Zen Master Teachings; Economic Turnaround

As long as I'm still getting some extra traffic from the Adi Da hub-bub... it behooves me to offer visitors something in addition to my own random thoughts.

Here's an .mp3 of Zen Master Bon Soeng's Dharma speech from Buddha's Enlightenment Day a couple years back. ZM Bon Soeng is the Abbot and Guiding Teacher of Empty Gate Zen Center, where I've been practicing for over 2 decades. More of his talks are transcribed here.

(ZM Bon Soeng gives talks and Q&A at Empty Gate each Wednesday night. We've been intending to start video of these sessions to post on YouTube, but are moving slowly with the technical details. I wonder if the teaching of reincarnation makes Buddhists tend towards procrastination.)

The founder of our school, who brought this Korean-style tradition to America back in the 70s, was Zen Master Seung Sahn, aka Dae Soen Sa Nim. ZM Seung Sahn died 4 years ago; as a tribute, the Su Bong Zen Monastery in Hong Kong created this .pdf illustrating his teaching.

In unrelated news... I go back to work tomorrow. I'd been steadily getting contracts from Gap Inc till earlier this year, when management outsourced computer work to India. Now, for the moment anyway, they've decided that I've got something to contribute, notwithstanding the guys in Bangalore.

I got the word on this new contract the same day that the Feds announced the worst unemployment figures in decades. The fact that I'm re-employed is a powerful leading economic indicator. On top of that, I hear that the Mayan Calendar -- the one that points to the End of Time in 2012 -- predicts that we're entering a year-long period of better times. Surely, these Signs indicate that we're turning the corner on global chaos.