First, I am off to Japan again this summer. Due to illness and such, my vacation time is very limited, plus I will be helping my oldest daughter with college prep, while my wife and son head to Japan early to stay with family. Anyhow, all this is to say is that we’ll be heading to Kyoto again, just as we did last year, and hopefully I will have some fun things to share. Due to very limited time, plus non-vacation stuff, we’ll see how much I can post this year.
Second, I have been experimenting with making the blog more readable. I have been blogging since about 2005 in various forms, and such, and I realized lately while fixing up the other blog that I’ve become somewhat outdated in how I write blog posts. Blog technology has definitely advanced, and so are the ways that people read the blog. I noticed when I tried subscribing to my own blog that in some formats it is pretty hard to read, especially email. Some of the subtle links, or images don’t render properly.
What this means is that I will try to update the blog format, and how I write posts, so that they are readable in mobile formats. I intend to keep the content the same, but make it more readable hopefully. Thanks for your patience as I try to make things more enjoyable for readers.
The last few weeks have flown by, and I realized that I hadn’t blogged anything for the past 2-3 weeks!
The good news is that nothing is wrong (this time): everything is fine, but I am just busy with both work and family. Most of it is good busy, too.
I have several posts in draft, but all of them require a bit of research, and I just haven’t had the time to sit down and finish. And, as always, I am playing too much Fire Emblem in my spare time.1
Hopefully in the next week, I can go back to a regular cadence again.
Anyhow, thanks for your patience, and I hope you’ll enjoy the content coming up.
1 I am simultaneous playing through Three Houses (again), Three Hopes, and Engage in what little spare time I have.
Just some quick updates. It’s day 8 for me since getting out of the hospital, and it’s been a tough recovery. My body is healing well enough, but the healing process has taken a lot of my energy, and because I was in the hospital for so long eating a liquid diet, I’ve had to readjust to eating normal food again. I tend to sleep a lot more than before, and don’t have my old stamina yet. I’m told it will probably take the rest of the month to fully recover.
On the plus side, though, I feel like I am getting stronger every day. I can now walk around my neighborhood a bit, and don’t take as many naps as before. This also means I have more time to get back into my old routine more and more, which is nice. My kids are happy to have me home as well.
I can’t emphasize enough how nice it is to be home, in my own bed, eating home cooked food, and just seeing the family again. Walking outside and feeling sunlight or smelling trees is such a nice thing to do again. I’ve also been touched by friends who’ve come out and supported us, checked in on me, etc.
My emergency room visit was pretty serious, and while probably not fatal, it was no joke. The experience was a mental shock, especially considering I might not come back home, and has given me a lot to think about. I don’t know if I’ll blog much about that though, as it’s something I want to chew on for a while. That said, I’ve been dabbling again in Buddhist and Japanese subjects and hopefully will have some fun content for you all soon.
I know I originally said i’d take the month off, but I have a hunch I’ll be posting sooner than that. 😋
In addition to bout of COVID I was dealing with, I ended up in the emergency room due to pancreatitis, a problem related to my gall bladder. It has been a long, long week at the hospital, recovering and prepping to have my gall bladder removed. I am thankfully home now, minus a gall bladder, but my energy level is very low. Between the surgery, hospital stay and covid my body is shattered.
There’s not much else I wanted to say at the moment, but I am taking the rest of March off to rest and recover.
FOMO, the feeling of missing out, can happen any time, but it feels like the holidays really exacerbate this feeling.
This year my wife and I chose not to go to company holiday party. It is a 21+ event that my company hosts, and is a big social event around the workplace, but since my kids obviously can’t go, we felt that we’d rather stay home and enjoy our time as a family than leave the kids at home just so the parents could have fun.
The notion of skipping the party got some odd looks from people at work, but generally people were supportive (while obviously planning to go themselves).
But the Monday after the party, I was inundated with post-holiday party discussions, anecdotes, photos on the company social media, and so on. Even if no one intends it, it’s grating to be constantly reminded of all the fun people had while I chose to miss out.
I willingly chose to stay home and hang out with my kids, and I don’t regret that, but I also don’t enjoy the feeling that everyone else celebrated anyway without me. Selfish, but still.
