Surviving Family Holiday Dinners
At the site Well&GoodNYC there's an article called "It's just turkey: A Buddhist primer for surviving the holidays." I'm sorry I didn't find this until late last night, after most Thanksgiving dinners were consumed. But, we've still got Christmas to survive enjoy, right? The advice comes from Carl Sheusi, a NYC holistic coach and yoga teacher who incorporates Zen teacher Genpo Merzel Roshi's "Big Mind" teachings into his work. It's good advice for anyone from families of button-pushers, or anyone who end

We Contain Multitudes
Via Greg Zwahlen at Beliefnet, check out "First Person Plural" by Paul Bloom, published in the November 2008 Atlantic. Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale, and he is writing about happiness. But he is also writing about the nature of selves. He says, We used to think that the hard part of the question "How can I be happy?" had to do with nailing down the definition of happy. But it may have more to do with the

Pardon Us
Today is the day of the annual pre-Thanksgiving presidential photo op, in which the President of the United States gets his picture taken with a turkey or two.  Contrary to what you might read in news stories, the first president to issue an official pardon that spared the turkey's life was President George H.W. Bush, in 1989. Before that, the turkey was just as likely to be the man course at the White House Thanksgiving dinner. Since 2005 the pardoned turkeys have been sent to either Disneyland or Disney World to be grand marshals in a Thanksgiving parade. This year's official White House turkey, Courage, and the emergency backup turkey, Carolina, will be sent to the California

Religion in Japan: Mistranslations and Manga
Recently Ichiro Ozawa, secretary general of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan, made a speech that, translated into English, seemed to insult Christians by calling them "self-righteous," contrasted with the more "magnanimous" nature of Buddhism. The speech was delivered on Mount Koya, birthplace of the Japanese Buddhist school of Shingon. At Japan Times, Roger Pulvers explains that many nuances of Japanese were lost in

Being Lamps Unto Ourselves
I finally worked up the nerve to write an introduction to the Heart Sutra -- a very brief, beginner-level introduction. I recall that I had committed the sutra to memory before anyone explained any part of it to me. I hate to think how long it took for me to figure out who that guy "Shariputra" was. The Heart Sutra is part of the much larger Prajnaparamita (perfection of wisdom) Sutra, which is a collection of about 40 sutras. Various legends claim these sutras were spoken by the historical Buddha and lost to mankind for centuries. According to one story I've heard, t