I was 15 years old and living with my mum and younger brother in a hut at the edge of our little town. Every day I would go into the woods with my brother to collect dead wood and load it on a self made sledge. We would pull the sledge into town and tried […]
It started last summer in the retreat with my teacher Ton Lathouwers. I was feeling quite free and open. Then suddenly, during zazen, I was aware that I had been sitting for some time without a narrative. I was fully present and completely without any feelings of it having to be otherwise. Deep contentment without […]
An interesting post someone in the US shared with me. ‘FROM QUORA – This photo was taken sometime between May and December 1944 (when the bodies of thousands of murdered Hungarian Jews were burned in open fire pits, because the crematoria couldn’t handle these numbers). These people are enjoying a bit of “down time” before […]
When everything appears as a continually flowing process, then there are no things or nouns, just verbs. But language stops!
On our road to Varanasi, a holy city where people take sacred baths in the Ganges, we stopped at the caves where the Buddha is supposed to have trained his asceticism. It was a long walk up and quite busy. Young boys with motocycles where driving up and down, hoping they could make some rupees […]
After an arduous trip from Sankisa to Sravasti, which took us 8 hours, we arrived at the Royal Residency hotel. We are surrounded by Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Taiwanese mainly women. All very devoted to the Buddha. Today we went to Jetavana Park. The place the Buddha camped out 24 times during the rainy season. […]
Welcome to New Delhi! We left Brussels with 15 people in total on Saturday morning. We arrived in New Delhi Sunday morning at 2:30 AM. When we came to our hostel it was about 5 AM. Today we went to a bazaar in the middle of Delhi. It was quite hectic although it being Sunday. […]
Dit is een vraagstuk waar ik me zo nu en dan erg druk over kan maken. Al voor dat ik aan Zen begon te snuffelen hield ik me met dit vraagstuk bezig. Is er überhaupt een werkelijkheid? Ontstaat alles in ons bewustzijn? Of is er werkelijk een of ander absolute werkelijkheid buiten onze geest waar […]
In Kaapstad, Zuid-Afrika worden maandelijks 1000 babies geboren in het Mowbray hospitaal. De meoeders komen uit de arme townships rondom de stad. Het kind is vaak een gevolg van verkrachting of ander misbruik. De meisjes (de meesten zijn onder de 18 jaar) moeten vaak uren lopen om bij het hospitaal te komen, want ze hebben […]
In the Mahayana Buddhism mindfulness is seen as insight and wisdom, but what kind of wisdom are we speaking of? It was the ninth century famous Ch’an Master Lin-chi I-hsuan Hui-chao (Japanese, “Rinzai Gigen”) who claimed: “On your lump of red flesh is a true man without rank who is always going in and out of […]