What was Roshi Bernie saying when he said that? I hear many people – I think it may be mostly people who didn’t know Bernie – taking it as a license to treat their own opinions as gospel. Almost. What the teacher said is just an opinion, and what I think is just opinion; all opinions are equal; one opinion is as good as another. “Just My Opinion” is a koan which somehow I began working with years before I met Bernie. It was my “boss” koan when I’d first moved into middle ma

When we set out to make peace, we need to bring the other to the table. That’s the first challenge. And often the next question is, “What do I call the other?” It might help to know how the others refer to themselves. But words keep changing. Yesterday’s word may no longer be correct. When I was kid, it was politically correct to refer to “colored people.” The leading civil rights organization was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Then it becam

It’s easy to put myself beyond the pale. Recently, I found myself othered for talking to peacemakers about the need to bring the other to the table. The implication is that I am creating the otherness by talking about it. I don’t see it that way: if we want to make peace, we have to begin by acknowledging that we see things differently. Focusing exclusively on “our common humanity” denies the difference. The others – whoever they are, including me – are often offended by th

As we were building our network of charter schools, probably in our fourth year, I was working on our first application for a State Department sponsored Egyptian teacher to teach Arabic to our students. I was pulling the application together, enclosing the resumes of our teachers who’d host and mentor our visiting Egyptian. Looking at Stephanie’s resume, I noticed that she’d graduated from Sacred Heart University. Wow. I taught there in the late 70’s. What a coincidence. Did

The answer is simple: “No.” No one is ever ready for the challenge that's right there, to bear witness, to teach, to facilitate council. No one is ever ready to be a parent. The trick – the only trick – is to bring your unreadiness to the table, to bring your openness to learning. Not being ready is no reason not to step forward. The only real obstacle is thinking that you are ready, “I got this one.” A bearing witness council rests in the intent to bring into the circle th

Maybe I should blame it on Roshi Bernie. At least in the earliest days, when Bernie began talking to us about a Zen Peacemaker Order, he didn’t want to exclude anyone. Bernie wanted an infinite circle. I worried about the lack of boundaries. What does it mean to be “Zen”? And what does it mean to be part of an Order? I had ideas about mission and especially about obedience. Members of the Zen Peacemaker Order, in my mind, were available to go at a moment’s notice wherever pea

I have been rediscovering Thomas Merton, and I am finding new riches. I am delighted by the light that he shines on the teaching of Zhuang Zhou, theTaoist philosopher who lived in China during the 4th century BCE. Anything we make into an object to strive for becomes a poison. Even Enlightenment as an object to strive for becomes a poison. Zhuang Zhou foresaw the trap into which Zen has fallen so many times, into which many are falling again. When enlightenment becomes the o

Roshi Bernie Glassman taught us to go up and down the mountain at the same time. Going up the mountain refers to our efforts to realize the oneness of life. We go up the mountain seeking enlightenment. We come down the mountain to help others. There are a lot of Zen people who don’t agree with Bernie. They argue that if we try to help others before achieving enlightenment, we will do more harm than good. Perhaps they’re embracing the Buddha’s first Pure Precept, ordinarily

Maybe we don’t realize it until we get up there in years. Then we see it all around us. Friends die. Institutions crumble. What can we do to avoid this pain? There is a story passed back and forth among Buddhists that attachments are the cause of suffering. As the story goes, we can get rid of our suffering by getting rid of our attachments. We can begin by letting go of stuff. Every time a bag of clothes that I haven’t worn in years goes off to the Viet Nam Vets I feel bet

We go looking for a teacher, thinking we know what we need. But we don’t. Not exactly. That’s why we need a teacher. We often don’t know what we need. We keep changing and our needs keep changing. Does that mean we should keep changing teachers? No. Jumping around from teacher to teacher seldom works. What we need is a teacher who can change with us, providing the teaching that we need at the moment. Last week I was taking Suzuki Roshi to task for talking about meditation p

