Lately I’ve been learning about Ven. Thích Thiện Chiếu (1898-1974), an exemplar of the Vietnamese #EngagedBuddhism tradition and an important revolutionary figure in Sài Gòn's colonial resistance. He published many commentaries that connected ideas of Buddhist liberation to national liberation. 1/

I was interviewed by the Fearless Wisdom podcast on the history of Vietnamese #Buddhism! Grateful for the opportunity to share some of my experience with the tradition & shine light on its rich history. 🙏🏼 (You’ll have to forgive how horribly I butcher some of the pronunciations of terms here.. 😅)

Has anyone else ever noticed how often Sakyamuni Buddha in his past lives slanders the dharma? 😅 In MN81, he had to be dragged by the hair to go see the Buddha after disparaging him. In T09, he insults the past life of Amitabha as a fraud. Just going around talking smack bout the Buddha and sangha.

A great write-up about the beautiful little temple in the Mission serving San Francisco’s Vietnamese Buddhist community.

Okay—took me a few days to get myself to the bookstore, but I cannot tell you how excited I am to crack into Ocean Vuong’s latest novel! #booksky #oceanvuong #emperorofgladness

I’m so very grateful to @tricyclemag.bsky.social for the opportunity to share more about Vietnamese #Buddhism and some of the history the oft-overlooked Thien-Pure Land Dual Cultivation tradition. It’s a true blessing to write about and share the dharma w/ others. Nam mô A di đà Phật 🙏🏼🙇🏻‍♂️🙏🏼🙇🏻‍♂️🙏🏼🙇🏻‍♂️

Absolutely. Vile. 😡 Sotheby’s to auction off a collection of STOLEN gems that had been found in India alongside the relics of the Buddha as an offering, known to have been excavated and taken by British colonists. Imperial violence against #buddhism still going strong in 2025.

Mahasthamaprapta Bodhisattva is a comrade—confirmed. ✊🏼 Honestly, I'm really moved by how pro-labor this #Buddhist scripture seems—like, it appears to argue/imply that the primary duty of both divine and stately power is improving the well-being of the working masses. 🙏🏼 Nam mô Đại thế chi Bồ tát 🙇🏻‍♂️

I don’t know if you’ve ever had lapsang souchong, a Chinese black tea popular with westerners, but it tastes the way an Asian grandma’s house smells—that is, like rancid Chinese medicine from a Taoist geomancer called Uncle Seven who smokes like a chimney and gambles behind the 99 Ranch market.

What a big moment for Vietnamese #Buddhism in America!

Real shocker: study finds US textbooks discuss Asians and Asian Americans almost exclusively in the contexts of being invaders, dissidents, and enemies.

Ven. Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā is one of the rock stars of Early Buddhist Studies. Her papers on the parinirvana of the Buddha's step-mother, and on the past lives of the Buddha Sakyamuni where he was a woman, are incredible reads for my fellow dharma geeks. Also this interview w/ her just dropped! 👇🏼👀

"Building the Pure Land: A Series of Anti-Imperialist Workshops for Jodo Shinshu Buddhists" with Rev. CJ Dunford, presented by the Jodo Shinshu Center. The first in this engaged Pure Land Buddhist series was yesterday. #buddhism #buddhist #engagedbuddhism #jodoshinshu #shinbuddhism #abolition

Remember Karen Russell promoting VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE twelve years ago, and how absolutely stunning the short story “Proving Up” was, and how she said she was working on a novel set in the Dust Bowl?? It’s FINALLY here! Cannot WAIT to start digging into this.

This is the real important science.

Free Mahmoud Khalil or we riot. ✊🏼

Went to Chinatown today and came across this statue that is unambiguously Angida the Snakecatcher (aka Clothsack Arhat), and not Maitreya (aka Clothsack Bodhisattva). Super cool! You almost never see this—normally, you get conflations between the two, sometimes with the Vietnamese Earth God too.

