The Gateway of Seon

I’ve been typing up translations of Dharma songs today, but our office has been kind of noisy, so I used my headphones and some music to keep from getting distracted.  By chance I’d selected the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, and the following track started playing as I began typing in this song. It’s a great [...]

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The Reality of Life

 In this poem that’s become a Dharma song, Daehaeng Kun Sunim describes a bit of the nature of our fundamental mind. Understanding this isn’t enough, we have to take what bits we understand and do our best to keep applying them to our daily life. Then the nature of how things truly are will gradually [...]

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Dog days…

This is a friend of ours who first came to the temple about nine years ago. He has the slight misfortunate of having a girlish name, Maeli (“Plums Blossoming,” poor guy), but he seems to be okay with it! One of the interesting things about him is that he’s taken on the job of defending the [...]

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Happy New Year

I’ve just got back from the temple. It’s not like Korea, where the temple would be full of people bowing and chanting and praying (how wonderful), in Japan people seem to do a whole lot less, and yet the feeling was great, very positive and very beautiful. It was just my local temple, rarely open except [...]

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