John Lee Pendall is a featured columnist, editor, podcast host, and co-owner of the Tattooed Buddha. He’s also a poet, composer, multi-instrumentalist (He’s recorded five albums so far), an amateur photographer/graphic designer and pen & ink artist, and he has a B.S. in psychology. He currently lives between two cornfields in rural Illinois. His errant knowledge base covers astronomy, theology, philosophy, music theory, and quoting lines from movies.
John Lee practices Chan Buddhism as a Novice Chan Priest. He’s also a lay Buddhologist (Buddhist scholar), and frequently translates and writes commentaries on Buddhist texts.
Feel free to check out John’s Facebook page and his blog, “Salty Dharma.”
Sticks & Stones May Break Bones, But Words Can Hurt Us Too
By John Pendall American Buddhists, well, we tend to botch Right Speech. We tend to use our words carelessly, like casually dropping warheads into our neighbors' swimming pools. Words are a powerful medicine, but like any medicine, they can also be...
Please Guru Responsibly
By John Pendall I know that the self is a collection of aggregates, or an illusory appearance of absolute emptiness, or the Dharmakaya but, it's also kind of a useful thing to have around. It might even be something worth defending. It feels good to be myself...
Walking the Lone Buddha Path
By John Pendall (Author) "I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in And stops my mind from wandering Where it will go... "And it really doesn't matter if I'm wrong I'm right Where I belong I'm right where I belong Silly people standing there who disagree...
Retreats, The Good, the Bad & the Controversy: 4 Buddhists Walk into a Facebook Chat {Interview}
By John Author Following up on the death of Megan Vogt, I felt compelled to interview some TTB columnists so that we could prevent something like this from happening again. Megan developed psychosis after enduring a 10-day S.N. Goenka Vipassana retreat. She...
The Darker Side of Meditation: Please Meditate Responsibly
By John Author For centuries, Zen teachers have told us that practice is about the Great Matter---life and death. Don't take that as hyperbole and gloss over it with typical Western conceit. Meditation can save lives... it can also end them. Out of all the...
I Know I Will Trust the Way Again, Just Not Right Now
By John Author I don't want to die. Death and the rapid fleeing of time and opportunity weigh on me at times. The Diamond and Heart Sutras say that death is a perception and nothing more. It's a noble teaching that offers me potential freedom from suffering,...
Deadbeat Buddha
By John Author Siddhartha Gautama was a deadbeat Dad. How does that make you feel? We don't talk about that very often because, unlike ancient Indians, modern Westerners don't look too fondly on abandoning your wife and child in the dead of night to seek...
Trusting the Way: How a Cynical Die-Hard Atheist Became Buddhist
By John Author Dana asked me, "How did you get into Buddhism?" The short answer is, "Curiosity." It was a burning, insatiable need to understand everything in the universe, to answer every question without compromise or good enoughs. If curiosity is the function of...
Dharma in a Superstore Parking Lot (Even without a Bodhi Tree)
By John Author I was standing outside work the other night, enjoying the crisp air during my lunch hour, then---seemingly out of nowhere---she materialized. She was bundled in layers of mismatched clothes hiding all but her weathered, but youthful, face. A...
This is What Happens When We Stop Creating Stories About Life & Start Living
By John Author Thinking, thinking, thinking... The gears turning day and night, belching out an incessant spew of cacophonous gibberish. Grinding---grinding away in my cranium, like some rabid little cymbal monkey. Bang! Bang! Bang! There they go, spinning in...
Bearing the Unbearable {Book Review}
By John Author "This book will not offer you a spiritual bypass; it won't make it so that you don't have to face the pain of grief---nor should it... What this book will do, I hope, is to provide a safe space to feel, to be with your understandably...
There is Beauty in a Broken Heart—An Impossible Gratitude
By John Pendall I'm terrified of love. It's raised me higher than any philosophy, religious experience or drug. It's pulled me into the deepest pits of despair, where even suicide sounds pointless. How can something have such power? How can it inspire such...
Practice Boils Down to One Thing: Respect
By John Author I've said several times that practice boils down to just one thing, and each time I say it, that one thing is different. That's either because my nomad mind makes tools and tosses them aside when they're no longer useful, or because there are...
How Buddhism Teaches Us to Deal with Negative Emotions
By John Author Welcome, Sexy Reader, to the 50th article I've written for TTB! That's 50 articles of me incessantly rambling with no regard for the human attention span, logic, or common decency. Today, we're going to talk about acceptance, coping with...
The Psychedelic Passages: Did Buddha Trip?
By John Author This article is just a meandering, something to think about. I'm not actually going to go off the deep end and start flagellating, sacrificing apples, and praying to Samantabhadra or anything. It's just a different slant on Buddhism based on...