Buddhism 2

places, my parents died in this time period also. It was the ideal time to begin the serious study of Zen. However, I was too sick to study formally ­ as Joshu Sasaki Roshi another Zen master, working in America from the sixties onward, told me, through a friend, by letter from the Zen Mountain Center, on Mount Baldy, California .

Just this last winter I have rejected discipleship on the grounds of faulty stamina. But my insight has deepened until my Sensei, Rev. Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston , Roshi, told me this year, "Your mind, my mind ­ the same!" But he has forbidden me to allude further than I have already done to this attainment.

But it caused a breakthrough in my illness which, with the atypical medications I began taking in 2001, has lead to my finally being declared in "complete remission".

In 2005 I beacame connected with the sangha of The Atlantic Soto Zen Center, in Halifax, an offshoot of The Atlanta Soto Zen Center, in Atlanta Georgia. This has lead to my Receiving the Precepts and, next year, The Four Bodhisattva Vows.

Buddhism has been the source of all the beauty that has poured into my life: my wife, my family, my friends, my poetry ­ all of it ­ before and after inquiring into the Encyclopedia Britannica. It is the store house of the wonder, joy and enchantment that has followed and will follow me all the days of my life. and beyond.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009 ­ Kokyo David Edgar Young