Big questions occupy our religious musings: ‘what extent does hard work help us find salvation or enlightenment? Is that impossible, out of our hands, or do our efforts make a difference?’ In Japanese Zen, this debate is between Jiriki and Tariki, or Self-power and Other-power. Jiriki Vs Tariki Jiriki (自力, one’s own strength) is the […]
Zen Buddhism, going meta and postmodernism
What’s the connection between the Buddha and Deadpool? It might seem an unlikely comparison, a wisecracking anti-hero and a spiritual icon. The answer is linked to the most amusing thing I learned from my battle with anxiety and what I learned from Zen: its responses are seemingly counter-intuitive, even paradoxical. You can’t understand Buddhism by grasping for […]
Buddhist Causality: Interdependent Co-arising
One of the most challenging ideas of Buddhism is their understanding of causality. It’s not based upon the western idea of because it doesn’t trace its history back to ancient Greece and the ideas of Aristotle and Plato. The Pratityasamutpada of Buddhist teachings asserts neither direct Newtonian-like causality nor a single causality. But a multiplicity […]
Buddhism is a medicine for the mind
Unlike many other religions, Buddhism doesn’t give you the answers, the purpose, the ultimate truth to existence. They recognise that such answers either don’t exist or if they do, we’re unable to find it. It tells us way a good way to live, not why we live. Buddhism is more focused on life, that is […]
Zen Buddhism: philosophy of Bewilderment
In my quest to understand Zen I thought like many people that there was a truth you had to understand or an answer to grasp. I learned just how wrong I was and in doing so learned what Zen and Buddhism offers us. Zen does it’s thing by undermining peoples expectations, destroying their sense of […]
The Emptiness of Buddhism itself
One of the strangest things about Buddhism is the idea of Emptiness or Sunyata. The idea that there’s no inherent existence in any thing or phenomena. All events and objects are a nexus of different influences coming together, in a constant state of transformation. When I wanted to try and understand Buddhism I tried, as […]