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Orientation 2

Naikan In Four Movements

This four-part Naikan series grew out of a course I offered at Baltimore Dharma Group in Spring 2025. While Naikan is often framed as a tool for self-reflection, I came to see it as something more relational: not a system of correction, but a practice of returning—again and again—to what holds us, what flows through us, what we leave behind, and what we remain with.
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Orientation 3

Threshold to Threadwork

Introduction: There are two doors into this work. The one below meets the moment. It is written in accessible language—for those seeking clarity about autistic experience, and especially about how it differs in rhythm, in structure, and in the invisible labor it asks of those who must translate themselves to be understood. But this isn’t the only way in. There is another door—quieter, less translated, more interior. If you're looking not just for insight, but for shape—if you’ve ever sensed that what goes unspoken is sometimes the most coherent thing there is—you may find yourself at home there.
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Orientation 4

Holding Vow Sutra: An Introduction

Introduction and Intention:  This is a sutra, but not a sutra in the traditional sense. It is not part of the Buddhist canon, nor is it offered from a seat of transmission or formal authority. It is, rather, a thread — woven from lived practice, shaped by fidelity, and rooted in a vow that did not begin with me and does not end with me.
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Featured

The Autistic Mode: A Way Of Thinking

We all have moments of deep concentration—those times when we are so absorbed in something that the world recedes. A musician practicing alone, refining a passage with exquisite focus. A philosopher turning an argument over in their mind, testing its weight from every angle. A scientist working through the layers of an equation, adjusting variables, refining the logic until it holds. In these moments, the noise of the world fades, and what remains is a kind of clarity, a steady presence of thought moving toward resolution.

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Musings from the Meta-Verse: Tip of the Iceberg Cosmologies

Before you begin: please take a moment, settle in, enjoy the image above—of me holding my baby daughter as a first-time dad, tune into the frequency of restful wonder. Now allow your mind to wander outward from the edges of that image: to the room, to the street outside, to the vast sky beyond the vast sky. Further—past the solar system, past the galaxy’s edge, past everything known—to the edge of the cosmos. And then…

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Woven

I never stopped making art. I just didn’t always call it that. What I made with you, my loves — in those days we shared — was the most embodied form of relational creation. Art was us — there was no interruption. Something Luu Li and and I talked about yesterday landed deeply. She said, “Wow Papa, 54 years! I'm so glad you’re starting to do art again.” And I told her — honestly — it’s never left me. But after that, I found myself thinking: when I was homeschooling Luu Li and CT, I wasn’t just not doing art — I was expressing my creativity through my life with them.
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Holding Vow Sutra: An Introduction

A New Sutra In Three Movements
Introduction and Intention
This is a sutra, but not a sutra in the traditional sense. It is not part of the Buddhist canon, nor is it offered from a seat of transmission or formal authority. It is, rather, a thread — woven from lived practice, shaped by fidelity, and rooted in a vow that did not begin with me and does not end with me. The word sutra comes from the Sanskrit root sūtr — meaning thread — referring to something that weaves what must be remembered. Its form echoes classical structures not to imitate them, but to fulfill their function: a seed of wisdom, small in size but infinite in depth. This thread arose in the quiet after shared inquiry — in the stillness that follows real encounter — like the stillness that followed Naikan in Four Movements . It is offered not as teaching, but as structure and pattern — a shape that might remain when speech falls away. This is not a practice of emotional validation or relational repair, though it may touch those places. Rather, it enters the stream of vow — not as self-expression, but as structural presence. What follows is not therapeutic, but liturgical:  a shape that remains when speech and certainty do not. It lives in the lineage of śūnyatā, where form and emptiness do not oppose. And it draws from Mahāyāna motifs to clarify its source: contact, recognition, and non-abandonment. May this sutra be read as one might listen to a bell — not for doctrine, but for pattern. Not for answers, but for something that stays. With bows, Dōmon 道門 Luu Pham 2025
Structure of the Holding Vow Sutra
This offering unfolds in three movements, each reflecting a distinct aspect of the vow to remain: The Sutra — A liturgical form drawn from Buddhist cadence, shaped by fidelity, and spoken from contact.
  →  Holding Vow Sutra ⧉ 
The Commentary — A layered reflection tracing the roots of each section within Buddhist thought, clarifying sources and intentions.
  →  Holding Vow Sutra Commentary ⧉ 
The Poem — A distillation in another voice, where meaning surfaces not through argument or lineage, but through echo.
  →  What Remains (a poem) ⧉ 
Each part holds a different thread. Together, they form the weave.
~ End ~
For orientation beyond this page, you may enter through:
•The Vibrating Thread: From the Field of Redibility
•Naikan in Four Movements
•Threadwork (or begin with  Threshold to Threadwork ⧉  for a gentler entry)
•The Holding Vow Sutra (drawn from the arc of  Naikan: The Rhythm of Vow ⧉ , but arriving later)
Grass in Desert
Winter wind gone. Grass bowed, unseen. Spring: the breath beneath.
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