Yeah, all of this 100%

The United States’s foreign policy has always been fascism abroad, to maintain global US hegemony, bullying every nation to submit or be starved/bombed to death, like Vietnam was, Afghanistan, etc. The media isn’t just complicit—it cheers it on, sanitizing ethnic cleaning into “peacekeeping.”

Well, fuck. I knew they’d go after us too. 😠 “Tin said most of the more than 8,600 Vietnamese nationals who are currently facing “an order of removal” from the U.S. were migrants who entered the country usually as refugees before 1995, following the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam.”

Oh great, the tech-finance bros want to turn San Francisco into the most corrupt parts of Hong Kong, Macau, and Shenzhen where capitalist tycoons are allowed to run criminal empires with zero oversight—they might as well name it Night City too, go full cyberpunk dystopia.

Ancient Buddhist love poetry kinda slaps.

There are a million reasons why an immigrant might not have paperwork, most of them benign. Some were raised as Americans since their infancy. Some came as refugees of dead states. Some are the adopted children of American parents. And sometimes life circumstances get in the way of filing paperwork.

SF’s Russian Hill Bookstore has a surprisingly extensive #buddhiststudies section. I picked up this Pure Land anthology edited by Richard Payne and Kenneth Tanaka, which I’ve somehow never gotten to, and this translation of Maitreya’s Mahayanasutralamkara(-bhasyam).

Another cool find at the #RareBooksSF fair—one of the original 1000 copies of Das Kapital, Vol I.

Cool find at #rarebookssf this morning. As relevant today as ever.

Dunno who might wanna know abt this, but there’s a Cdrama for Buddhist Studies geeks called Faithful to Buddha, Faithful to You—a young historian travels back in time, meeting 4th c. translator Kumarajiva early in his career. They fall in love & put the entire history of Buddhism in China at risk.

While the Chinese are teaching Americans about how their socialism actually works in practice on Rednote, absent the lies of liberal propaganda, the Americans are reminding the Chinese—who’ve lived under socialism for nearly 75 years—just how horrific, bloody and oppressive capitalism actually is.

One year later, we now have more details on Neil Gaiman’s impropriety. tldr; he’s a sadistic monster that forces himself onto fans, coerces them into slavery, and tortures them for his own gratification. Heartbreaking when someone you looked up to since childhood turns out to be just vile scum.

And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Credits in Dead Lit Journals

Ever since they first encountered each other, Marxism and Buddhism formed a synergistic partnership aiming to dispel the misery of the masses—Marxism as the dialectical method to solve material suffering; Buddhism as the dialectical method to solve spiritual suffering. Together, a complete praxis.

Anxiously waiting for ANY article on Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship to mention whether or not refugees are considered illegal to Trump—we know the Haitian refugees who’ve applied for asylum aren’t legal to him. Genuinely concerned—do I still count as an American or not? Does my mother?

Whale worship has a long documented history in parts of Viet Nam. A possible source (or syncretic support?) for this is Madhyamagama 35 where the Buddha lists “huge fish-like creatures” many leagues in length I assume are whales along w/ turtles & crocodiles in a list of gods living in the ocean.

Tonight I read about Sakka, the leader of gods, when he was a human prince called Magha. Magha saw the village was a dirty mess and cleaned up a space large enough to stand and be comfortable, but a bully pushed him out of it and took over the space.

Thread on #meditation in #mentalhealth: I have seen a recent uptick of anti-meditation content in mental health circles. In my experience, there hasn't been a single client I have had that proper meditation has not worked for. It seems the root of the problem lies in colonialism and capitalism.

Earlier this year in Lion's Roar, I reflected on a liturgy in the Thiền tradition that calls on practitioners to worship Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva by embodying her, engaging the world with mindfulness, kindness, and a compassionate activism. #engagedbuddhism #buddhism #avalokitesvara #thien

Some fun trivia that intersects Buddhist Studies with pop-culture... The "Super Saiyan" trope from the anime DBZ of an advanced cultivator's black hair turning gold is actually an ancient Indian trope and appears in the episode of Megha and Dipamkara Buddha. #buddhism #literarytropes