Posts under ‘Uncategorized’

At the Suvannabhumi airport in Bangkok, waiting to board the first of my flights back to the West. This flight may mark the end of my residence in Suvannabhumi in general, as I begin to settle in my new North Hollywood environment. Thailand has been a great place, in retrospect, but I’m looking [...]

In Chom Tong. So much has changed here in ten years… who would have thought I’d be hacking into the monastery’s wireless Internet router in an air-conditioned five-story building where there used to be only a rice field behind our huts over which we would watch the sunrise in between meditation rounds? [...]

Cynicism sucks, really… I mean, if you’re always expecting the worst, you can’t ever really be happy, even when things turn out for the best. On the other hand, optimism doesn’t really accomplish anything useful either, since the optimist has little or no reason to effect real change in their life and tends to [...]

Buddhism is certainly the hardest pill to swallow. Everything about us screams out against the middle way, trying always to find some way to make things permanent, satisfying or controllable. We push and pull, trying to make things go our way, never realizing that we are but dust in the wind, tossed about [...]

Mike Knight: Then we go to the backup plan…
K.I.T.T.: The backup plan, the plan created because of Murphy’s Law … whatever can go wrong, will go wrong … but isn’t it true that there are an infinite number of ways a plan can go wrong?
Mke Knight: That’s why backup plans suck.
– from Knight Rider

Today we [...]

A perennial favourite, this question.
Last year, I said I wasn’t going to stay at Wat Thai, any Wat Thai, and now here I am in Thailand about to go to a Wat Thai board meeting to talk about starting a meditation department at Wat Thai. See, they bought a piece of property near Wat [...]

Heard there was some sort of athletic contest going on back in Canada recently. Don’t really understand what the fuss was all about, but here’s my last post before the eight-day gauntlet trip to Tai Pei, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Chom Tong. Hoping for some golden news to bring back. I get [...]

‘Brethren, if outsiders should speak against me, or against my teaching, or against my disciples, you should not on that account either bear malice, or suffer heart-burning, or feel ill-will. If you, on that account, should be angry and hurt, that would stand in the way of your own self-conquest. If, when others speak against [...]

Just a note that I’ll be in Thailand from March 2nd to 10th. Almost twenty-two hours in transit, eight days to attend a board meeting, visit students in Bangkok, fly to Chiang Mai to see my teacher, and recover from jet lag just in time to fly back. From Chiang Mai to LA [...]

I was recently asked whether the word Ajaan can be used for people who are not ordained, and rather than limit the answer to one person, I thought I would share it with all of you who might be interested in the subject.
The word Ajaan, or actually “Aajaan” (อาจารย์) as the Thais pronounce it, comes [...]