Every year around Yom Kippur I talk about one of Roshi Bernie’s most impactful teachings. I’d always thought about atonement as making amends. Bernie suggested that atonement meant quite literally “to be at one with.” To be at one with what? With all the ingredients of my life – all of them, not just the pleasant and the pretty. This teaching has changed my relationship to Yom Kippur and to the Gatha of Atonement, but it took many years for it to occur to me that the Gatha sh

As the Jewish high holy days approached, I found myself thinking about the future of Zen in America where religion is such a family thing. If Zen is going to engage broadly with American families, we are going to have to have something for the kids. It got me thinking about Sunday school and my experience. When Morri was little, Dee and I wondered how to support her spiritual development. Dee had found her spiritual home in the Hindu Christian world of the Self-Realization Fe

Three of Maezumi Roshi’s first successors were Jewish, including my teacher, Roshi Bernie Glassman. Accident or karma? I’m thinking now that it was karmic. I’m thinking about the importance of planting Buddhist seeds in Taoist China. Without the Taoist soil, there would have been no Zen. Maybe the American Jewish soil is important to the emergence of American Zen. Maezumi Roshi brought to America the Zen that he’d imbibed growing up in a family of Japanese Soto Sect priests

But when does the year begin? Pick a date. It is closer to the Zen heart to say, “No beginning and no end.” So how can there be a Buddhist New Year? Actually, there are several. In America, you can take your pick among the differing Asian calendars of the immigrant communities and teachers who brought Buddhism to America. They’re not my calendars, so what do I do? I’ve never been happy with January 1. Where did that come from? Apparently, Julius Caesar picked the date. I re

No. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that you can’t make peace if you’re neutral. You may be able to play a role in the peace process, you may be able to bring the warring parties together to talk, but only the parties to the hostilities can make peace. What’s required is not neutrality. It’s openness. To be a peacemaker requires an open heart and an open mind but not an empty mind. This insight is prompting me to relook at a wonderful Zen story. A university professor visit

I went to Svalbard this summer because Morri wanted to go there – she was in Norway for five weeks on a writing grant, finishing a rewrite of the novel that she began during her year in the Boston University MFA program in creative writing, and we went to visit. I always wanted to see the midnight sun. Svalbard was an experience, a three-hour flight north from Oslo. A sign at the entrance to the hotel bar announces, “Northernmost bar in the world.” Outside Longyearbyen – it

Roshi Bernie Glassman spoke often of his close spiritual friendship with Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, founder of the Jewish Renewal movement. Tikkun olam, Hebrew for ‘repairing the world’ could also be understood, according to Bernie, as ‘healing’ or ‘peacemaking.’ God had sent his light into the world in vessels which shattered as they went from refined realms to the grosser, earthier ones. Sparks of light were scattered, trapped in a universe of suffering. According to t

If only we could hear that voice. Call it the voice of the Universe, if you like. Call it “the voice of God.” Are we listening? That’s the question. On a Street Retreat with Roshi Bernie, we had dinner one night with the homeless at the Bowery Mission. We met one of the senior staff there and he told us his story. He himself had been homeless. He slept on the subways in the days before the city put the arm rests between seats to keep the homeless from lying down. Nobody bot

I like to be able to fit things together in a neat, logical way. When I think about Karma, I find myself in a tangle. Karma is the law of cause and effect. I love it. We all face challenges every day, hard challenges. It’s easy for me to get stuck on, “Why is this happening to me?” “I don’t deserve this.” At first glance, Karma seems to be telling me I’ve brought this on myself. But there’s a way out of that gloom. Maybe, the cause of today’s trouble doesn’t lie in this lif

How could I be? Although I’d grown up in a predominantly Jewish suburb, we weren’t that Jewish. I’d seldom been to temple. Maybe a funeral, maybe a bar mitzvah, maybe a wedding. An occasional seder. One bris. There wasn’t all that much to convert. Or so I thought. I believed in freedom of religion. I had a lot to learn when I got to Carleton College in 1960. In Minnesota, whoever I thought I was, I was Jewish. One of the kids in the dorm, very sweet, asked to pat my head. He

