This man is an elusive figure. There are hints of bio, background,
especially of his early association with his unnamed mentor in the fifties in
California, who had been both with Yasutani Roshi and Ramana, but solid,
no.
His site, though scattered, is huge,
with all kinds of material about almost anything in the fields of zen and
Caribbean shamanism, + lots more. He has a course of study, Awakening 101, pages on many current living
awakened ones, pages on venerable ancients, a whole section on women, mainly
Buddhist-related, an extensive guru list, and tons of pages of general guidance
on the path.
It's organic and sprawling, but intricately interlinked, linking also to outside
sites. One of the most fascinating aspects of this interconnectedness is that
his collection is not very systematic in the usual sense. Forget site map, there
is nothing for it when visiting but to wander from one page to another without
much sense of where you're going, and usually without completing the page you're
on, which you may return to only after a long garden path. In reading, you
become a wanderer.
One more tidbit is the domain structure. The Wanderling has undertaken to create
his project in free website places, assembling a myriad of apparently different
sites, but all interwoven. As the free website places fold and merge and change
their rules, he shifts accordingly, thus a migration happens on this level as
well. [Correction 2006: The Wanderling informs me that some of his material is
now hosted on paid servers. And Update 2009: The Wanderling has scratched my
back in return in his blog (June 14, 2009 entry) at MySpace.]
Some of his (sub)domains currently are:
angelfire.com/electronic/bodhidharma/
angelfire.com/electronic/awakening101/
angelfire.com/realm/bodhisattva/
angelfire.com/electronic/zennun/
angelfire.com/indie/anna_jones1/
geocities.com/the_wanderling/
geocities.com/jiji_muge/
geocities.com/upakaascetic/
geocities.com/zennun12_8/
sped2work.tripod.com/
<==> members.tripod.com/SpEd2work/
wanderling.tripod.com/
The geocities.com/zennun12_8/
area seems to be the most thematically focused, being about women and their underappreciated
role in Buddhism, but it is not the only place such pages reside.
Happy wandering!
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