Jushoku’s Meanderings – March 2024
The Alabama ruling dealt with embryos being stored in an In Vitro Fertility clinic in Alabama. This case is a direct result of the upturning of the Roe vs Wade decision by the Supreme Court last year. It deals with many of the same issues that are involved in abortion...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – February 2024
Smṛtyupasthāna -The Discourse on the Foundations of Mindfulness - is often referred to as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. The term Smṛty means to remember the dharmas, which allows one to see the true nature of phenomena or reality. The foundation of mindfulness...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – January 2024
Part 1: Year of the Dragon Each Of the twelve animals in the Chinese astrological cycle the dragon is the only mythological beast. This creature is featured both as a symbol of state power and one of the primordial animals that is responsible for the creation of the...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – December 2023
Where’s Shumon and Monshin? Last month Shumon and I spent the Thanksgiving holiday in Honolulu attending the 50th anniversary celebration of the Tendai-shu Hawai’i Betsuin (Tendai Mission of Hawai’i), the installation of Rev. Tanaka Shojun as the new abbot, and...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – November 2023
By way of a disclaimer, I am a Buddhist-Jewish American. I support the origins and continuity of Israel, but do not support the ways Israel has become an oppressor of the non-Jews within and outside its borders. October 7th – 25 days ago – Hamas. an Islamist militant...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – October 2023
Recently I officiated a wedding ceremony in Vermont, outside, on a hilltop with a mountain vista behind the wedding party. It was underneath a chuppah (a canopy under which a Jewish couple stand during their wedding ceremony). A lovely setting in early autumn. As with...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – September 2023
Part 1: Conclusion of Gyo and Consequences The recent gyo, which concluded on August 13th, was the first after a hiatus of three years due to the COVID pandemic. It was unlike any we have hosted before primarily due to many of the leadership and participants...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – August 2023
Part 1 - Hozro: To be in harmony with one’s environment. In recent years we have been living with the consequence of rapid climate change around the world. The last few months have been especially noteworthy in the northeast U.S. and Canada. Up until recently...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – July 2023
It’s summertime. Those of us living in the Northeast of North America are treated to the changing of the seasons. Each season has its advantages and disadvantages. Not only the temperature differentials but the smells of the air, the quality of the wind on one’s skin,...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – June 2023
We perceive human immigration primarily as a political issue today. It has been a social phenomenon as long as there have been people. Immigration has been a feature of hominid life from long before Homo sapien sapiens. Homo erectus immigrated out of Africa to Eurasia...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – May 2023
In discussing behavior in the hondo during a dharma talk recently I mentioned that the genkan (entranceway between the outside to the inner, the sanctuary, is a liminal space. A space between the sacred and the mundane or profane. Stepping across the sill at the door...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – April 2023
‘Symbols; institutional, religious, commercial, are all around us. We respond to them based upon our experiences with the entity that the symbol represents, as well as the visual message conveyed by the graphics and an understood meaning. When an image which has a...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – March 2023
‘Mid-February I had the opportunity to participate in the ‘Hizmet International Conference: Responses to Contemporary Challenges’ held in Long Beach, California. What is Hizmet, what was the conference about and what is Hizmet’s relationship to Tendai Buddhist...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – February 2023
‘May you live in interesting times’, is a Chinese curse that might describe the world we live in. More so for people who are plugged into the many streams of information, disinformation and misinformation that abound in our world. How I long for what the Japanese...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – January 2023
In the morning before breakfast Shumon and I conduct a daily gongyo. Before starting the service we sit in front of the Butsudan (family Buddhist altar), that is located to the left of the shumidan (the front altar with the main Buddha image) and offer our prayers. It...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – December 2022
The eighth of December is the observance of Śakyamuni Buddha’s enlightenment, Shaka-Jōdō-e in Tendai. An important aspect of that occasion is the teaching of the Middle Way (Madyamā-pratipad), a path of moderation of away from extremes. Siddhārtha Gautama was a...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – November 2022
On the 22nd of this month there will be an Interfaith Thanksgiving Service at Saint James Roman Catholic Church in Chatham, NY. The local sangha is encouraged to attend. As an interfaith service this is very important because it brings together faith communities from...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – October 2022
A person recently asked me exactly what merit means in a Buddhist context. I had to stop and think about how to answer. From an Asian perspective it is more or less obvious and doesn’t need much explanation. So, it has been with not a little misgiving that we have...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – September 2022
Walking into the hondo (the main building) is a sensory and serene experience. Taking off one’s shoes in the genkan (entryway) and walking up the few steps, stepping over the sill into the sanctuary, one travels from the realm of the mundane to the realm of the sacred...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – August 2022
Tendai Buddhist Institute is in a beautiful rural area nestled in the Berkshire foothills. The bird feeders are always packed with goldfinches, barn finches, blue jays, red winged blackbirds, mourning doves, red breasted grossbeaks, and many more, while the barn...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – July 2022
There are a handful of science and social science research papers that have had a profound effect on the way I see the world. A few will illustrate the point; a group of research articles on the effect of different spectra (colors) of light on human behavior by John...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – June 2022
This month the Tendai-shu New York Betsuin, Tendai Buddhist Institute, will host a Public Tokudo (Ordination) Ceremony. What makes this different from the Betsuin tokudo ceremonies you may have witnessed, why is this important and why is ordination, as a concept,...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – May 2022
First – Thank you everyone who attended and participated in the Spring cleanup day on April 30th. We got a lot done, spruced up the grounds, and enjoyed a sangha activity. There will be another clean-up day on June 18th, the weekend before the Public Tokudo ceremony...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – April 2022
The March one-day O-Higan retreat was a reset in several ways. It was the first retreat in over two years. It addressed resilience in a Buddhist context. Resilience is the ability to recover or adjust easily to misfortune or change. To survive the last few years we...
Koshin’s Meanderings – March 2022
By the end of this month, the Spring Equinox will be upon us, although it does not currently feel like it outside in Upstate New York. The equinox is when there is equal light and dark to our day and is meant to be a representation of balance between extremes. The...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – February 2022
We will start this Jushoku’s Meanderings with a remembrance of Thích Nhất Hạnh, who died on January 22nd. He was a Vietnamese monk, prolific author, poet, translator and influential contributor to Buddhism outside Asia. He said of his own imminent death, “I am a...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – January 2022
End of Year Thoughts - Tora Doshi - Year of the Tiger – is upon us. In short, the tiger represents energy, strength, protection, altruism, leadership, purposefulness, respect, revolutionary ideas, but also vulnerability, sensitivity, selfishness, overestimation, and...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – December 2021
The Background: Over the last 20+ months Tendai Buddhist Institute has adapted to the pandemic identified as COVID-19. Never in the history of human infectious disease has a virus been studied more intensely within such a short period of time. The mobilization was a...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – November 2021
Each day we are all confronted by choices about which we must make decisions. The choices may be about practical matters, or they may be ethical, moral, even existential. We like to think that the decisions we make are rational. More often than not our decisions are...
Jushoku’s Meanderings – October 2021
There is no entry this month done by Abbot Monshin Naamon. Instead, you can read the entry by Koshin Bower for this month here