Peter Coyote On Zen, Politics and an Amazing Life

[@skyrocketcoast219]

Mr Peter Coyote is just a lovely person!!

[@charlessupton]

Dear Peter: Greetings from Lexington, Kentucky, where my wife Jenny and I have lived since 2004; I hope you’ve been well. Your email is dead, so I've tried contacting you through these comments. I’m very glad that you finally took orders as a Buddhist Priest-just as I did (in 1988) as a Sufi faqir. May your connection with Tradition be a cell in the monastic rather than the correctional sense of that word-not to say that we all don’t need some correction from time to time…. I recently listened to your reading of “101 Zen Stories” on KZbin-beautiful, sober, clear, all the more expressive for its lack of self- conscious “expressiveness”, avoiding both emotive theatricality and clinical neutrality through the practice of “doing without doing” in the form of “acting without acting.” That was one of the things that led me to reach out to you, hoping to share a short piece I wrote called “The Spiritual Exercises of Lew Welch”, the material for which came to me partly from his books and partly through direct oral transmission. I believe that Lew planted the seeds for a new approach to Buddhism, not comprehensive enough to be called a “school” like Soto or Rinzai in Zen, but entirely compatible with both of them. I call it “Perceptual Buddhism” because, by and large, it has to do with how one would see the world from the standpoint of enlightened Mind (a state that, though certainly “ordinary”, is actually quite rare), and how learning to see the world like that might support the “achievement” (terrible word) of such a Mind. The Soto approach of “just sit” and the Rinzai one of “try to answer a question that has no answer” both tend to leave out the world, that infinite field of natural forms and humanly-contrived pseudo-forms and suffering sentient beings who, nonetheless, are all host to the Buddha nature, and-if they only knew it-all enlightened from the beginning. Consequently the “me obsessed with me” disease may subtly develop. In I Remain, Volume Two, Lew named me his “only heir”: therefore I consider it my duty to pass on to others his higher teachings, purified of the those lower karmic tendencies represented by his alcoholic suicide, not to mention his unguarded idealism and self-dramatization. I see this as a way of dedicating them to his liberation (assuming that he still in need of it) from the lower and darker worlds of existence. Who better to receive them, and evaluate them, but you? Sincerely, Charles (Skip) Upton (You can contact me at [e-mail] or [phone])

[@MrRichDavid]

Peter is a stud!

[@petermihacerar1137]

Just a stud????? More than a stud in my book! And I do live in u.s. anymore, but in the plane, and I could talk about life endlessly. Like it matters!!!!!!! Anyway, we are all on this plane!!!!!! Let go of self anyone! That is a first among many coincidencess! When there are all, and thus none, one can start living. Reset!!!!!