one of them was more traditional than we thought ——— When the Dharma declines, new paths must open—not by denying the past, but by reawakening its living flame. ——— The Crucible In the crucible of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Japan, the Buddhist landscape was undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Political chaos, social upheaval, and a widespread belief that the age of

Tolkien, Lewis, and the Dharmakaya There is a moment familiar to anyone who has ever made something—a poem, a melody, a garden, a meal prepared with unexpected grace—when the work seems to arrive rather than be constructed. The hands move, the words come, but something else is doing the work. We become, in those moments, less like engineers and more like scribes. Two of the twentieth century's most beloved writers gave voice to this experience with striking clarity. J.R.R. To

Feminine Emptiness at the Heart of the Sacred Title When we chant Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, we rarely pause to consider what lies hidden in the brushstrokes. But Chinese characters are not arbitrary signs. They carry histories, and those histories sometimes preserve truths the conscious mind has forgotten. Consider 妙 ( myo )—the "wondrous" or "subtle" that names the Dharma we invoke. The character is composed of 女 ( onna , "woman") combined with 少 ( sho , "young" or "small"). But

Language, Meaning, and the Odaimoku A student recently asked me a deceptively simple question: "If language is just metaphor—symbols pointing at reality rather than reality itself—then isn't Namu Myoho Renge Kyo just another metaphor? How can we say the Odaimoku is ultimate reality rather than merely representing it?" The question cuts to the heart of what we're doing when we chant. And the answer, I've come to believe, lies in one of Tiantai Buddhism's most subtle teaching

Visualizing Dependent Origination Through the Apple The Cosmos in a Seed: Potential That Must Be Cultivated Consider the image of the apple cut in half. At first glance, it is a mundane object, the kind we hold in our hands without a second thought. But look closer at the core. Resting where the seeds should be are two embryonic figures, their faces serene, bearing the countenance of the Buddha. This image is a radical visualization of both Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamu

A Chronological Journey through the Asian Mind A Speculative Essay on the Convergence of Chinese and Indian Thought It may be fun to speculate and imagine a meeting of the three giants of Eastern philosophy—Confucius, the Buddha, and Lao-Tzu—as contemporaries, perhaps meeting on a dusty road in ancient China or gathered around the famous “vinegar tasters” jar. There is romance in imagining these sages exchanging wisdom and shaping world consciousness together. While this meet

The Great Synthesizer's Other Legacy Zhiyi (538–597 CE) is remembered as the systematizer of Tiantai Buddhism—the monk who organized the entire Buddhist canon into a coherent whole and developed the meditation methods that would shape East Asian contemplative practice for fifteen centuries. But in Chinese medical circles, he's remembered for something else entirely: a breathing practice that mapped Buddhist pathology onto the body's organs with remarkable precision. My wife,

Taking Tendai Seriously: How Nichiren Practiced What Zhiyi Preached I recently found myself listening to a Tendai morning service, followed by a 45-minute lecture on Nichiren by a Tendai teacher. I was struck by several things. First, their use of "Om Ah Hum" - quite resonant and beautiful, yet surprising since it has no connection whatsoever with the Lotus Sutra. Second, and more troubling, were the significant misunderstandings about Nichiren and the mistakes made throughou