Part One: Sometime in the mid 1990’s Dr. Victor Hori, a professor (now retired) at McGill University and a Zen Buddhist priest, paid a visit to Karuna Tendai Dharma Center (now Tendai Buddhist Institute). I was pleasantly surprised to meet him. He had heard about our...
Freedom and its relationship to saṃsāra, nirvāṇa, and duḥkha In an undergraduate course, maybe an anthropology, sociology, or political science class, I remember reading a journal article on a cross cultural study of what the word freedom meant to different cultures...
From The Black Death and the Trans-formation of the West, David Herlihy, writes of the, “death” as a liberating force, pushing European society forward, destroying it, but at the same time transforming it, spurring new growth and possibilities. There is a reason...
In December of 2017 we had to demolish the cow barn on the Tendai Buddhist Institute’s main property. The barn itself was over 250 years old and sat about 50 meters from the main house. Originally it was attached perpendicular to the horse barn which we took apart...
Recently I felt as though I had awoken from a year’s long nightmare. Unfortunately, the last five years were not a nightmare, not a dream, but a reality that cost over 400,000 lives, has decimated our economy, exacerbated our environmental challenges,...
