An outline of the step-by-step path to purification outlined in the Tipitaka and expanded upon in the treatise called the Visuddhimagga, especially as it pertains to meditation practice.

Me: “Hi, how are you today?”
Customer: “I need to buy this bird.”
Me: “Ok, have you ever had a bird before?”
Customer: “I’ve had THIS bird before! I need to have this bird! My bird died last week and this bird tells me that he is my bird reincarnated! I need to have this bird.”
Me: “The bird [...]

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
–Carl Jung
Human beings are a funny lot. We pride ourselves on our ability to parse stimuli rationally and yet we rarely, if ever, accomplish the task. Take the Internet, for instance. As fascinating as [...]

Some of you may already know I’ve wasted put a great amount of time into creating the Digital Pali Reader as a tool to make reading the Pali texts easier for those who already have basic grammar skills. Well, a couple of months ago, while touring Northern Thailand together, one of my students gave [...]

Touched down in LA, made my way back to the monastery only to have to turn around and head back to save a visiting nun from deportation. All is well, time to rest. Tomorrow is the first day of my planned stayputting in Los Angeles. Wish me luck.

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 [...]