I understand from an internet search that Martin Huges passed away in 2003 due to complications with meningitis. Mark, it would be useful if you could somewhere (here or elsewhere) post some more biographic data on Martin Huges.

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It is reassuring to learn from this excellent talk that it is pointless to try and understand zen by submitting to the sadistic cult that the medieval Japanese have devised. No doubt we in the West are too fat, dumb, and lazy to grasp the delights of waking starving, shivering, and sleep deprived in the grey dawn and hearing the sound of the Bonsho bell penetrate the vastness of the Universe. So it is good that devotees like the speaker here are honoring the ancestors' suffering with their own suffering. We can learn a lot from his experience, such as not to go to Japan to study zen. Where, for instance, is the humor of the old zen fables preserved? Never trust a religion without a sense of humor, I say, and Japanese zen seems to have lost it, judging by this talk.

- November 24, 2012Introduction to the Japanese Cult of Self Abuse