writing – Page 3 – In It To End It

Yama and Mara: Hindu and Buddhist personifications of Death, a hypothesis

February 17, 2015

Both Buddhism and Hinduism personify Death in the form of a deity. The two traditions’ imagination around this figure naturally has many overlaps, but I’m suddenly thinking about some that I can’t find any reference to in the scholarly literature. The correspondence is about the role of Death as Teacher, as appearing in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, and the role of Māra […]

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I have seen the yogi and he is us: Patañjali and the consolations of ambiguity

June 5, 2014

One of the marks of a great text seems to be that it can be deeply important to wildly different people from cultures separated from each other by vast distances of time and space. A theater company in Kolkata establishes a reputation for cutting social realism by putting on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, while a British director in France hubristically (and with some success) attempts to stage the entire Mahabharata. A Japanese director who traces his lineage

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Devotion and doubt: race, religion, and postmodern kirtan

May 23, 2014

After a long day of sessions, feeling with clients/students through the morass of feelings and confusions that seem to be the near-universal experience of being human around here, I light a dry leaf of white sage, shake off the fire, and walk slowly around the practice room both clearing the air and honoring the images and statues that live there.

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Saffron-washing part 2: Response to Thich Nhat Hanh

April 2, 2014

Several folks have posted this Thich Nhat Hanh (TNH) interview to me, after my recent dip into the Google-Mindfulness-Buddhism-Capitalism debate following the Wisdom 2.0 protest. There’s a good debate about it on Be Scofield’s Facebook wall, and a smaller one on mine after this post, and I don’t need to repeat many of the elements of the discussion in those

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Mindfulness the Google Way: well-intentioned saffron-washing?

February 22, 2014

For the last few years there’s been a growing uproar in San Francisco rooted in dismay and anger over ballooning rents, historically high eviction rates, and other markers of the intense gentrification that has been happening for 15 years or so — if I choose the tech boom of the 90s as a convenient recent historical marker. The recent acceleration

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Inner and outer gaze in dharma and art practice

November 23, 2013

I tell you that there is no making an end of suffering & stress without reaching the end of the cosmos. Yet it is just within this fathom-long body, with its perception & intellect, that I declare that there is the cosmos, the origination of the cosmos, the cessation of the cosmos, and the path of practice leading to the

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I let a song go out of my heart: an ear worm gets me thinking about karma

October 21, 2013

This morning, walking up the steps of Sproul Hall at UC Berkeley, through the crisp fall air, I heard a fragment of melody, whistled, in the distance. I only heard a handful of notes, but recognized it as the distinctive dorian mode hook in “Eleanor Rigby” — the part where the words are “…picks up the rice in the church…”. It

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Interview with Keith Hennessy about “Turbulence”

June 26, 2013

Keith Hennessy, interviewed by Sean Feit on 3/7/13 for UCD PFS newsletter. (A shortened version of this conversation is in our 2013 department newsletter. Here is the full conversation with minimal edits.) Sean Feit: What do you consider the main conceptual frame for Turbulence? Keith Hennessy: I try to stay away from any kind of central frame. I wanted it

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Kosha and khandha, a hypothesis.

June 19, 2013

Recently, while studying a couple early Tantric texts (the Shiva Sutras and the Heart of Recognition), I found myself thinking about energy and consciousness, which the texts say are the two most fundamental aspects of reality. Feeling into these, and reflecting on various places they appear in the yoga tradition, I thought about the early list of the Five Sheaths

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Yama and Mara: Hindu and Buddhist personifications of Death, a hypothesis

Inner and outer gaze in dharma and art practice

I let a song go out of my heart: an ear worm gets me thinking about karma

Kosha and khandha, a hypothesis.

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Connect with the beauty and power of Buddhist training.

Receive articles, guided meditations, and tools for starting or deepening your practice, along with Dr. Oakes’ teaching schedule.