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Enlightenment Is Embodied | The Awakened State (Part III) #Shorts
Part three of the four-part series drawn from *The Awakened State: What Buddhist Enlightenment Actually Means*. This one is about the body. There is an old habit of treating awakening as an escape from the body: leave the flesh behind, and something purer is waiting on the other side. The Lotus tradition does not read…
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The Assembly Never Dispersed: Who Are the Students of the Lotus Sutra?
For some time I have had a quiet feeling about this. When I sit with the Lotus Sutra, reading it, holding it in my mind, returning to it, something happens that I cannot quite name. A sense of being held. Of being placed in a particular kind of attention. As though the sutra knows me…
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The Army That Rose Out of the Ground
Post 9 of the Awakened State series. The fifth and final volume-bridge post—this one into The Bodhisattvas of the Earth (Vol V of The Lotus Sutra for the Modern Reader*). About a seven-minute read. There is a moment in Chapter 15 of the Lotus Sutra that is, in cinematic terms, the most important scene in…
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What If You’re Already Awake? | The Awakened State (Part II) #Shorts
Original enlightenment: awakening is not produced by practice — it is obscured, like the sun behind clouds. Zhiyi’s Six Stages of Identity map the difference. Part II of IV — The Nature of What We Are — from The Awakened State by William Altig.
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The Chapter Where the Buddha Admits He Lied About His Death
Post 8 of the Awakened State series. The fourth of the volume-bridge posts—this one into The Eternal Lifespan (Vol IV of The Lotus Sutra for the Modern Reader*). About a seven-minute read. There is a chapter in the Lotus Sutra that almost everyone skips. It comes at the structural hinge of the sutra. Up to…
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Have You Ever Felt That a Text Was Reading You Back?
For some time I have had a quiet feeling about this. When I sit with the Lotus Sutra, reading it, holding it in my mind, returning to it, something happens that I cannot quite name. A sense of being held. Of being placed in a particular kind of attention. As though the sutra knows me…
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What If No One Is Hopeless? | The Awakened State (Part I) #Shorts
The Nirvāṇa Sūtra reverses the early Buddhist map: even the being written off as hopeless is a burned seed that still contains life. Part I of IV — The Maps and the Territory — from The Awakened State: What Buddhist Enlightenment Actually Means by William Altig.
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The Flower That Blooms Once in Three Thousand Years — and the Two I Saw
I want to tell you about something I saw. I’m still not entirely sure what to do with it, which is part of why I’m telling you. It was a flower. A single white petal, smaller than a fire ant, on a stem like a black thread—a little thicker than the silk a spider lets…
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Why the Buddha Stopped Lecturing and Started Telling Stories
Post 7 of the Awakened State series. The third of the volume-bridge posts—this one into The Skillful Means (Vol III of The Lotus Sutra for the Modern Reader). About a seven-minute read. The most important pedagogical moment in the Lotus Sutra is one in which the Buddha says nothing at all. Chapter 2 is called…
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The Hellhounds Have Stopped Chasing: “Hellhounds and the Void” Accepted for Publication
There’s a phrase I’ve come back to for years, sitting with the Heart Sūtra on my own porch, guitar within reach: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Easy to say. Harder to live. Hardest of all, maybe, to explain to someone who’s actually running from something—a debt, a diagnosis, a hellhound on their trail, in…
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