Top Ten List
The recent spate of interest in Buddhism in magazines (like Time) and on television (like “The Oprah Winfrey Show”) inspired the students in my BS (for Buddhist Studies) 230: Introduction to Buddhism to compile a list…
From The Academy
IdeasMagazine | From The Academy
Performative Utterance
One of the occupational hazards of being a professor of Buddhism, at least in the United States, is that one is inevitably asked at some point during the semester, “Are you a Buddhist?” Sometimes at the…
Digesting The Dharma
In my last column, I provided a brief history of the attempt to anthologize Buddhist texts, to reduce the teachings of Buddhism to a single volume. The organization of these anthologies was often telling, revealing the…
IdeasMagazine | From The Academy
Digesting the Dharma, Part I
Last year, a new anthology of Buddhist texts, entitled Buddhism in Practice, was published. It seems that only once in each generation does someone have the audacity to produce such a book, and in this case,…
If and When
Last fall I was interviewed on ABC’s “Nightline” in connection with Ted Koppel’s conversation with the Dalai Lama (aired September 13, 1995). The producer asked me what I thought the role of the Dalai Lama would…
IdeasMagazine | From The Academy
The Return of the Suppressed
The Chinese rejection of the Dalai Lama’s choice of the next Panchen Lama, the second most important Tibetan lama, represents the greatest threat to the Tibetan institution of the incarnate lama in its history. It is…
IdeasMagazine | From The Academy
A Sangha-less Sangha
One becomes a Buddhist by going for refuge in the “three gems”—in other words by saying, “I go for refuge to the Buddha, I go for refuge to the dharma, I go for refuge to the…
IdeasMagazine | From The Academy
Buddhism(s)?
EVERYBODY KNOWS there is really no such thing as Hinduism. The name is derived from an ancient word for sea, sindhu, used also for the Indus River. Persians living to the west of the Indus modified it…
IdeasMagazine | From The Academy
The H Word
In 1987, the Zen Buddhist Temple of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sponsored a conference on “World Buddhism in America.” The title was meant to convey the fact that representatives from various Buddhist traditions had gathered to talk…
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