Unlike early Buddhism, Zen espoused the view that householders as well as monastics could achieve enlightenment in this lifetime. Good thing. I came to Zen with a family and a career. What I found was ambivalence. The monastic ideal of devoting oneself fully to the Dharma was everywhere. Was lay practice really possible? I was fortunate. Although my teacher, Roshi Bernie Glassman, had given up his career in aerospace, he never encouraged me to give up my career in mental he

I have been working with my impatience forever. Slowly, I’m learning to be patient with myself. Sometimes, it seems that it’s taking me even longer to learn patience with others. There’s an old koan, “Hyakujo and the Fox,” that talks to this challenge, although it’s taken me years to begin to appreciate it. Here’s my brief retelling. Hyakujo is the abbot at a mountain temple when he notices a stranger attending his talks. The stranger approaches Hyakujo and reveals that he

I hear the Buddha saying that everyone is perfect, we’re all enlightened just as we are. How can he say that? I look around and see people who are causing immense suffering. Did I hear the Dalai Lama say they’re doing the best they can, that everyone is doing the best they can? My first thought is that they could’ve/should’ve done better. Is it really possible they’re doing the best they can, given who they are? At that moment? That doesn’t mean they might not do better in

Even those of us who fancy ourselves us peacemakers have ways of setting things in opposition, of making something else “other.” Maybe, Roshi Bernie taught me, that’s just the dualistic way our brains work. Isn’t it ironic that one of the oppositions I set up is peacemaking versus advocacy? Peacemaking and advocacy are different practices, different ingredients in the dance of life. Maybe, as we used to say in mental health, they are “phase-related.” Maybe advocacy is the d

The world is probably divided between the “going deeper” people and the “going broader” people. Most Zen people fall into the going-deeper camp. Roshi Bernie Glassman stood out from the Zen crowd because he championed going broader. Not that he was against going deeper. Bernie taught me to go up and down the mountain at the same time. Before I got to Zen and Bernie, both sides were there. I found my professional way to community mental health, serving some of the most exclu

I don’t remember when, but I do remember where, the locker room at the JCC where I worked out three times a week. I haven’t been there in years, but the locker room is still vivid. The scale was one of those where you moved the blocks until you got the balance point, a big block that moved in 50-pound increments, and the small block which moved pound by pound from zero to 50. My big block was always on 150. At my worst the small block was somewhere in the 30’s. That’s when I

When I teach Zen, am I teaching what the Buddha taught? Who knows? The Buddha taught 2500 years ago. It’s probably getting closer to 2600 years. His teaching was handed down orally for five hundred years before it was written down in Indian languages that I don’t understand. The teaching came to me largely by way of China and then Japan, bits through Viet Nam and Korea and Tibet, and then to America. Along the way the teaching was translated into more languages that I don’t u

Roshi Bernie substituted “creations” for the traditional “sentient beings” in the first Great Bodhisattva Vow. I appreciated the idea of not discriminating against insentient beings – save the rainforest as well as the whales – but it was overwhelming. The more limited “sentient beings” was itself an impossible-to-achieve goal. Bernie was pushing farther even than the trees, at least as I understand his teaching now. Creations encompass not just all the stuff created by God

Every individual is unique, has value, and no one will ever be replaced. Tough guy bosses often threaten the person asking for a raise, “No one is irreplaceable.” What they mean is, “Don’t threaten me. We can manage fine without you.” Nice guy managers say the same words to members of their team when a key staff member departs, but they mean something more along the lines of, “Don’t worry. We will be fine without her.” Both miss the point. Everyone is irreplaceable. This is t

I was never a boy scout and proud of it. In our family, the Boy Scouts were jingoistic, paramilitary, not for me, an American version of Hitler’s Youth. I grew up listening to Tom Lehrer’s spoof of the Boy Scout slogan, “Be Prepared.” Spoof or no spoof, the slogan is pervasive. As we built our network of charter schools, we were training our teachers to be prepared. “To fail to plan is to plan to fail,” was one our favorite slogans. We learned to emphasize the counter theme

