New Vine Ghost Site for Dosho’s Creative Endeavors (and other things)

This is a heads-up for you that we now have a new Vine of Obstacles Zen website on a platform called Ghost that combines the website for our training group and my many writings. This new post, for example, Fishing With A Straight Hook: Messing With Katagiri Roshi, is open for all of those who sign up for a free subscription.

If you’re familiar with Tetsugan Sensei’s and my work, you’ll notice that we’ve freshened up the description of our Vine training group and included a process for anyone interested in awakening (and post-awakening training) as a householder to check us out – click here. Yes, there are a few spaces for new students now available on the Vine. And our next intensive training will begin in mid October, focussing on Hakuin Zenji’s teaching. So if you have been thinking that you might want to enter into Zen training with us, now is a good time to begin the process.

The biggest change that the Ghost site offers, though, is that it also will be the site for videos, interviews, my writing (original translations of classic texts, challenging and sometimes eviscerating comments about the present state of Zen in the West, photos of the lovely environs we live in, etc), Tetsugan Sensei’s writing, guest posts, photos, etc., all in one place with unlimited room for subscribers.

Viner Wit Myomon has helped a lot (thank you!), including importing the last year-and-a-half of material from Patreon (179 posts!). It surprised us to see how much content was there!

Ghost is a site that facilitates subscriber systems (like Substack) that are quite popular now. They allow authors, artists, and other creative types to get paid for their work in a crowd-sourced manner – the idea is that many people contribute a small amount to support the work – so that the actual posts are ad free, unlike you know where. I’m using the same tiered system that I had used at the Patreon site, but now the tiers have different benefits.

FYI, given that Tetsugan Sensei and I teach Zen full time (with our combined 70 years of Zen practice), the income we receive from our Zen writing and other creative endeavors is an important part of our monthly budget. Occasionally, we hear complaints that all Zen offerings should be free. Well, that should is a value that the grocery store, utility company, and our landlord don’t seem to share. That said, I’d love to see our economy organized so that all spiritual teachers are supported to do their work, but for now, that’s not real. Maybe with the coming revolution where almost all work is done by AI?

Meanwhile….

For those of you that are Patreon subscribers (thank you!), August will be a transition month with posts going up on both Patreon and Ghost. We’ll be asking Patrons to cancel their Patreon subscription and then sign-up for a paid tiers at Ghost. Come September, all posts will go up just on the Vine Ghost website and the Dosho Port Roshi Patreon site will be closed.

There are a bunch of free posts on the Vine Ghost now, including some that were restricted while they were posted on Patreon (and were not posted here on Patheos), so you might enjoy checking those out (many are quite short, for example, inspirational quotes from Dahui’s Shobogenzo).

As we go along, more posts, especially those that take a lot of time to create (like translations of whole cases from the Record of Going Easy, aka, the Shoyoroku, that take at least two weeks to produce), will be available only for paying subscribers.

FYI, I will continue using this Wild Fox Zen Patheos site for now where fifteen years of my writings with my quirky perspective on Zen are free (with advertisements), but I will shift more and more to only posting on the Vine of Obstacles Zen Ghost site. My specialized interest in depth dharma has not attracted a following here on Patheos that generates much income. So if you want to stay tuned, please hop over to our new Vine Ghost site and subscribe for free. You will then receive notices about open posts.

You are invited and encouraged to sign up for a paid subscription, of course, and so doing would be greatly appreciated.

For now, I invite you to check it out. Click here.