You ask me: what is right, what is wrong? I say to you to be AWAKE is right. To be ASLEEP is wrong. I don’t determine acts wrong and right as such. My focus is your being. My effort is that you are there, in your being. Then whatever you do is right. One Zen […]
Recently, I saw “The Railway Men: The Untold Story of Bhopal 1984” on Netflix and now seeing “Einstein and The Bomb.” The night of 2nd December 1984 saw one of the world’s worst industrial disasters at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Methyl Isocyanate, a highly poisonous gas, leaked from the plant killing
It is only a question of when one decides to wake up. It is up to you whether you want to have a little more sleep — then turn over and pull the blanket up. But even while you are asleep inside the blanket, enjoying a beautiful morning, you are a buddha. It is up
Swami Krishna Chaitanya Das of ISKCON introduced me to H.H. Radhanath Swami and his book “The Journey Home“. Within this extraordinary memoir, Radhanath Swami weaves a colorful tapestry of adventure, mysticism, and love. Readers follow Richard Slavin from the suburbs of Chicago to the caves of the Himalayas as he transforms from young seeker to
GREED is an effort to stuff yourself with something – it may be sex, it may be food, it may be money, it may be power. Greed is the fear of inner emptiness. One is afraid of being empty and one wants somehow to possess more and more things. One wants to go on stuffing
A WARRIOR CAME TO THE ZEN MASTER HAKUIN AND ASKED “IS THERE SUCH A THING AS HEAVEN AND HELL?” HAKUIN SAID “WHO ARE YOU?” THE WARRIOR REPLIED “I AM CHIEF SAMURAI TO THE EMPEROR.” HAKUIN SAID “YOU, A SAMURAI? WITH A FACE LIKE THAT, YOU LOOK MORE LIKE A BEGGAR.” AT THIS THE WARRIOR BECAME
There is a Zen story: Two monasteries existed side by side and both the masters had small boys to run errands. Both the boys used to go to the market to fetch things for the masters — sometimes vegetables, sometimes other things. These monasteries were antagonistic towards each other, but boys will be boys. They
Life must be something more. To be of any value, life must have something of eternity in it; it must be something beyond death. And you can know it, because it exists within you. Life exists within you — death is only an experience of others, outside observers. It is simply like love. Can you
In the past two months, one of my very dear friends, a great soul whom I respected like my elder sister, passed away due to cancer. Three of my very close friends and one who is a fatherly figure to my wife, were detected with cancer and are fighting it gracefully. I was reminded of
There was a man in Gautam Buddha’s time whose name was Angulimal. He had taken a vow to cut off one thousand heads, and to take one finger from each dead person so that he could remember how many he had killed and he will make a garland of one thousand fingers. Angulimal means the