I grew up listening to Pete, on records and at hootenannies. I knew which side I was on. “They say in Harlan County/ There are no neutrals there/ You'll either be a union man/ Or a thug for J. H. Blair.” I was no thug. We were for the workers and peace. We were against nuclear testing and segregation. We marched and we protested. It was important to stand up. We had to take a side. I was proud to stand up. This was who I was. I never questioned it until Roshi Bernie Glassma

It’s not enough to be “for” world peace. Ultimately, my peacemaking begins with me. I have to make peace with myself, with my demons, the aspects of myself which shame and frighten me, which I lock in a closet. I have to let them out of the closet. “Come and join me on my cushion.” Peacemaking grows out from that center toward what Roshi Bernie, the mathematician, called the “infinite circle,” the boundary, or perhaps non-boundary, that includes everything and everyone. Mak

Peacemaking and advocacy are different practices. In the advocate’s world, there are good guys and bad guys. The way to stop the horrors that are happening all around us is to convert the bad guys to our way of looking at the world or, failing that, by killing or incarcerating all the bad guys. Peacemakers see things differently. All of us have done bad things, things we wouldn’t do if we didn’t feel threatened. In our minds, we create bad guys and good guys, enemies and al

Another monk asked the ancient Chinese master, “What is zazen?” This time the master answered, “Zazen is everything.” This monk too was greatly enlightened, but I didn’t get it. “Didn’t you tell the other monk that zazen was nothing.” It was years before I began to understand. The Zen master gives each student the medicine he needs at the moment. I was confused by my idea of great meditators. The heroes in the Zendo were the ones during sesshin who returned to the zendo t

A monk asked the ancient Chinese master, “What is zazen?” The master answered, “Zazen is nothing.” The monk was greatly enlightened, but the master’s answer went right over my head. It was years before I began to understand. Zazen is not a thing. It’s not an object. It’s no thing. Why did it take me so long to see this? Looking back, I can see it now. I was confused by the zazen instructions which are everywhere in the Zen world, in the beginners’ instruction in person at m

In Zen, there are always two sides. Roshi Bob Kennedy once told us that if you wanted to talk like a Zen master, just add “or not” to every statement you make. The challenge is to see from both sides at the same time. Can you do that? If you can, when you can, when you do, you may be tasting enlightenment. We are all one. There is no separation. Roshi Bernie used to say, “We are all one body.” And we are all, each of us, unique, distinct. Choose just one side and you land i

No one has criticized me or said that I’m a bad person for avoiding the news. They’re intense in their agreement about some horror in the world, some evil doer. Do they care that I’m not joining the conversation? Sometimes, they try to engage me, and I’m forced to admit that I don’t know what they’re talking about. I was never a news junkie, but now I’m weird. For many years I was a partisan, firmly committed to the “good guys,” to the righteous team. You have to take sides.

We associate effort with strain. The strain is extra, almost always unnecessary, and generally a source of suffering. Lose the strain. Ease up on the gas. Driving home from Queens – the traffic is always terrible – sitting in bumper-to-bumper, I realize how less stressful it is to drive 10 miles per hour than 60. We are so often in a hurry. We humans are the only animals that worry about arriving late. Instead of being present, we’re chafing to get to the next step, the nex

I’ve added a Bodhisattva Vow to the traditional four chanted by Mahayana Buddhists everywhere. You may think that’s brassy. Four vows have been enough since the 6th or 7th century. Why another? Maybe my vow is already encompassed by the other four. Why do we even need four? Embody any one of them fully and the other three are included. There’s nothing magical or sacred about the number of vows. So, these days, I’m chanting five vows each morning, and I’m finding hungry ghosts

And yet we keep setting up boundaries. I never liked them. In the world of my childhood and young adulthood, “sectarian” was a bad word. The sectarians were the activists who spent more energy opposing other anti-war groups than opposing the war, more energy opposing other civil rights organizations than fighting racism. My first teacher, Kyudo Nakagawa Roshi, was part of the Japanese Rinzai sect. When I got to Roshi Bernie two years later, I was moving from Rinzai to Soto. W

I’ve been working with this koan for a long time, thirty years at least, since that early Ox Class when Jishu introduced us to “Who are you?” I didn’t know then that she was leading us into the longish story of Bodhidharma’s arrival in China and his meeting with the emperor. Bodhidharma has managed to piss off the emperor. When the emperor asks, “Who is facing me?” I hear, “Who the hell do you think you are?” Bodhidharma replies, “Don’t know,” one of the great moments in Zen.

