The rose of a Pacific Ocean sunset poured through the windows as I woke up. I had fallen asleep on the living room couch shortly before dinner. Our house hung on a coastal hillside above a…

RE: How you understand a "higher power"

A roundtable with five Buddhists on the Twelve Step Path

Two (anonymous) voices on sobriety and dharma

Zen Abbot Bodhin Kjolhede Do enlightenment and alcohol mix? No. That’s the short answer. But let’s define our terms. There are many people who might consider themselves “drunks” who haven’t touched alcohol in years. But here…

I remember a three-month training period at Zen Mountain Center, when I was the chiden, the caretaker of altars and offerings. It was during the summer months, when the shaded gully of the San Jacinto mountains holds…

William Alexander tracks the fractured terrain between booze and badness, gin and genes, identity and emptiness—and makes his way from AA to Zazen The Twelve Steps 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives…

At one time a certain woman was wearing a rough blanket. A certain monk, being infatuated, said to this woman, “Sister, is that thick, short hair yours?” She did not understand and said, “Yes, master, it…

Thinley Norbu Rinpoche on Nihilism, Spiritual Surrender, and the Importance of Lineage and the Guru

A photographer explores the art of offering temple flowers

One Mind     On June 6, the Great Hill in New York’s Central Park was the site of Tricycle’s Fifth Annual Change Your Mind Day, graciously sponsored this year by the Henry Luce Foundation. On…

Cassette Tapes Your Buddha NatureTeachings on the Ten PerfectionsJack KornfieldSounds True, $59.95 An introductory program of meditations and mindfulness techniques. Therapist and meditation instructor Jack Kornfield draws on an eclectic pool of teachings from various traditions…

By Bernie Glassman

Recently, I visited New Mexico to join the first Buddhabus Tour. Organized by the Tricycle ExChange, a membership program for our readers, the trip included eighteen adventurers. They started off with a workshop at Naropa Institute…

"Mother of the Buddha"

By Philip Kapleau / Rodney Smith

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…

Bhante Henepola Gunaratana on the difference between mindfulness and concentration

Discovered inside a catcher’s mitt in the year 2087 by archaeologists while excavating rubble in the abandoned Yankee Stadium in the Bronx: KOAN 1: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”Commentary: Yogi…

“Draw your chair close to the precipice and I’ll tell you a story.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald I recently returned from a pilgrimage into Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County in northern California, where eight of us buried an…

All Fired Up Regarding the Summer 1998 issue, thank you very much for your elegant presentation of my poem “No” in “Seeing Red: Practicing with Anger” from my chapbook Fuck You, Cancer & Other Poems. But…

The Legend of Queen CamaBodhiramsi’s CamadevivamsaA Translation and CommentaryDonald K. Swearer and Sommai PremchitSUNY Press, $19.95 A Pali chronicle from early fifteenth-century Thailand, translated and contextualized by a Thai-American team of two scholars. The seventh-century Queen…

Practicing Takuhatsu in America

Books by D.T. Suzuki, Taitetsu Unno, and Kenneth K. Tanaka

Listening alongside His Holiness the Dalai Lama at a recent conference on meditation, I was inspired by the notion I was hearing that this century may be remembered less for its velvet revolutions than for the…