A not-entirely-random selection of blog posts on meditation.

Justin Whitaker, Buddhist scholar and blogger, has a nice review of Bodhipaksa’s latest audiobook, Still The Mind. Justin was a student of Bodhipaksa’s many years ago, but he’s the very soul of integrity and we don’t think his review is hyped in any way.

Via Shambhala Sun Space comes this delightfully quirky story of the launch of the “Buddha phone” in Japan; a single tap of the phone’s dedicated lotus-leaf button will load a private, customizable, animated altar.

From the Buddhist Military Sangha blog comes a great video by a Navy Seal, explaining how Zen practice has helped his life and career. Rather bizarrely, the video features not Zen temples, but Tibetan ones. It’s rather like watching a news story about Quakers that’s accompanied by shots of the Vatican.

Arunlikhati has a provocative post called “I am a Western Buddhist.” He writes a lot about the western perceptions of eastern Buddhism, including perceptions of ethically eastern Buddhists living in the west. Is, for example, an ethnically Vietnamese Buddhist practicing in the west to be excluded from the category of “western Buddhists”?

The Rev. Danny Fisher writes about another Reverend — Kevin Thew Forrester — who is an Episcopal priest and also a practitioner of Zen Buddhism. Forrester’s Zen practice has raised eyebrows and even hackles in his church, where he is up for election as a bishop.

And lastly, you may never have imagined Thich Nhat Hanh or the Dalai Lama pumping iron, but maybe one day that’ll happen, thanks to the Mindful Muscle Blog, where you can read articles such as Using Meditation to Bulk Up… or Slim Down, and many others.