Bulls focus on a goal, not Riders (Zen video)

Shambala SunSpace, Rage Against the Machine


Sit-a-Long with Taigu: The Ten Oxherding Pictures (IX)

Rev. Taigu again takes us for a ride with the next of the Ten Oxherding Pictures. He writes:

“Riding the bull home… As one mounts the bull, rides the bull, the world and practice itself are not experienced as obstacles anymore. The bull as an object to grasp, a goal to reach has disappeared. Practice and self are intimate. In this, carefree-ness, detachment, joy arise from the silence space of sitting. The boy is not worried anymore about where he should go, where the bull takes him to, what the Bull-boy will become. As the comment sates: this struggle is over; gain and loss are assimilated. The song of the flute is played by ten thousand things met and released. Forms and sounds play and are played. This dance is nothing but the Bodhisattva stepping into the world, freely playing with what comes and goes, fully interacting with things and beings without being caught by any…”

(Click through to watch today’s talk, and to “sit-a-long.”)

"Bulls on Parade" (Rage Against the Machine)
His microphone explodes, shatterin' the molds
Either drop the hits like De la O or get the [fudge] off
The commode, with that sure shot, sure ta make
The bodies drop, drop and don't copy yo don't call
This a co-opt, terror reigns, drenching, quenchin'
The thirst of power dons that five sided fist-a-gon
Tha rotten sore on the facade of mother gets
Bigger the trigger's cold, empty your purse

Rally around the family
with a pocket full of shells
They rally round the family
with a pocket full of shells

Weapons not home not food not shoes not need
Just feed tha war cannibal animal I walk the corner to
The rubble that used to be a library, line up to the
Mind's cemetery now what we don't know keeps
The contract's alive and movin, they don't gotta
Burn the books, they just remove while arms
Warehouses fill as quick as the cell
Come wit it now. BULLS ON PARADE!

Stay "Mindful" with Mindful.org

It was a very exciting time around the Shambhala Sun offices last year. They were preparing a special print publication called Mindful with the tag-line “Living with Awareness and Compassion.”

Mindful was a 40-page mini-magazine inserted into the December-January 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun and also distributed across North America FREE in health food stores, bookstores, health clinics, and wherever those who seek mindfulness might congregate.

Mindful, which Barry Boyce was in charge of, had short articles about mindfulness meditation and other forms of awareness, body, and compassion practices, all written from an entirely secular viewpoint.

• Mindful.org

When the mini-mag was starting to reach people, a website was launched. It carries the latest information on bringing mindfulness, awareness, and compassion into our lives. It is updated every day with fresh stories and news.



Mindful.org offers mindfulness-based approaches to all the important issues of life today, from health, happiness, emotional well-being, psychology, relationships, and family life, to work, creativity, activism, and the science that is proving its benefits. Source

Against the Grain: Anarchy and Zen

David Kupfer (The Sun Magazine, June 2011)

Performers in New Delhi with innovative moves and the Buddha as backdrop (mayankpandey)

Actor Peter Coyote suggested we meet for this interview at his home north of San Francisco. Nicknamed “the Treehouse,” it has a striking view of Mount Tamalpais and is close to Golden Gate National Recreation Area and San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. It is a long way from Hollywood, where Coyote has worked since 1980, appearing in more than ninety films and television programs. He says that he is “a Zen Buddhist student first, an actor second.” He will be ordained as a Zen priest in August.

Coyote has had an eclectic life, having done everything from farming to being a stockbroker. A self-described “socialist radical hippie anarchist environmentalist,” he’s seldom without an opinion on an issue and never one to hold back his views. Born Rachmil Pinchus Ben Mosha Cohon in New York City in 1941, Coyote took his stage name from an experience he had while taking peyote in the Southwest. He has been socially and politically engaged since the age of fourteen, when he volunteered for the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign in Englewood, New Jersey. Coyote’s passion for progressive reform continued at Grinnell College in Iowa, where, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he helped organize a group of twelve students to travel to Washington, D.C., and protest nuclear testing. They fasted for three days outside the White House before President John F. Kennedy invited them in to talk with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

After college Coyote joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a guerrilla street-theater group still in existence today. He and some of his fellows from the mime troupe went on to form the Diggers, an anarchist group that “acted out” its ideas of what culture should be, questioning the core values of capitalism and distributing free food to runaways in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, sometimes feeding hundreds of people a day. They also ran a Free Store, a Free Clinic, and even (briefly) a Free Bank. The Diggers evolved into the Free Family, a network of communes around the country pursuing an alternative economy and culture.

Coyote is the author of the memoir Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle, a portion of which won a Pushcart Prize. A new book, about what he calls the “present mass hypnosis afoot,” is currently in revision. More

Bronze Age Brain Surgery

SCIENCE (DiscoverMagazine.com)

Today we may shudder at the thought of ancient brain surgery, but recent studies of the practice at Bronze Age sites in Turkey suggest that early neurosurgeons were surprisingly precise and that a majority of their patients may have survived.

At Ikiztepe, a small settlement near the Black Sea occupied from 3200 to 1700 B.C., archaeologist Önder Bilgi of Istanbul University has uncovered five skulls with clean, rectangular incisions that are evidence for trepanation, or basic cranial surgery. The procedure may have been performed to treat hemorrhages, brain cancer, head trauma, or mental illness. Last August Bilgi also unearthed a pair of razor-sharp volcanic glass blades that he believes were used to make the careful cuts.

There is ample evidence that Bronze Age sawbones knew what they were doing. Last summer, biological anthropologist Handan üstündag of Anadolu University in Turkey excavated the 4,000-year-old trepanned skull of a man at Kultepe Höyük in central Turkey. More

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