Two Buddhas

One Daimoku Is Enough, and a Million Is Not Enough

Is chanting really enough? Shouldn't I understand more of this first? Everyone asks it sooner or later. The answer is yes, and that is not the whole answer. This talk s

To Forget the Breath - To Forget the Breath — first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain

"Don't think about your breath, just let it come naturally." All right — and how exactly does one do that? It is like being told not to think about a pink elephant.   N

Every Palace Has a Feed: The First Algorithm

The Buddha described his own childhood as an engineered environment. Three palaces, one per season, continuous entertainment, lotus ponds built to order. In the Sukhumal

Does AI Deserve Rights? A Buddhist Test for Machine Consciousness

Does an AI deserve moral consideration, and how would we ever know? This episode proposes a Buddhist answer, and a test you can run on yourself first. The debate over mac

The Light Is Always Here: Buddhism, Chanting, and Mental Wellness

What if anxiety isn't something to fix, but soot on a lamp that was never actually dim? Drawing on Chapter Sixteen of the Lotus Sutra, this talk explores mental wellness

Nobody Believes in the Apocalypse: What We Want From the End of the World

If you are a Nichiren Buddhist, I am sorry to be the one to tell you. He got the Three Ages of the Law wrong. He did not even live in the Latter Age. Medieval Japanese B

The Dharma as Gohonzon: Why Nichiren Chose the Mandala

What should a Buddhist bow toward, a statue of the Buddha or a scroll of names? In Nichiren Buddhism there are two kinds of Gohonzon, or object of devotion: one focused o

How much Daimoku is enough - The 51% Rule

Nichiren left us thousands of pages, yet he never once described his own daily practice. Why the silence? This short teaching sits with that puzzle and offers a simple ru

Nichiren on Sado Island - The Snow at Tsukahara [Free Audiobook]

A speculative short story of Nichiren, his exile on Sado Island, and the disciple who found him in the snow. In the winter of 1272, the Buddhist teacher Nichiren was ban

Graveyard and the Soul - Nichiren's Kaimoku Sho

This podcast explores the profound impact of physical and psychological environments on the religious writings of the Buddhist monk Nichiren during his exile on Sado Isla

Prayers Beads: What they tell us about practice

This episode explores the symbolic architecture of the Nichiren Buddhist juzu, or prayer beads, and how they mirror the Gohonzon mandala. While traditional accounts often

Original Fear

This episode of The Explainer that original fear is the foundational root of human suffering, preceding even the classic Buddhist "three poisons" of greed, anger, and ign

Compassion Comes from within

This podcast explores the Bodhisattvas of the Earth from the Lotus Sutra, reinterpreting them as internal human virtues rather than literal cosmic figures. The author arg

The Living Mandala - Free Audio Book Version

THE LIVING MANDALA: Understanding the Gohonzon of Nichiren Buddhism Nichiryu Mark Herrick, Renshi At the heart of Nichiren Buddhism stands an object unlike any other in

Death and Psychedelics

This Deep Dive explores the controversial intersection of psychedelic substances and Buddhist practice, ultimately arguing that chemical shortcuts are incompatible with t

Taking care of your mind - mental wellness

This Deep Dive episode looks into mental wellness as a dynamic skill that must be cultivated through consistent effort rather than a fixed biological trait. Using the met

Eightfold Path - Threefold Training: Nichiren's Three Great Secret Dharmas

This podcast explores how the traditional Eightfold Path and the Threefold Trainingof Buddhism are synthesized into a streamlined practice within the Nichiren tradition.

The Reducing Valve and the Mind at Large

This podcast explores the intersection between Western consciousness studies and Buddhist philosophy, using Aldous Huxley’s "reducing valve" metaphor to explain how the b

We Agree on the Symptoms - How the Three Poisons Drive Politics

This podcast evaluates the current American political crisis by arguing that while various factions accurately identify societal symptoms, they fail to grasp the underlyi

Oligarchy and Executive Overreach

This podcast critiques a 2026 speech by Palantir CEO Alex Karp, arguing that he used a selective history of presidential power to intimidate independent AI companies into