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In Soto Zen, though there is no formal course of koan practice, students are often encouraged to practice with a question of their own. “What is the emotional life of a buddha?” is a question that poet Jane Hirshfield, a Consulting Editor to Tricycle, has been working with for many years, and she suggested that […]
Milarepa’s guru, Marpa the Translator, was an enlightened master who was also a farmer and family mam In the tenth century he returned to Tibet from India, bringing with him the priceless instructions of the whispered oral lineage. Marpa’s son Dharma Dode was his main disciple and spiritual successor. Once, Dharma Dode was with Marpa […]
What is the Emotional Life of a Buddha?
I bow down to all holy Gurus. I am the man called Milarepa, For possessions I have no desire. Since I never strive to make money, First I do not suffer Because of making it; Then I do not suffer Because of keeping it; In the end, I do not suffer Because of hoarding it. […]
What is the Emotional Life of a Buddha?
Hakuin Japanese Rinzai Zen master (1689—1769) “Is That So?” The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbors as one living a pure life. A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child. This made her parents angry. She would not confess […]
What is the Emotional Life of a Buddha?
Han-shan Chinese Buddhist hermit who lived on Mount Han-shan (Cold Mountain) around the middle of the 7th century I came once to sit on Cold Mountain And lingered here for thirty years. Yesterday I went to see relatives and friends; Over half had gone to the Yellow Springs. Bit by bit life fades like a […]
FORMERLY, BHIKKHUS, in this same Savatthi there was a housewife named Vedehika. And a good report about Mistress Vedehika had spread thus: “Mistress Vedehika is kind, Mistress Vedehika is gentle, Mistress Vedehika is peaceful.” Now Mistress Vedehika had a maid named Kali, who was clever, nimble, and neat in her work. The maid Kali thought: […]
What is the Emotional Life of a Buddha?
What kind of a Buddhist throws people down on the ground and carries a big stick? Ninja Stephen Hayes wrestles with our preconceptions and predjuces about what Buddhism should be.
an interview with Anne Klein
The Life and Works of Gendun Chopel
Born to a devout Buddhist family in 1864, David Hewivitarne became Anagarika Dharmapala, the leading light of the Buddhist Renaissance Movement in Sri Lanka. As a child, Dharmapala was sent to Christian missionary schools, where his education, if comprehensive by European standards, showed little respect for Buddhism. By the age of nineteen, he had mastered […]
The SoloistMark SalzmanRandom House: New York, 1994.284 pp. $19.00 (cloth). Amy Hollowell This could have been a helluva book, a marvel, a veritable gem glistening in the dull, plastic body of contemporary American fiction. Or could it? Gould a novel that mixes so many genres—thriller, courtroom drama, love story, spiritual awakening—do justice to any of […]
Go Bill! I read Tricycle from cover to cover and don’t understand ninety percent of what I read; but the ten percent I do understand helps me “deal with life” one day at a time (hopefully with more kindness for others). Perhaps next year I’ll understand twelve percent. Bill Krumbein Santa Rosa, California Food for […]
With all the events that signal the acculturation of Buddhism in the West—including the interface between Buddhism and psychology or social action, or between practitioners and scholars—it is increasingly difficult to keep track of everything that is going on. It also makes the temptation to keep busy with Buddhism all the more seductive—and the need […]
The Pope: Part II In the Winter 1994 issue, Tricycle reported on the response of the Catholic Church to the rise of Buddhism in Italy. That article, based in part on “Why So Many Religions?”—an advance chapter of Pope Paul II’s new book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (Knopf)—represented the Pope’s views regarding non-Christian religions as […]
“The Zen of what?”“Harmonica,” she said.“That’s what I thought you said.” I was standing outside the door of a classroom at a New Age center in New York. The woman in question had just emerged from a room where twenty or thirty people were jumping up and down, all playing the harmonica at once. […]
A Nice Place Outside the rest home,resting in hiswheelchair in the shade, my father said:“This is a nice place”– and I couldn’t tellif he meant the rest home in general,the shady spacewith the birdschirping,fountainflowing,springbreezes blowing, or the world. Grandmother For Grandmother Mijiu Inada, Yoshiko Saito Except for the fact that Grandmother taught mechopsticks;and Japanese before […]
An interview with Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say “inner world” or “outer world,” but actually there is just […]
Instruction on vipassana meditation using the breath as object.
There are many good methods of concentration bequeathed to us by our predecessors in Zen. The easiest for beginners is counting incoming and outgoing breaths. The value of this particular exercise lies in the fact that all reasoning is excluded and the discriminative mind put at rest. Thus the waves of thought are stilled and […]
Bhante Henepola Gunaratana on mindfulness of breathing.
ONE OF THE MOST WELL-KNOWN, popular and practical examples of “meditation” connected with the body is called “The Mindfulness or Awareness of in-and-out breathing” (anopanosati). It is for this “meditation” only that a particular and definite posture is prescribed in the text. For other forms of “meditation” given in this sutta, you may sit, stand, […]
And how, monks, does a monk abide contemplating the body as body? Here a monk, having gone into the forest, or to the root of a tree, or to an empty place, sits down cross-legged, holding his body erect, having established mindfulness before him. Mindfully he breathes in, mindfully he breathes out. Breathing in a […]
“In order to communicate very openly with the world, you need to develop fundamental trust. This kind of trust is not trusting ‘in’ something, but simply trusting. It is very much like your breath. You do not consciously hold on to your breath, or trust in your breath, yet breathing is your very nature. In […]
Shakyamuni Buddha: a life retold
re: school prayer/a moment of silence