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Like a Raven in the Wind
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Like a Raven in the Wind
In the late seventies and early eighties I would escape every few months from my political work in Jimmy Carter’s White House to play chess with my old friend and Buddhist teacher, Geshe Wangyal, in Washington, New Jersey. From dawn till night the long silences, laughs, and wild accusations of cheating could be heard throughout […]
A Lasting Friendship
The Dalai Lama Interviewed by Spalding Gray
Introduction and Event List
Three Voices
The Practice of Poetry and Meditation
Notes on Buddhism and AIDS
Cross-species compassion from ancient India to Earth First! activists
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius By Ray Monk. The Free Press: New York, 1990, 646 pp., $29.95. Ludwig Wittgenstein is perhaps the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, and certainly one of the most original in the entire Western tradition. Given the inaccessibility of his work, it is remarkable that he has inspired poems, […]
Jewels of the Doctrine: Stories of the Saddharma Ratnavaliya By Dharmasena Thera, translated by Ranjini Obeyesekere. SUNY Press: Albany, 1991, 259 pp. paper, $14.00. From the earliest days of his ministry, the Buddha knew that his message was received with varying levels of comprehension. Advanced monks received an entirely different lesson than simple folks. Skillfully, the […]
A Thousand Lives Away: Buddhism in Contemporary Burma By Winston J. King, forward by Edward Conze. Reissued by Asian Humanities Press: Fremont, California, 1990, 238 pp., paper, $15.95. I arrived in Burma a few days short of a day that was being hyped around the world as the Harmonic Convergence, in 1987. And while harmony did […]
Lust for Enlightenment: Buddhism and Sex By John Stevens. Shambhala Publications: Boston, 1990, 188 pp., paper, $9.95. A lot of eyebrows were raised thirty years ago when the poet Kenneth Rexroth wrote, “Erotic love is the highest form of contemplation.” His comment actually paraphrased one of the primary teachings of the Tachikawa-Ryu school of tantra in […]
Book of Serenity Translated by Thomas Cleary. Lindisfarne Press: Hudson, NY 1990, 463 pp., $18.95. The Gateless Barrier Translated and with a commentary by Robert Aitken. North Point Press: Berkeley, CA, 1990, 332 pp., $14.95. The Koan or “Zen dialogue” is the fundamental study of Chan (Zen), an oral transmission rooted in the ancient Chinese tradition […]
The Secret Pilgrim By John le Carré. Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1991, 336 pp., $21.95. I have long been an admirer of Ie Carré, yet I was unprepared for his latest book, The Secret Pilgrim. And despite its great popularity I have felt alone with it, for no one I know seems to have read […]
Crazy Clouds: Zen Radicals, Rebels and Reformers By Perle Besserman and Manfred Steger. Shambhala Publications, Inc: Boston, 1991, 240 pp., paper, $12.95. Perle Besserman and Manfred Steger have put together a most entertaining and lively collection of eight wild and crazy Zen masters (Layman P’ang, Rinzai, Bassui, Ikkyu, Bankei, Hakuin, Nyogen Senzaki, and Soen Nakagawa), the […]
House of the Turquoise Roof By Dorje Yudon Yuthok, edited by Michael Harlin. Snow Lion Publications, Inc.: Ithaca, 1990, 330 pp., paper, $14.95. This autobiography of a Tibetan noblewoman describes, in exhaustive detail, life in her homeland before the Chinese invasion, and the subsequent turbulence that led to flight and exile for so many thousands […]
An Interview with Bruce Joel Rubin
Gen Sun Tzu at the Allied Front A Chinese text on military strategy written 2,500 years ago for the Chinese kingdom of Wu is now an indispensable element of U.S. Marine Corps modern warfare. The Corps’ commandant, General Alfred Gray, has made The Art of War, by General Sun Tzu, required reading for his men. Shambhala […]
I have always loved the dance of cleaning the kitchen, washing the vegetables, cutting, cooking, cleaning again. My culinary career began when I apprenticed with a Swiss chef at age seventeen. Cooking was art, it was dance, but in Guatemala, I learned that it was medicine as well. The people of Todos Santos in Guatemala’s […]
Two years ago, while researching an article on sports, I came upon a conundrum that resisted any attempt to confine it to the language of the conventional sports page. It concerns a cherished gospel of the playing field that athletes and their fans call the “Hot Hand.” Heat in this case refers to transcendence, an […]
Listening to the radio I hear .. Coyote Roshi a known collector of.. wooden buddahs received a letter from a student of Bhag Wan Shree Rahjneesh saying .. “You collect wooden buddas .. why not come here and meet a living buddah?” Coyote Roshi wrote back .. “Living buddahs are all over .. but a […]
When Paul Reps was asked what kind of Zen he practiced, he answered: “Reps Zen.” This poet-painter-philosopher who died last year at the age of ninety-six not only followed his own Zen but influenced generations of Americans. Zen Flesh Zen Bones, a collection of Zen stories complied by Reps, was published in 1952 and continues […]
and Letting the Ladies in
DOC O’CONNOR Office Manager, LaGrange, Ohio “Long pilgrimages to Asia. I’m just back from five months in India and Nepal with a more balanced foundation for dealing with my own chaotic American culture.” FATHER ALLEN BREAUX Pastor, St. Rita Catholic Church, St. Martinsville, Louisiana “Being free—being given permission to be oneself. In the tradition of […]
The United States produced its fair share of cranky religious characters throughout the 19th century, but the self-named Philangi Dasa was surely one of the most original. In 1887 he published The Buddhist Ray, the first Buddhist journal in the United States, and announced that it was “the first Buddhist baby born in Christendom.” Dasa vowed that […]
In 1989 the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize for being the only contemporary leader of a displaced people to disavow the use of arms to regain control of his country. This past March he arrived in the United States to inaugurate the Year of Tibet and to ask for universal responsibility in establishing […]
Although most of us are intimately identified with the contents and functions of our minds, we never make the attempt to actually see what goes on there. If we did, we might see what the Buddha saw over two thousand years ago: that we are not of one mind, but many, and that these various minds […]
Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening by Andrew Harvey.Henry Holt: New York, 1991,253 pp., $22.50. Andrew Harvey has a gift for spiritual experiencea—an openness and attunement to the surprising manifestations of the Divine in the contemporary world—and also the rare ability to render it as “real” in his writing. Born and raised as a child of […]