Brad Warner's Blog, page 26

HAPPY NEW YEAR and "HARDCORE ZEN TOUR: The Movie" Saturday at Hill St. Center

Happy New Year!

Hope your year is wonderful. I'm busy doing a half-assed version of 大掃除, which is pronounced "oh-so-ji"and means "big cleaning." It's something you do on New Year's in Japan. You clean up every damn thing in the house. I'm not going quite that far, but I'm doing some special cleaning tonight. Which is why this is gonna be short.

Today I finally watched Sike Sillanpää's film "Hardcore Zen Tour," a 30 minute documentary about my tour of Finland this summer. I'm really impressed. S...

MEXICO TRIP REPORT

I am sitting in the Plaza de Armas using the free wi-fi kindly provided by the city of Queretaro, Mexico to write this message to you out there in Blogger Land. My dad, sitting right next to me and using a Windows based computer (an Acer, it seems) can't pick up the signal that I'm getting. Computers are mysterious.

The photos on this page are from the nearby Plaza Zenea, where they have very cool displays of the Garden of Eden and Hell. I mentioned this last time, but now I've got photos to p...

FELIZ NAVIDAD

Feliz Navidad and Merry Kwanza from the city of Queretaro, Mexico. I'm down here with my dad who has been looking into places in Mexico to retire for the past 15 years or so. This is the fourth of these exploratory journeys I've made with him. The first was to Valladolid and Merida in the Yucatan, the second was to Guadalajara, and the third was to Puerto Vallarta to check out some city north of there. So even though I've been to Mexico a few times I still can't speak much Spanish beyond "don...

CAN ANYONE OUT THERE RENT, LEND OR SELL ME A DECENT CAR?

It's a long story, which I'm tired of telling. But the end of it is that I do not have a viable vehicle. And I need one starting on December 29th.

Anyone got a car they wanna get rid of?

Contact me at spoozilla@gmail.com.

Thanks! And Happy Winter Whatever!!

HOW AMC'S REMAKE OF THE PRISONER EXPLAINS WHY I WILL NEVER HAVE A DHARMA HEIR

I recently watched most of episode one of AMC's remake of the classic Sixties TV show The Prisoner over at my friend Nina's house. She has cable and TiVo and I have neither. Unfortunately her TiVo thought the episode was an hour long when it was actually longer than that. So it cut off before the finish.

In any case, I wasn't too upset. The show was good enough that I'd like to have seen the ending. But not so compelling that I can even recall now exactly where things were when the TiVo decide...

War Is Bad, Death Row Tull, Top 15 Books for the Holiday Season, Tiger Woods

Lots of little things this time...

First check out this link:

Elephant Journal's Top 15 Books to Give as Holiday Gifts

Yep! Elephant Journal sez to give your loved ones a little Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate for Hanukkah, Kwanza, Rohatsu or Christmas this year! They'll love you so much they'll lick you on the ears for it! Thanks Waylon!

Also, here's a little holiday gift from me to you. Can't remember if I put this up once before. But I don't think I did. Check out:

Black Sabbath by...

TRIP REPORT

Here's an audio file of my talk at Dharma Field in Minneapolis last Sunday, December 6, 2009.

12/6/09 Dharma Field

Those of you who've heard my talks before will recognize that the first 15 minutes are a variation on my standard introductory stump speech. This is the autobiographical how-I-got-into-Zen thing I do a lot. But after 15 minutes, the Q&A started and it went in some interesting directions, I think.

I went several of places this time out. I started off in Vancouver, where I did a publi...

Happy B-day, Nishijima Roshi & Macalester College Today at 4:45

Nishijima Roshi turned 90 on November 29th! The photo to your left is from the party held for him by students of Dogen Sangha in Tokyo, who meet each Saturday at Tokyo University's Young Buddhists Association. I guess 90 is pretty young! At the bottom of this post is a video made for his b-day by one of the Dogen Sangha groups in Frankfurt, Germany.

I'm in St. Paul today enjoying their double good hospitality and warmth. I sat in on a poetry reading at Macalester College last night, which was ...

JUKAI and Why I No Longer Do It...

I promised an piece about jukai, so here it is. I've written extensively about jukai in all of my books. The longest bits about it are in Hardcore Zen, in which I talk about the jukai ceremonies I went through (three of them!) and in Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate, where I talk about the jukai ceremonies I've performed.

For those who don't know, jukai is the traditional Buddhist ceremony of receiving the precepts. A person publicly vows to honor the Three Devotions, and uphold the T...

NEW VIDEOS WITH SKYLAR!

You asked for it! You got it! New videos of the comedy team of Brad and Skylar!

For those of you who don't tune in regularly, Skylar is my niece, the daughter of my younger sister. A couple years ago Skylar did an interview with me that she posted on YouTube, which still gets more hits than anything but my interview with Sock Monkey. High brow entertainment is my middle name!

The one posted on top was just improvised. The "Pickle Monster" thing below was conceived by Skylar. I'm not sure why th...