When was the last time I actually posted at 3:40 AM?

Well, something woke me up.

I said a while back I wasn't going to post any more Buddhist/Taoist stuff here. As I mentioned then, there are plenty of other places that do that better than I can, and some are listed at right.

But from another perspective, everything I've posted since then has been Buddhist/Taoist in nature. At some point we all have to live our daily lives, and unless you're a monastic, the better part of your typical day is not going to be devoted to the mechanics or rituals of your belief system.

A friend once described me as "Buddhist Lite." I guess that's true. But what would make me "Buddhist Classic"? A saffron robe and begging bowl? A shaved head? (Granted, my hair is rather short these days, but that's for convenience, not to make me look like a monk.)

Even Jesus and the Buddha had the events of daily life: waking up in the morning, eating, bathing, walking from one place to another and so on.

And what you've gotten in this blog is the daily life of someone who is trying, with varying degrees of success from day to day, to lead a daily Buddhist/Taoist life. It's just a lot of mundane, day-to-day stuff, because that's what life — even the examined, inward-looking life — is.

The difference between my life and anyone else's life is, I hope, that I'm living it with some level of mindfulness about the true nature of the universe and my place in it.

My favorite zen koan is the one where the old abbott of the monastery was sorting and weighing flax. The young monk came up and asked "What is the Buddha?" The old master replied, "Three pounds of flax."

In other words — or at least in my other words, and wiser people may disagree — Buddha nature is not some mystical floating-in-the-air meditation event. It's just the ordinary stuff we do every day. And this blog has been mostly about the ordinary stuff I do every day. The blog itself is part of the ordinary stuff I do every day.

Barring some extraordinary turn of events, I am never going to deliver a Sermon on the Mount or Diamond Sutra, so the daily struggle against cat shit is about as profound as it's going to get for me.

If you asked me "What is the Buddha?" I guess I would have to say, "cleaning the litter box."

Or maybe "Smoke on the Water."