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No Man’s Land
A Letter from South Africa
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Back Issues A Letter from South Africa
Dharma in American Internment Camps
The other day I picked up a world religions textbook my twin sons were using for their freshman high school history course. The chapter on Buddhism had a subdivision entitled “Western Buddhism,” and here you could see pictures of life in an American Zen Buddhist monastery, along with thoughtful text on the subject. I was […]
Buddhist Views on Organ Donation
On the Set with Bertolucci
An interview with Philip Kapleau Roshi
MY DAUGHTER HAS BEEN LOST TO ME in a world I don’t understand. I have been lost to her in a world she came to scorn. In more than two years, I haven’t spoken with her. Now, woken up by the telephone’s beeping, I hear Veronica’s voice, sure, cool, coming through the receiver from a […]
NO BARRIER: Unlocking the Zen Koan Thomas ClearyBantam Books: New York, 1993.224 pp., $9.95 (paperback). THOMAS CLEARY is a genius, the blurb on the back cover of my page proofs announces, as if this were not already obvious by his production over the past sixteen years of dozens of translations of Chinese Buddhist, Taoist, and […]
FOOD FOR THOUGHT Let us agree that Buddhism is not vegetarianism. It is not “virtue” either, or “peace,” or “gratitude,” or any other word or concept. To identify it with anything at all is to reduce what in essence is illimitable. In fact, Buddhism isn’t even Buddhism. But now let us leave the pure and […]
THIS YEAR MARKS the centennial of the Parliament of World Religions; for the first time in America, clergy from non-theistic religions were invited to represent their traditions. Zen abbot Soyen Shaku (see “Ancestors”) addressed the assembly in Chicago, having had his letter of acceptance written by his disciple, D. T. Suzuki. Also present was Dharmapala, […]
1. Wat Buddhawararam, Denver, Colorado, founded in 1976, a former church (Theravada). © Rachel Antell. 2. Chuang-yen, Carmel, New York, founded in 1975 (Chinese Tientai, Zen, and Pure Land Buddhism). © Wen-Jie Qin. 3. Seumi Sha Buddhist Temple, Tacoma, Washington (Korean Zen). © Finnley D. Macdonald. 4. Ch’an Meditation Center, Elmhurst, New York, founded in […]
To take the one seat is to discover that we are unshakable
Episode One
NOBEL CAUSE A group of Nobel laureates including the Dalai Lama, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mother Theresa, and Desmond Tutu convened in Bangkok early this year to protest the detainment of fellow laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, currently in her fourth year of house arrest in Myannmar (formerly Burma). The State Law and Order Restoration Council seized […]
WHEN THE PARLIAMENT of World Religions opened in Chicago in September 1893, a replica of the Liberty Bell tolled ten times, once for each of the great religions represented. Charles Carroll Bonney, the President of the Parliament and one of its first visionaries, began his address. “Worshippers of God and lovers of Man, Let us […]
In a traditional Zen monastery, the position of tenzo, or head cook, is held by a monk who is considered to “have way-seeking mind, or by senior disciples with an aspiration for enlightenment.” Here, Japanese Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253) instructs his monks on the importance of the position of the tenzo as it had been […]
THE PRAJNAPARAMITA SUTRA is considered the originating text of Mahayana Buddhism. Scholars agree that it began to emerge into prominence in India from about 100 B.C.E., about four hundred years after the final nirvana of Shakyamuni Buddha. The original Prajnaparamita, the Great Mother: The Prajnaparamita of 100,000 Lines, purports to record the full audience given […]
Once you sit, do not change the position again until the end of the time you determined at the beginning. Suppose you change your original position because it is uncomfortable, and assume another position. What happens after a while is that the new position becomes uncomfortable. Then you want another and after a while it, […]
Elaine Waller-Rose Los Angeles, CaliforniaPsychotherapist and Social Worker“Before I became a Buddhist, I felt some sort of rebirth needed to occur in order to work out one’s difficulties and move to a higher sense of being. Now that I am a Buddhist, I understand reincarnation on two levels. On one, there is the sense […]
MY FATHER’S GURU: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Addison Wesley: New York, 1993. 174 pp., $20.00 (hardback). IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE to dismiss Jeffrey Masson. The psychoanalytic community would like to do so, because of his radical critique of Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory in The Assault on Truth: […]
CLOUDLESS SKY: The Mahamudra Path of the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyu School The Third Jamgon Kongtrul Edited and translated into German by Tina Drasczyk and Alex Drasczyk. English translation by Richard Gravel. Shambhala Publications: Boston, 1992. 135 pp., $10.00 (paperback). CLOUDLESS SKY IS THE FIRST-and last-book by the Third Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche. He was killed in […]
Only Companion: Japanese Poems of Love and Longing Translated by Sam Hamill, Shambhala Publications: Boston, 1992. 160 pp., $11.00 (paperback). In his preface to Only Companion, translator Sam Hamill points the way for us to follow, the way by which he found the heart of each of the one hundred poems in this moving collection. […]
THE SNOW LION’S TURQUOISE MANE: Wisdom Tales from Tibet Surya Das, HarperSanFrancisco: San Francisco, 1992. 255 pp., $17.00 (paperback). A FEW YEARS AGO, Joseph Campbell’s conversations with Bill Moyers on public television captured the imagination of this country in ways a historian of culture would have been hard put to explain. After all, Campbell’s treasury […]
ENLIGHTENED COURAGE: An Explanation of Atisha’s Seven Point Mind Training Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche Padmakara Publications: Peyzac-le-Moustier, France, 1992. 120 pp., $20.00 (paperback). SHORTLY BEFORE HE DIED, Dilgo Khyentse, old man master of the Tibetan Nyingmas, taught for a month in the south of France, in the Dordogne. Enlightened Courage, the book of his talks, makes […]
THE FRUITFUL DARKNESS Joan Halifax Harper San Francisco: San Francisco, 1993. 240 pp., $18.00 (hardback). JOAN HALIFAX is a cultural anthropologist and author with a specialty in shamanism and some status as a leader of workshops, founder of the Ojai Foundation, and a thoughtful contemplative. She is also a classic modern seeker of knowledge, availing […]
THE EIGHT GATES OF ZEN: Spiritual Training in an American Zen Monastery John Daido loori Dharma Communications: Mount Tremper; NY, 1992. 270 pp., $12.95 (paperback). “THERE IS NO TEACHER on the face of the earth who can actually give you anything, and there is nothing that you need to receive, because each one of us […]
LORD OF THE DANCE: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Lama Chagdud TulkuPadma Publishing: Johnson City, CA, 1992.248 pp., $16.95 (paperback). THE GREAT VIRTUE of Lord of the Dance, Chagdud Tulku’s autobiography, is the utter straightforwardness with which events in his life are related. In the Tibetan tradition, those events mostly take the form of stories. […]
