Books

Muho talks about the meaning of happiness, June 16th 2015

Happiness is everywhere. Except for that exact spot where YOU are! (Polish proverb)

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be. (Abraham Lincoln)

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth. (George Bernard Shaw)

Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy; only because of that. … It’s everything, everything, Whoever learns will at once immediately become happy, that same moment.
Man only likes to count his troubles; he doesn’t calculate his happiness. (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

No one asked you to be happy. Get to work.
What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.
(Sidonie Gabrielle Colette)

Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. (Guillaume Apollinaire)

Many search for happiness as we look for a hate we wear on our heads. (Nikolaus Lenau)

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life. (Albert Camus)

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness. (Eric Hoffer)

Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

After all, it is foolish to keep probing for happiness or unhappiness, for it seems to me it would be hard to exchange the unhappiest days of my life for all the happy ones. (Hermann Hesse）

Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. (Og Mandino)

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our […]

Seigaku’s forth book In Japanese is out, May 26th 2015

Seigaku’s “Undo” in Berlin

20 newcomers at Antaiji, May 21st 2015

We had quite a good number of new arrivals yesterday. Twenty of them, and feathered.
They are retired hens from a chicken battery close buy, whom we buy for a price of 30 yen per hen. They will spend the rest of their days in the new chicken shed and the connecting palying ground, hopefully laying an egg from time to time to contribute to our diet.

Also, Antaiji was featured in a magazine called pen, representing Buddhism just behind the Dalai Lama. Too bad we did not make the first spot:

And for all of you who are in Japan right now, Muho will be leading zazen classes at the Truenature Yoga event in Karuizawa on the weekend (May 23rd and 24th):

After the storm: Pushing “taguruma”, May 13th 2015

Yesterday, we finished planting the third and last rice field just before an early typhoon passed by.
Today the weather is fine again, and we are pushing the “tagurama”, old-fashioned tools to remove weeds in an organic way, in the first rice field.
And tomorrow will be the first day of “oo-bousan”, the annual three-day holiday we have after the rice planting.

Muho talks about Q&A with Haruki Murakami, April 11th 2015

Link to Q&A with Haruki Murakami (in Japanese)

Talking head, March 25th 2015

Watching corpses, collecting bones after March sesshin in Antaiji, March 6th 2015

For all those that keep complaining that there is not enough English videos on our blog, Muho talks about Mahākāśyapa’s practice of watching decaying corpses in the Shobogenzo chapter Gyoji, and about differences in attitudes toward death and funerals in the West and in Japan.
Shot in the back and in the fron of the main hall after the March sesshin:

Link to the Shobogenzo Gyoji chapter (part on Mahakasyapa is on page 377):
thezensite.com/ZenTeachings/Dogen_Teachings/Shobogenzo/029gyoji.pdf

About Tri-State Crematory, the crematory that failed to cremate hundreds of bodies that were doscovered in 2002:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-State_Crematory

Last dharma talk on the “Dhammapada”, February 11th 2015

Muho circles around the main hall and discusses some Japanese books, one by Seigaku from Berlin’s “UNDO”, February 9th 2015

Seigaku’s UNSUI CAFE:
「雲水喫茶」
Seigaku’s UNDO：
facebook.com/undoinberlin

The wood stove keeps us warm, January 29th 2015

Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again. Yet, do not suppose that the ash is future and the firewood past.
You should understand that firewood abides in the phenomenal expression of firewood, which fully includes past and future and is independent of past and future. Ash abides in the phenomenal expression of ash, which fully includes future and past.
Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death.
This being so, it is an established way in buddha-dharma to deny that birth turns into death. Accordingly, birth is understood as no-birth. It is an unshakable teaching in Buddha’s discourse that death does not turn into birth. Accordingly, death is understood as no-death.
Birth is an expression complete this moment. Death is an expression complete this moment. They are like winter and spring. You can not say that winter becomes spring, or that spring becomes summer.

(Genjōkōan)