Rhinoceros Zen Paganism

My path is called Rhinoceros Zen Paganism. Rhinoceros Zen Paganism is an ecletic blend of Druidism, Witchcraft, Buddhism and Taoism. I do not believe in the concepts of white, grey or black magic. I believe that as energy can not be destroyed but only converted, energy also has no "color". It simply depends on what your intention and/or motive is. My ethics/morals are guided by the Eightfold Noble Path of Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths, the Shaolin Moral Code, the ten Obligations of Shaolin and The Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth. Rhinoceros Zen Paganism has also been influenced by the Left Hand Path. Why is it called Rhinoceros Zen Paganism? In January 2006, I began to work on a book about Zen Paganism. I remembered hearing about Tom Swiss doing Zen Paganism workshops, and I decided to contact him to make sure who started what when. This is how he responded. "Heh. Funny, I'm also at work on a "Zen Paganism" book; doing some background research into historical connections between Wicca and Buddhism at the moment. A friend and I came up with the term in the late 1980s, and I went around with "Zen Pagan Vegetarian Cyberpunk from Hell" on my scrawled on my backpack in college (around 1988). I started trying to integrate elements of Zen and Taoism into the practice of a Circle I was in in the early 1990s; I first did a workshop on it at the Free Spirit Gathering in 2000 or 2001 IIRC. John Lennon had us all beat, though: in 1980, a few weeks before he died, he said in an interview that his beliefs could be described as "Zen Christian, Zen pagan, or Zen Marxist". So it's clearly a term that several of us have hit on over the years, though we may all mean different things by it. In the interests of clarity, maybe we should add qualifiers...you could make your sig read something like "Founder and Teacher of Rhinoceros Zen Paganism", maybe I could be "Earth-touching Zen Paganism". Or something like that. (I used the subtitle "Why Buddha Touched the Earth" the last time I did a Zen Paganism workshop.) Best wishes, Tom Swiss" tms@infamous.net www.infamous.net