The elder brother of His Holiness the Dalai Lama discusses Dorje Shugden as a hungry ghost.

The life and times of Dorje Shugden

We believe that Dorje Shugden is a buddha.       – Geshe Kelsang Gyatso, founder of the New Kadampa Tradition, who organized demonstrations against the Dalai Lama during the summer of 1996       This worship of Dorje Shugden is not a religion at all. It is a cult. – Thubten Jigme Norbu, […]

Geshe Kelsang Gyatso discusses Dorje Shugden as a benevolent protector god.

The controversy over Tibet's Dorje Shugden

Some people vacation in Yellowstone, Aruba, or New Orleans. Others go to Bali to lie on white beaches, or to the Himalayas to climb mountains. I went to Japan to clean toilets.

Larry Rosenberg speaks to Tricycle's Amy Gross about academia, retreat, his first teacher Krishnamurti, and his Buddhist journey.

  At the time these photos were taken, the nuns and monks of Monkol Won Pagoda in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, were cautiously optimistic that the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia might bring democracy to their country. For a number of months in 1992, the nuns allowed us, U.N. volunteers, to set up registration sites […]

When “Trungpa” comes up “turnip,” and your “sangha” becomes “sangria,” you know you’re in cyberspace. A secular computer spell-check program, when fed Buddhist words, suggested some English alternatives, offered here with dharma definitions of their own. Arhat:Skt., lit. “worthy one”; one in whom all defilements and passions have been extinguished Overheat:an indication that you might […]

In Memorium Being Nobody: Meditations on the Buddhist Path. She was ordained a Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka in 1979 and was one of the first pioneers to work on behalf of women in the dharma. Born to Jewish parents in 1923, Ayya Khema lived in Berlin until she escaped to Scotland at the start […]

In childhood encounters with houses of worship, I never got past the front doors. Many Saturdays I waited outside a shul in Coney Island with my father and sister for my grandmother. She emerged in a crowd of old people in dark clothes and no one spoke English. Then we all went to the boardwalk, […]

Awakening to ZenThe Teachings of Roshi Philip KapleauEdited by Polly Young-Eisendrath and Rafe MartinScribner: New York, 1997256 pp., $22 (cloth)   A compilation of never-before-published teachings, given over the course of thirty-two years, from one of the first American Zen Buddhists and the author of The Three Pillars of Zen. Roshi Philip Kapleau’s style is […]

Salute to the Son I am writing to express my appreciation to Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. I was especially taken by his support for Westerners’ taking more responsibility in the development of dharma and not depending so much on the Asian teachers. This is a refreshing view, as Tibetan teachers in particular so often express a […]

Kundun: Music from the Original SoundtrackPhilip GlassNonesuchMilo Miles Director Martin Scorsese was expanding the boundaries of movie soundtracks even before he used the immediacy of rock oldies to heighten the headlong action of Mean Streets in 1973. Composer Philip Glass was not afraid to shower listeners with music of pop-concert brashness even before his Einstein […]

How and where to find meditation instruction, retreats, teachings, and dharma literature—at no cost

Judy and Charles Lief were married by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1975A marriage in New Mexico: Anna Christine Hansen and Dixon WolfTenshin and Seisen Fletcher were married by Maezumi Roshi in 1981George Bowman and Trudy Goodman were married by Maureen Stuart Roshi in 1985A marriage of monks: Jody Hojin Kimmel and Konrad Ryushin Marchaj—John Daido […]

Altars in the Street: A Neighborhood Fights to SurviveMelody Ermachild ChavisBell Tower: New York, 1997257 pp., $23.00 (cloth) “Why do you live there?” white acquaintances often ask Melody Ermachild Chavis, a private investigator who has moved with her family to an old Victorian house on Alma Street, in an interracial neighborhood in South Berkeley, California, […]

Awakening the Buddha Within Eight Steps to EnlightenmentTibetan Wisdom for the Western WorldLama Surya DasBroadway Books: New York, 1997414 pp., $26.00 (cloth) In Awakening the Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das, a Western Buddhist meditation teacher and Dzogchen lineage holder, weaves many of the fundamental teachings and practices of the Buddha together with his own well-told […]

 

By Jack Kerouac

At Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, I worked in the garden with a woman about ten years older than me and a very serious Zen student. Marga was an ordained priest who wasn’t thrilled about being assigned to work in the garden with a brand-new Zen student as her supervisor, and I was always a little […]

Reginald Horace Blyth was born near London in 1898, the only child of working-class parents. By the start of World War I, he was eighteen and already an eccentric in his contemporaries’ eyes: he ate no meat, loved George Bernard Shaw, and became a conscientious objector to the war, for which he was jailed. After […]

Re: Marriage