I just remembered I used to post here a while back, so I decided to take a look at what I had littered about the cybersphere. I have to say, it's a bit eerie. What over a decade ago were random thoughts have now coalesced into book form: Alone in a World of Wounds: A Dharmic Response to the Ills of Sentient Beings was published this past June by Cascade Books; Obstacles to Stillness: Thoughts, Hindrances, and Self-Surrender in Evagrius and the Buddha will be out by the end of 2023 from Fortress Press.
Some of the things I found myself chewing on then I find myself still chewing on now. There are new tacks, however, and who knows what they might lead to. I'm doing more reading in Jōdo Shinshū generally and Shinran in particular. I've signed up for a correspondence course with the Jōdo Shinshū folks in Berkeley, and I'll be joining some of them on a trip to Japan this spring to take part in the 850th anniversary of Shinran's birth and visit sites connected with him and the school (I'll also be popping into some of the Zen temples in Kyoto and environs on my own while I'm there).
I began this shortly after my ordination as a way of clearing my head. Now I find myself having become sanctioned to teach in our lineage. I never expected that, and I'm still not entirely happy about it, but there it is all the same. Now I have slightly different things to mull over, things related to students and teachers, to what teaching even means, to my own shortcomings and blind spots, to the Dharma whose spokesperson I've been tapped to be.
Above all, I have become even more convinced of the liberation the Dharma offers, and I have now seen with my own eyes what a student's first dropping of self entails. I said before, and I will say it again: the Dharma is a vast, live-giving ocean.
