Barry Graham's Blog, page 8

Favourite books of 2018

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Dandelions by Yasunari Kawabata
Milkman by Anna Burns
Frankenstein by Junji Ito
This Is How It Ends by Eva Dolan
Lullaby by Leila Slimani
Not One Single Thing: A Commentary on the Platform Sutra by Shodo Harada
Advice for Future Corpses by Sallie Tisdale (published in the U.K. under the inferior title Advice for the Dying)
Waiting for the Last Bus by Richard Holloway
Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh
The Xenofeminist Manifesto by Laboria Cuboniks
Paradise Rot b...

Theresa May is totally not insane

May can't get her Brexit deal passed at Westminster, so she's coming to Scotland to campaign for our support.

Zen liturgy: Translation of The Kannon Sutra

A few years ago, I realised I had never seen a good English translation of The Kannon Sutra, a.k.a. Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyo, so I decided to attempt one that was both accurate and easy to chant. This is the result (Romaji followed by English):

ENMEI JUKKU KANNON GYO

KAN ZE ON
NA MU BUTSU
YO BUTSU U IN
YO BUTSU U EN
BUP PO SO EN
JO RAKU GA JO
CHO NEN KAN ZE ON
BO NEN KAN ZE ON
NEN NEN JU SHIN KI
NEN NEN FU RI SHIN


TEN-LINE LIFE-PROLONGING KANNON SUTRA

Kanzeon
Veneration to the Buddha
The Buddha is my origin
Th...

Zen and science agree about memory

Memory can never be trusted. We think of our experiences as being real, our personal stories as being true. We think what we remember, and the stories we tell about these memories, are what actually happened. But this is an illusion, which, if we believe in it, becomes a delusion. There are events, and various people have their experiences of an event, and the experiences may vary so much that the event itself may disappear.

The event may be a brief incident, or a years-long marriage, bu...

How to do Zen meditation

Cosmic Mudra Zazen means “sitting in meditation.” It is the heart of Zen practice, and is most useful if done daily. It is best learned from a teacher, who can check your posture and answer questions, but here are the basics of the practice that Dogen Zenji calls “the Dharma gate of great ease and joy.”

Zazen is traditionally done sitting on the floor on a zafu (cushion) and zabuton (mat), but can be done on a chair or any firm seat.
  
If using a zafu and zabuton, sit on the edge of the za...

Books have an obesity problem

I read a review that described a book as "a slim 200 pages." I thought of the books I grew up seeing in Glasgow bookshops; 200 pages was unusually excessive, with the average being 150 pages or less. I don't know how or when books became so bloated, but the reviewer's remark reminded me that I aim to get as close to a blank page as is possible while still having a story.

Lost

Halloween rising

Halloween rising,
and I’m riding shotgun
with an incandescent raver girl
at the wheel
and a junkie on the back seat
when the bars are closing
and the desert a mirror
of the moon

— Phoenix, Arizona 2007

This bike was intact when I walked past it yesterday

Autumn in Maryhill