Lama Rinzen Mystery Series
About the Lama Rinzen Mystery Series
Crime Mysteries Wrapped Inside Buddhist Mysteries
What does that mean, a crime mystery wrapped in a Buddhist mystery?
It could mean it’s a challenge. A question if any solution can ever be as fixed and certain as we’d like it to be.
Is a mystery still a mystery once it’s figured out? Can true mysteries ever be figured out?
Or are the solutions we assign them nothing more than delusions meant to calm us and convince us we’re in control?
The Buddha says we should experience the world intimately and not as something our minds need to unravel. The Buddha teaches us to drop such abstract thinking and experience the world directly without the need to impose our egos pm top of it.
Thinking things through does not provide solutions. Only direct in-the-moment experience does that.
In each Lama Rinzen Mystery the lama must learn a Buddhist lesson and solve a crime. But lessons can be tricky. Only when the lama stops trying to explain them does the lesson become clear.
When the lesson awakens us, that’s when we understand its mystery.
Take the Lama Rinzen Get Lit Quiz & Win
An Everyday Meditation #2: Thoughts Arise
During our everyday meditation, thoughts arise. These can be the seeds of insight, if only we are aware of them. Some say thoughts during meditation are impediments. This is true, they can be. Thoughts can arise either with our being aware or not being aware of them. To reconsider things, it is not the thought
Communion Town, by Sam Thompson
Smart, Edgy Horror. Except Better. Sam Thompson’s Communion Town: A City in Ten Chapters reminds me a little of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, except I has more plot. It reminds me of China Mieville’s The City and the City, except it has less plot. Mostly it feels like literary slug undulating beneath the reader’s skin
Fascism by Madeleine Albright and Thoughts about Trump’s America
Trump’s losing at politics, ignoring democracy, declaring an emergency where no emergency exists. Like it or not, we’re getting a lesson in fascism. I’m reading Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning. No, it is not a Trump-bashing tell-all. It barely mentions him. But like the title says, it warns democratic countries to learn from the mid-20th
Rascal in the Bardo
This Christmas Eve is a Bardo day, and particularly festive for me and my old buddy and Tibetan Terrier Teacher, Rascal. You may know, Rascal died November 5. I was with him, and felt his moment of passing. Very real. Very immediate the way a spirit lifts and leaves. My teachers say 49 days after
Write Like A Buddha
Writing Like a Buddha is a blog for writers. It includes thoughts, meditations and writing exercises to help authors see the world anew.
In Buddhism, every moment is a rebirth. A step outside of the normal into a burst of reawakening. We call these bardo moments—time in between past and future, between where we’ve been and where we are heading.
That is what we do as writers. Reimagine the ordinary as something new. Writing Like a Buddha is meant to help us experience the world fresh, and not as we already know it. Whether you are a poet or prose writer, a fiction or non-fiction writer, I invite you to engage in the exercises, offer comments, ask questions, and contribute ideas. Let’s create a mindful exchange of tips and practices to benefit us all.