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Zen Conversation with Rafe Martin
Rafe Martin's Endless Path Zendo is located three blocks from the famous Rochester Zen Center established by Philip Kapleau...
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Gabyo—Painting of Rice Cake
Painted rice cakes, it’s said, can’t satisfy hunger. How could they? It would be like reading a menu and expecting that to nourish us ....
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Why I Use Jataka Tales
Within 100 years of the Buddha’s parinirvana, (death) jataka tales were accepted as canonical within Buddhist tradition, not as children’s tales but as powerful and essential adult teachings ....
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Zen and Failure
In a koan in a central Zen training text, The Gateless Barrier, Manjusri, Bodhisattvaof Wisdom, fails both to get close to the Buddha as well as to bring a young woman out of her samadhi. ....
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When the Buddha was a Tree
When I was young, trees were my friends. I’d climb up among the branches of the ones beside our three-story apartment building until I was higher than the roof....
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On Entering the Zendo
The practice of Zen is a practice of attention. Ultimately this means becoming conscious of the nature of our own self. Seeing through habitual self-centeredness, we find renewed connection with all things, animate and inanimate...
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Bodhisattva Way
Zen tradition calls someone who has had some realization, and then tries to protect or hold to that and maintain it rather than freeing themselves from it and moving on even further, “a ghost guarding a corpse.” ...
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The Great Loneliness and the Voice of the Universe
In the “Way of the Animal Powers,” Joseph Campbell quotes the arctic explorer Knud Rasmussen, quoting an eskimo shaman who told him, ...
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Wasp
When my daughter Ariya was about four or five, we all; our son, Jake, who was then eight or nine; Rose and I went on a camping trip to the Adirondacks. We had a tent, an old car, and some cooking gear. The car was old enough so that the trip that is now a pleasant half-day jaunt ...
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Self Doubt and the Buddha, Guttila Jataka
The Buddha Loses Faith In Himself: The Master Musician, Jataka No. 243 (Synopsis: The Buddha as an aging master musician doubts his ability to win a musical competition. The king of the gods steps in to help him, revealing that kindness can be of greater benefit than great artistry.) Once the Bodhisattva was born into a musician’s family. When grown, ...
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The Buddha was a Monkey
Even the Buddha had his trials – and not just when as the ex-Prince Siddhartha he sat beneath the Bo-Tree and Mara the Tempter appeared. The jataka tales show he had lifetimes of challenge and difficulty – perhaps facing the very kind of things we might be dealing with in our lives now. It seems that for the Buddha, being ...
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Touching the Earth: The Jatakas and the Buddha’s Enlightenment
At the moment of enlightenment, after the Buddha-to-Be’s six years of exhaustive effort, going the limit, trying and trying with all he had, Mara appears before him and makes one last ditch effort to tempt the ex-prince with self-doubt. “How could you, a sheltered ex-prince be worthy of the Supreme Goal of complete ...
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Riding Through the Gateless Gate
I’m heading north on Interstate 390 to Rochester, New York, after a great October day of riding twisty rural back roads and hours of tales, tire kicking, good food, and motorcycles. The rain starts, then comes down heavily enough to wash my bug-splattered windscreen nearly clean. ...
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Sex/Ethics/Practice: Looking at an Old Tale
A talk given at a Casa Zen Jataka sesshin in Costa Rica. In yesterday’s talk we saw the Bodhisattva as perfect, and perfectly perfecting the paramita of dana or selfless generosity by ...
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A Pillar of Zen: Roshi Philip Kapleau 1912 – 2004
My Zen teacher, Roshi Philip Kapleau, died peacefully on May 6 at the venerable age of 91. Several days later, many of us who had known him and been with him for more than thirty years gathered ...
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The Paramita of Compassion
Here’s a set of links to The Toledo Zen Center’s site — “Drinking Gourd” where they posted a talk by me (The Black Hound Jataka) and a Q&A panel discussion afterward between Jay Rinsen Weik, Karen Do’on Weik, myself, and the audience. Recorded at the Toledo Zen Center on September 12, 2010. This special Dharma Talk was ...
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Fairy Tales and Zen Riddles
Rafe Martin was born into the perfect training ground for a storyteller. He grew up immersed in told stories, hearing his father’s tales of flying dangerous rescue missions in the Himalayas during World War II, fairy tales read aloud by his mother, and his Russian-Jewish relatives telling entrancing, often hilarious, stories about their lives...
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The Black Hound, Maha-Kanha Jataka #469
Long ago, in a distant past world age, the Bodhisattva came to life as Shakra, king of the gods. Resplendent and radiant, shining with the glory of the merit he’d acquired in the course of countless lifetimes of noble and selfless effort, he sat at ease on his golden throne...
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Car Bodhisattvas
Are there really skillful bodhisattvas who can appear in all kinds of appropriate forms to help us when we need them? Here’s a little story series of linked tales, all personal, all true...