Institutional Zen & Me
June 28, 2009
Blogs are meant to be confessional, right? So here goes: the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh, these guys are my heroes. I want to be like them.
OK, not all that stunning as confessions go. But I did start meditating as a result. And I’m also reading an endless string of books about Buddhism. So where has this taken me?
First, I should say that I hardly knew where to start. The Dalai Lama is a Tibetan Buddhist, but Tibetan deities aren’t for me so that ruled out a Tibetan practice. Thich Nhat Hanh practices a Vietnamese version of Zen. He has written an enormous amount (several books sit on my shelf) and there are plenty of affiliated meditation groups in my town so I gave a couple of them a chance, but something didn’t quite mesh. I needed something else, but what?
