Posts Tagged ‘news’

Digital Pali Reader Firefox Extension

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 [...]

Leaving the LA Airport Again

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.

Leaving Suvannabhumi

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 [...]

The Back Nine

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? [...]

The Green Light

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 [...]

Swallowing the Middle Way Pill

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 [...]

The Backup Plan

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 [...]

Why Am I Here?

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 [...]

Monkathon

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 [...]

Around the World In Eight Days

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 [...]