This also goes for the holidays themselves. I grew up Christian, but in my teens and 20’s I left that behind1 and eventually took up the Buddhist path. For most of the year, I have no qualms about this, but then every Christmas and Easter, I feel a pang of FOMO. Maybe it’s because I grew up with Sunday school, and the old biblical stories still have a place in my heart,2 or maybe it’s because holidays just aren’t prominent in the Buddhist faith. I don’t know. But every year I miss it, then when the holiday passes, I am back to my old self.3
It feels sometimes like someone who’s exiled themselves, and looking back at everything they have missed.
But when I think about it, it’s something I willingly left behind, and am glad for doing so. From a personal growth and theological standpoint, I feel like Buddhism was much more helpful to me, even with all the twists and turns I’ve gone through over the years. It’s hard to imagine what my life would have been like if I hadn’t had the encounters I did. It’s a lonely path sometimes, especially living in the West, but I am glad I chose it.
1 I am sure someone reading this will eventually want to ask “why”, and whether I’d consider coming back. Short answer is “no”, and save your breath. That ship sailed a long time ago.
2 It’s hard to explain. It’s not something I personally believe in, I just enjoy imagining the time and place, maybe in the same way I feel about reading Tolkien or something. Or, I miss it the way I miss Christmas as depicted in the Peanuts cartoons: something that’s idyllic, but doesn’t actually exist.
3 I even picked up the Bible a couple times over the years and read through some old, familiar chapters, but they feel hollow to me now with the benefit of perspective. The Dharma is just so much deeper and meaningful to me now.
I’ve been thinking about this quote from Fire Emblem: Three Houses ever since the conflict in Gaza has started. I recognize that different readers will have different views about the Gaza conflict, so I won’t try to impose any ideas or viewpoints.
So, I’ll just leave that quote for your consideration, as well as these:
Confucius said, The gentleman has three things to be aware of. When he is young and his energies are not fully controlled, he bewares of sexual attraction. When he is mature and his energies are at their height, he bewares of aggressiveness. When he is old and his energies have waned, he bewares of avariciousness.
The Analects of Confucius, 16:7, translation by Burton Watson
Although I don’t talk about the Analects of Confucius very often, this is a quote that I stumbled upon many years ago and often dwell on.
As I look back, I can definitely see the progression in my own life: I was a hopeless romantic in my teens and 20’s,1 bull-headed and arrogant in my 30’s while building up my career, and now as I approach my mid-40’s, I can see the greed and acquisitiveness cropping up now. My life is more stable than it was in my 20’s, and I have a bad habit of buying nostalgic things, or books I don’t need. In other words, a tendency or hoard now that I am able to do so.
After my grandfather passed away a few years ago, we had to sift through all his accumulated stuff, and it was a lot. He was not a hoarder by nature, and was comparatively organized, but it was still a lot of stuff. Similarly, my wife’s parents have accumulated some items as well.
My wife and I have both discussed that as we get older we do not want to be a burden on our kids, and that includes keeping things simple at home, so they don’t have a ton to throw out later. Easier said than done, but it’s an important thing to remember as you get older. People do naturally tend to hoard in their later years. Confucius knew it as far back as 5th century BCE, and the same pattern of human behavior is true even now in the 21st century.
The den in our home has piled up a lot of things, and this weekend I finally looked around and found tons and tons of books I didn’t need, including some D&D books I just never used (and now don’t want), really old reference books that I might have used only once yet are taking up a lot of space, and a huge collection of old Roger Zelazny novels that I had been collecting:
In many cases, I had redundant copies, with different cover art, or they were just books I didn’t want anymore, such as the latter books in the Amber series,2 or the collaboration novels that don’t interest me.3
In any case, I spent most of a day sorting books and managed to pare down my book collection by one-third, and now have 4 stacks of books sitting on the floor waiting to be sold to Half Price Books, or tossed out for good. In some cases, I can simply recycle old books where possible by removing the covers and recycling the pages. Further, I found a bunch of old journals I kept when learning Greek and Sanskrit, and while it’s fun to see the progress, they’re also taking up space.
Further, I have a bunch of DVDs, KPop CDs,4 and games I hardly ever use, probably further paring things down. I don’t need to throw them all out, but it’s not hard to separate what I actually use and want to keep (e.g. Lord of the Rings trilogy on DVD because streaming sucks) vs. things I never watch such as Star Wars sequel movies.
It really is amazing how much I have accumulated in the last 15 years.
