This page summarises the Buddhism section of a personal website for Christopher Michael Luna, preserved in a web archive. Views described here are his, presented in the third person for general information.
Standing on shifting ground
The section opens with a verse from Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra which argues that suffering belongs to no fixed person and so should be eased wherever it arises. It continues with a reference to Dr. Janet Gyatso’s 2003 address to Harvard Divinity School. She described emptiness not as nothingness but as a recognition of constant change and openness, and suggested that a firm stance on a ground of flux is a good place from which to think about fundamental questions.
From these sources the author draws a central message: stand firm in uncertainty, devote yourself to the liberation of all beings and recognise that the world exceeds the concepts we use to capture it. If that is so, what looks impossible may reflect our limited understanding, not the nature of reality. He adds that his Buddhist outlook, though seldom obvious, shapes his approach to leadership, teaching and design.
Why cosmology matters
A subsection on cosmology begins with a Japanese woodblock map of Mount Meru from the late Edo period, around 1860. Meru is the sacred mountain at the centre of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmography, with oceans, mountain ranges, the sun and the moon arranged around it.
His argument is that Western converts sometimes skim past cosmology, treating it as colourful add-ons to a “philosophical” core. He suggests this contrast can reproduce a stereotype that sets thoughtful Western meditators against devotional Asian practitioners, and he cites Robert Wright’s book Why Buddhism Is True as an example of the tendency to set aside rebirth and deities. Reading Buddhism through a Western division of natural and supernatural, he says, risks misunderstanding it from the start.
He offers an example. A teaching that suffering and delusion shape reality can be explained through psychology and the study of perception, which feels clinical and cerebral. Or it can be told through cosmology: when anger takes hold, you are reborn among the asuras, beings of wrath. He sees no need to choose. Holding the psychological and the cosmological readings in tension keeps an edge on each and reminds him that ultimate truth lies beyond any system of concepts.
Teachers
He credits a number of teachers, some met in person and some known through their writing and art. Chief among them is the scholar Charlie Hallisey, who advised his master’s thesis at Harvard. In his telling, Hallisey challenged the assumption that religion means being nice and that Buddhism is about happiness and harmony. The author says niceness can hide exclusion, that peace given absolute priority can protect the status quo over justice, and that grief, anger and sorrow belong to a real encounter with life.
That groundwork prepared him to read Chögyam Trungpa’s lectures Crazy Wisdom, where the teaching of “hopelessness” is described not as despair but as abandoning hope, understood as desire joined to expectation. The author says this opens a space of possibility for helping others in an age of ecological and political uncertainty.
Resources
Quoting Hallisey that the Dharma can be found “in the phone book if you look hard enough”, he nevertheless lists works that deepened his practice:
- Oxherding Tale by Charles Johnson, a humorous novel placing the quest for liberation within the experience of American slavery
- Miyazawa Kenji, a modern Buddhist poet exploring interdependence with nature and the self
- Therigatha, among the earliest collections of women’s literature, on suffering in lay life
- Spring Essence, poems by Hồ Xuân Hương embracing pleasure and sorrow together
- Radical Dharma, a guide to Buddhist thought and practice alongside injustice in the United States
- Apparitions of the Self, a study of autobiography in medieval Tibetan and wider Buddhist literature
- The Lotus Sutra, in Gene Reeves’ translation, important for the idea of skillful means
- Bodhicaryāvatāra by Śāntideva, the classic introduction to the bodhisattva path
- Vimalakirti Sutra, on non-dualism as taught by a layman
- Tatami Galaxy, an animated series about escaping who we are and the grasping of the ego
- Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring, a film about transforming suffering
- Ghost Dog, directed by Jim Jarmusch with music by the RZA, about interdependence and what is communicated beyond language
Reading the list
The resources span very different forms: a comic novel, poetry from different eras, classical sutras, an anime series and two films. That variety reflects a point made throughout the section, namely that the ideas of Buddhism are not confined to one genre or culture and that stories, images and poems can carry as much insight as formal philosophy. Readers new to the subject might begin with whichever form appeals most, whether a short poem collection or a film, before turning to the classic texts.
The author also stresses that no single list or authority can capture the tradition. Each recommendation is presented as personal and as one route among many.
A closing thought
Taken together, the section reads as an invitation to stay curious and humble. Concepts are useful, but the world exceeds them, so the sensible response is to keep studying, to listen to many teachers and to let ideas change how we act toward other people.
For more context see the introduction to Buddhist cosmology and the profile’s scholarship section.