Déshān Xuānjiàn I vaguely remember a story—I’m not sure if it’s true or a joke, or if I am even remembering it correctly—that someone once asked Sigmund Freud about a patient who successfully completed psychoanalysis but still behaved like a jerk. How did Freud account for this? Freud allegedly quipped the patient was a “well-analyzed jerk.” Freud’s quip points to the possibility of  complex relationship between psychological health and being a decent human being. The two, according to psychoanalysis, are not necessarily the same. But one can imagine other psychotherapeutic approache ..read more

  There are three problems with how Buddhist enlightenment is traditionally understood. The first is enlightenment’s non-naturalistic aspects, for example, the idea of enlightenment as an end to rebirth. The idea of rebirth is inconsistent with the way most modern Westerners understand how the world works. The second is Enlightenment’s absolutism: the idea that enlightenment is a complete and permanent end to greed, hatred, delusion, and attachment, beyond which there is nothing more to accomplish. I don’t think such a state is humanly possible and I’ve never met anyone—be they monk, lam ..read more

  I’ve experienced a gradual set of shifts in the way I understand Buddhist practice over the years. There was a time when the Buddhist teachings on non-self, interdependence, awareness, impermanence, and dukkha provided the totality of the frame within which I understood the aims of Buddhist practice. These teachings remain important to me, but I now understand them within a larger non-Buddhist framework. At first that larger frame was primarily neo-Aristotelian: Buddhist practice is a means for promoting virtue, wisdom, and flourishing. By flourishing, I mean a life that is happy, psych ..read more

ConfuciusJohn Dewey               Since 2017, I’ve scrupulously avoided posting political content on this site because The Existential Buddhist is focused on the Dharma and there’s no shortage of political commentary to be found elsewhere. Also I am not an economist nor political scientist, and my opinions on these matters deserve no more attention than anybody else’s. That being said—I’ve spent the past two years gaining a better understanding of Chinese cultural-philosophical influences on the development of Zen, and this has led me to learning how to read ..read more

My first retreat wasn’t a Zen sesshin, but an Insight Meditation Retreat led by the late Ruth Denison.  As it was my first retreat, I was grateful Ruth gave us copious meditation instructions.  In fact, she never stopped talking during our allegedly silent meditation retreat—silent for us, not for her—every meditation was at least somewhat guided—”now do this, now do that.”  There was never a moment during the 10-day retreat where I had to question what I should be doing. Zen instruction is a different kettle of fish. Dòngshān Liángjiè, the ninth century Tang Dynasty Chan M ..read more

It’s become commonplace to talk carelessly about two American Buddhisms (a phrase attributed to famed Buddhologist Charles Prebish), one often described as “convert” or “white” Buddhism, and the other as “heritage,” “birthright,” “immigrant” or “Asian American” Buddhism. According to this simplistic dichotomy, “convert” Buddhists are mostly older, well-off, European-descent Buddhists who grew up in non-Buddhist households. “Heritage” Buddhists, on the other hand, are Asian Americans raised within Buddhist households. According to this dichotomy, convert Buddhists practice meditation and study ..read more

About seven years ago, my wife and I visited the Kit Carson Home and Museum in Taos, New Mexico. We hadn’t gone to Taos intending to visit the museum.  We had gone there to see the famed Taos Pueblo, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site— but when we saw the museum in town, we thought we would drop by. At that point, Kit Carson was just a name to me like Bat Masterson, Davy Crocket, Billy the Kid, and Wyatt Earp—one of the legends of the wild west one might read about in a dime novels or see in old black-and-white Saturday matinee movies. His story, however, is a bit more complicated. Whi ..read more

William James may have been the first psychologist to take an interest in Buddhism, but he certainly was not the last. In Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), psychotherapist and religious studies scholar Ira Helderman explores the history and current status of the ongoing relationship between the American psychotherapeutic community and Buddhist traditions—at least the Buddhist traditions as transmitted by Asian modernizers and as practiced within predominantly European-descent Buddhist “convert ..read more

In China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen (Shambhala, 2020), translator/poet David Hinton makes two closely related arguments. The first, his strongest argument, is that English translations of Chán texts obscure, distort, and erase Chán’s significant debt to Daoist thought. The second, and somewhat weaker argument, is that Chán is an offshoot of Daoism that incorporated and subsequently remade Buddhist meditation in its own image, rather than being an authentic descendent of Buddhism in its own right. There can be no doubt that as Buddhism established itself in East Asia it underwent a ..read more

Every Zen practitioner ought to read Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye), but it’s not an easy read, and most readers will find it alternately inspiring and frustrating.  I’ve previously written about the difficulty of understanding Dōgen here and here. He is difficult to read for a multiplicity of reasons: 1) translating medieval Japanese into English is never a straightforward affair; 2) many of Dōgen’s implicit assumptions about time, space, mind, and nature are different from most 20th Century readers’ basic assumptions; 3) Dōgen quotes extensively from sūtras, kōans ..read more