To be honest, it’s been a great feeling to clean all this out. When I see my bookshelf looking trim and well-organized with room to spare, less schwag from random toys and figures I had accumulated, it makes me feel lighter. I may remove even more to make room, but we’ll see.
This is hardly the level of cleaning that someone like Marie Kondo might have suggested, but it is worthwhile to clean out the house from time to time, while also guarding against future impulsive purchases. Taking a half-second to think before you do something impulsive can probably save you future headaches. I have started to do this more and more in recent months, reminding myself that I am pretty happy overall with what I have, even I am still paying for years of impulsive clutter.
As I wrote in my book, much of what we carry around is as much as mental burden as it is a physical one, so sometimes it’s perfectly fine to just put it down and leave it.
For example, I even threw out some really, really old sentimental items because they were just not needed anymore. I realized that nostalgia is all well and good in small doses, but you can’t cling to everything in your past, and once you’re dead, it won’t mean anything to whomever has to clean up that stuff anyway.
Leonard Nimoy was right:
Of course, I have a hunch that I’ll be having this conversation again in 5 years, but we’ll see. 😉
1 My mother told me that I was a hopeless romantic since I was probably 5 years old, but I definitely remember being girl-crazy in high school and college. I am pretty happy that I was able to find that special lady in my life a while back, though. 🥰
2 The first five books of the Amber series are awesome and I re-read them from time to time, but the last five aren’t worth re-reading. The convoluted plot and new generation of characters really turned me off.
3 Roger Zelazny collaborated with another of authors at the time, and some of those books definitely reflect the other author more than Zelazny. Frankly, some of them just aren’t very good. I do like Coils though.
4 I was hugely into KPop about 10-15 years ago, during the days of SNSD, 2NE1 and so on, but frankly most of it isn’t really worth holding on anymore. Plus, there are the smaller groups that just never really made it, and whose CD’s it’s time to let go of.
First, my family and I are finally heading back to Japan at the end of this year! Japan finally relaxed its visa restrictions on vaccinated travelers, and so we can finally go after 3 years. My wife hasn’t seen her parents, and my kids have seen their grandparents or auntie in all this time.
Second, after some initial technical difficulties, I finally consolidated my blog and my side project in AWS under the address https//nembutsu.cc. The blog’s URL is all fixed and you can use the new URL (or the old one is fine too). Apologies for the hassle. I made a dumb mistake when migrating the DNS. In short: read the directions carefully.
That’s it for now! Have a great weekend dear readers, and I will be posting from Japan in late December once we get there, and I decide what I would like to visit. 😎
You may have noticed a few changes, and so I wanted to post some quick updates:
I added a new blog page on tips for learning Japanese Language. This was inspired by my recent grumblings about learning Japanese on Duolingo, and also by a recent conversation with a co-worker who was also taking the JLPT exam and needed advice. I will be fleshing out the content more, but for now, it’s a start. I had been mulling this idea for a while, so I finally decide to just do it.
I also made a new introduction page to Buddhism in Ukrainian,inspired by a recent conversation by a different coworker, who is Ukrainian and wanted to learn more about Buddhism, but resources in Ukrainian language are (not surprisingly) very few. I wish I could say I wrote it all myself, but I had to write in English using straightforward, simple text and then Google translate into Ukrainian, but validated Buddhist terminology in Wikipedia as best I could. This one too will be a work in progress.
Also, I finally finished a new version of the chanting guide for the Amitabha Sutra. I made the old one about 2 or 3 years ago, and use it from time to time, but it had some serious problems, and was (frankly) a pretty amateur effort. I heavily revised the document, and focused on making it more readable, but also divided the sutra by its usual, logical paragraphing. It also, as I unfortunately learned, had a number of textual errors, so I had to carefully proofread it Sino-Japanese-line-by-Sino-Japanese-line. As always, I will be field-testing it in my own time, and will update and fix with new revisions (part of my overhaul was also to make it easier to revise in the future).
On the sly, I’ve also been fixing quite a number of posts for broken links, awkward phrasing (I wish I had more time to proofread, but alas), and also to link newer documents to older ones for easier cross-referencing.
Now, I can finally go back and finish several blog post drafts that been sitting stuck until I got this work done. It’s all self-inflicted work, but I do enjoy it. I sincerely hope you do too. 😊
Thanks as always for reading, and have a great weekend!
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields 
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