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The Buddhist Review
Back Issues
With more than a little trepidation, my girlfriend Marion and I boarded a flight to Hawaii. Once buckled in, I fell into a deep and unusually restful sleep. Hours later, I raised the shade and, overcoming a blast of near-blinding light, peered out the small window. The palm-fringed handful of islands strewn in a random […]
A psychotherapist discusses addiction.
When my mother took LSD in 1975, under the amicable supervision of Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax, she had no idea I was growing inside her. Throughout the trip, she commented on the movement in her belly, how it pulsed and distended. That was me. I was smaller than a grape seed, yet I was […]
Number of responses: 1,545; 63% from the magazine, 37% from the Web 89% said that they were engaged in Buddhist practice. 83% said that they had taken psychedelics. Over 40% said that their interest in Buddhism was sparked by psychedelics, with percentages considerably higher for boomers than for twentysomethings. 24% said that they are currently […]
with Ram Dass, Joan Halifax, Robert Aitken, Richard Baker
An interview with Terence McKenna
Introduction
Dharma & DMT Research
Over the last 25 years, I’ve watched a lot of Deadheads, Buddhists, and other free-thinkers do acid. I’ve taken it myself. I still do occasionally, in a ritual sort of way. On the basis of their experience and my own, I know that the public terror of LSD is based more on media-propagated superstition than […]
An Interview with Jack Kornfield
The war on at least one drug—the psychedelic variety—has been won. In place of the alchemicals that reigned supreme for a momentarily eternal moment, young would-be mind explorers now toke their way through a fractled marketplace of pot, coke, weak acid, heroin, cocaine, ludes, Ecstasy, speed, crack. Set and setting? The set is the fresh […]
An Interview with Michele McDonald-Smith
I was nineteen when I first dropped acid. A sophomore at UC Santa Cruz, I was living with my best friend, Kat, in a ramshackle beach cottage. We gave each other a long gaze, wished each other luck, and each swallowed a tiny piece of paper, blotted with a dot of LSD. Then we lay […]
From the thin, rocky ridge where a few friends and I were resting following a 13,000-foot climb, we could look out over the entire expanse of New Mexico’s Pecos Wilderness, east over the Great Plains, and north as far as Colorado, almost 200 miles away. As we sat there in a circle, sheltering each other […]
To many people, the words psychedelic and spiritual are dissonant on first hearing. Yet the use of psychoactive sacraments in shamanic and religious practices is found throughout history. The word entheogen, used to describe certain plants and chemicals when used for spiritual purposes, emphasizes this long-established relationship. Following is a survey of the most historically prominent and […]
Hop Hop Hooray Thank you so much for the wonderful interview with Jeffrey Hopkins [Summer 1996], reading which I was inspired to consider the implications of imaginary sexual contact with “a man” as some functional identification—in mutuality—with that “generic” image as such. Hal PappsSan Francisco, California More of Tricycle’s supposedly white elite liberal readership speaks […]
A Collection of Quotes and Excerpts from Buddhist Notables and Literature
By Robert Aitken
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 be if Tibet ever regained its independence. “If and when Tibet regains its independence . . . ,” I […]
CHANGE YOUR MIND At 12:30 p.m. on June 8, Michelle Laporte struck a large brass gong 108 times to initiate Tricycle’s third annual Change Your Mind Day. The setting for this day of meditation in a free and public format was a quiet wooded lawn in New York’s Central Park. The Reverend T. Kenjitsu Nakagaki […]
I felt like I had embarked on a dangerous adventure. I had the sense of doing something scary that I didn’t fully understand, something that could turn out to be more than I could handle. It was the mid-seventies, and I had signed up for a silent weekend of meditation. l had done meditation before, […]
Before the time of Hui-neng, who lived in the seventh century in T’ang China, it was thought that the experience of enlightenment could be attained only after one had practiced and attained some depth in dhyana, meditation. Perhaps some of us still think that. Hui-neng, however, maintained that prajna, transcendental wisdom, is inseparable from dhyana. […]
To celebrate our fifth anniversary, we have chosen to focus on a controversial issue that claims both a complex history and a contemporary revival: Buddhism and psychedelics. Dozens of controversies surround the subject of psychedelics. Some involve legal and medical issues; others, issues of empiricism and religion. Beyond controversy, however, is the historical relationship between […]
By Jampa Mackenzie Stewart
What is a Mudra? Mudra or Mudras are hand positions often depicted in Buddhist art and used in practice to evoke a particular state of mind. The most notable mudras (Sanskrit, “seal” or “sign”) are those commonly found in representations of the Buddha: hands folded in the lap signify meditation; a palm held up facing […]
By Ruth M. Tabrah
Henry Steel Olcott and the Sinhalese Buddhist Revival
On the Bookshelf at Café Nirvana
These days I am obsessed with poop. Poop and rot. Walking the narrow trail that traverses the autumn headlands, I pause to break apart the dry scat of raccoon and grey fox to see what they’ve been dining on. In the garden I know the stellar jays are robbing the raspberries by their loose splatter […]
Timothy Leary died on May 31, 1996. Timothy Leary died as he lived, in public. After announcing that he had inoperable prostate cancer, he held court at his Beverly Hills home, was feted at the Hog Farm’s annual picnic, interviewed on TV and radio talk shows and in various newspapers and magazines, including Time. An […]
By Sumner Carnahan with Lama Kunga Rinpoche
By Mark Matousek
By Philip Whalen
I grew up in Taiwan in the mid-seventies. Most of my free time was spent in the kitchen, not cooking, but serving as a (fat) guinea pig for the family chef. At that time, we knew a number of families who had their own chefs. Most of these families were Kuomintang elite, wealthy and influential […]
First on the list of items in the Buddha’s tool kit is a pair of lungs. You may experience lapses in mindfulness many times during a single period of meditation, but the lungs remain faithful to their appointed task. This is why Buddhist teachers have always advised their students to cultivate awareness of the breath. […]