Two Poems, Megan E. Freeman

We Will Meet Under The Bodhi Tree Two blocks north the Zen center stretches in a sun salutation. One block south the Fellowship blinks its sleepy doors to greet the coffee makers and flower arrangers. We buckle on our Mary Janes you tie your soft-soled shoes we toss the paper up the driveway and turn […]

Eat Sleep Sit by Kaoru Nonomura

Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan’s Most Rigorous Zen Temple Kaoru Nonomura, Juliet Winters Carpenter (translator) Published in English by Kodansha, 2015 At the beginning of a successful career, the author decided to enter a Buddhist monastery. Putting everything else on hold, he entered the priestly training program of Eihei-ji, Japan’s most famous Soto […]

NOLA Zazen

by Sven Davisson The Zendo near our house in Maine the sound of the han echoes off trees and hill and large rock where Gato-Roshi’s ashes lie. The songs of birds chattering and trilling to each other the mournful coo-ah coo of a pair of doves and the cutting craw of a crow the lone […]

An Asceticism of Being

Foucault & the Epistemology of Self, Post Modernity by Sven Davisson From the Archives Ashé Journal #1, 2002. I pay homage to the guru, the divine friend, Mahatma Guru Shri Paramahansa Shivaji, Osho, Baba-ji The mental focus of the past several decades, in the West, has been marked by a heightened quest for essence, sometimes […]

Dharma Discourse by John Daido Loori, Roshi

From the Archives Ashé Journal, Vol 3, Issue 2, Summer 2004. Master Dogen’s 300 Koan Shobogenzo,[1] Case 172 Dongshan’s “Three Pounds of Flax” The Main Case Dongshan was asked by a monastic, “What is Buddha?”[2]Dongshan said, “Three pounds of flax.”[3] The monastic had a realization and bowed.[4] The Commentary This is an old case that’s been echoing […]