A lot of us think of ourselves as peacemakers, but we only talk to our friends. It’s more comfortable that way. We maintain friendships by avoiding the topics which could lead to blow outs. We go to summer barbeques with relatives from the other side of the divide. We maintain the “peace” by avoiding the hot topics, politics for sure, maybe religion, maybe we just agree not to mention Cousin Charlotte or Uncle Joey. Why aren’t they at the barbeque? They weren’t invited. We’re

I have never been comfortable with liturgy. My parents were committed atheists. So, how did I end up as a Zen priest? I’ve told the story before of a dinner with Roshi Bernie and Jishu when I was still new to Zen. “Who will be your first shuso?” Bernie asked. Who would Jishu choose to serve as “senior student” during her first three-month training period as a teacher? As a Dharma Holder, Jishu had many students. She named one. “No,” said Bernie. Jishu named another. Another “

“When is daddy coming home?” I am pacing the living room, returning to the front window, looking out for my father. My mother doesn’t know. Daddy worked six days a week, making custom furniture. Evenings, he was out meeting with potential customers. When he wasn’t working, he was doing his political organizer thing. Daddy taught me to catch and throw a ball, took me to Dodger games, taught me to play chess. I cherished my time with him, but I couldn’t get enough. As a teenage

Roshi Jishu Holmes introduced me to demon work. It’s been an important part of my practice, but I didn’t see the connection with the hungry ghosts that Roshi Bernie Glassman was always talking about. Bernie was using a Buddhist image, beings with needle-narrow necks, starving because they could not swallow the food they craved. Bernie looked outward, vowing to feed all the hungry ghosts. His vow manifested in the Greyston mandala which brought jobs and housing, childcare and

In my graduate school days, C. Wright Mills was a giant. He was the sociologist who challenged the status quo. The Power Elite rattled cages. I loved his distinction between “personal troubles” and “public issues.” I look back now and wonder how it was that my doctoral dissertation landed so far from public issues. Somehow, I managed to write a dissertation which dealt only with a methodological problem. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that I managed to write 300-plu

What should we do with our anger? It depends on what we mean when we say “anger.” It’s one of those words that cause a lot of confusion. Are we talking about a feeling? Or are we referring to our expression of that feeling? It helps to know what we’re talking about. I learned something new about my anger in Portugal. Dee and I were on a cruise on the Douro River in Portugal, tours everyday through the beautiful wine country, learning lots of Portuguese history, all pretty n

There are intoxicants other than alcohol and drugs, other ways of dulling our minds, of trying to contain our stress. Wine is not my only intoxicant. There’s also my phone games, Wordle and sudoku and something called “Zen Word.” I’ve been telling myself that these are harmless “tools” to break the tension and give my mind a rest. Recently, I started telling myself that they have additional health benefits: they ward off dementia. My gaming increased when my neurologist start

How do you know if you’re living a balanced life? And do you care? Bernie developed a tool for checking your balance, his version of The Five Buddha Families, a variant on a Tibetan teaching. Bernie’s aspects of life were spiritual practice, study, livelihood, social action, and community. Jishu showed me how to use it. Take a week-at-a-glance calendar with each day divided into hours, half hours might be even better. For two weeks, keep track of your activities, fill in yo

Mindful eating has been part of my spiritual practice almost from the beginning. Jishu took me on my first dive into mindful eating. During a course on the Zen paramitas, the practices of enlightened beings, she asked us to pick an everyday activity that we did without paying attention. I took a four-month plunge into eating without reading. I wasn’t dieting, I wasn’t focused on how much I was eating. This plunge was about the way I ate, and it was illuminating, showing me