The Buddha Diaries Recommends

Click here to read The Buddha Diaries review of "An Arrow to the Heart: a Commentary on The Heart Sutra" by Ken McLeod.

Thanks to this article by RJ Eskow in the current Tricycle (I think you have to subscribe to the online magazine if you want to read the whole article, but the magazine itself is a wonderful investment: consider this a plug!), we at The Buddha Diaries have been thinking a bit about Buddhism and blogging, and whether the twain should meet. Before The Buddha Diaires there was The Bush Diaries, the political blog that Peter started---like RJ Eskow--immediately following the 2004 re-election, and for the same reasons. Something had to be done, and the only thing I knew how to do was write. You'll find some further thoughts on the matter--and on the Democratic presidential race on Eskow's Huffington Post blog. It's an interesting debate, and one in which I engage every time I feel moved to respond, in these pages, to political events.

Cardozo, meanwhile, my trusty sidekick, turned up this wonderful site, where a bona fide warrior with a conscience fights the good fight against the senseless spilling of blood. Cardozo writes:

Pen and Sword

Jeff Huber, a retired U.S. Navy Commander, has been blogging about the Iraq War and other misadventures of the Bush administration since 2005. The voluminous archives of Pen and Sword exist as a compelling database of the illogicalities and deceptions that have characterized Bush II.

As Huber wrote in the blog's introductory post, by pursuing a "fist-first approach to shaping the rest of the world in our image, [we may] collapse under the weight of our own hubris..."

Pen and Sword is driven by a passion born from patriotism, and tempered by an encyclopedic knowledge of national security issues. The blog url (zenhuber.blogspot.com) hints at a connection to Buddhist thought, but we could find no confirmation of this apparent influence within the posts themselves. Perhaps Mr. Huber leaves it to the reader to draw the natural link between Buddhist teaching and his unflinching critiques of the neo-cons' propagation of war and U.S. global dominance.

Please drop in at Pen and Sword to pay a visit to this military man with two boots planted firmly on the ground.

To which Peter merely adds, Amen.