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Born in Baltimore in 1937, Philip Glass began studying the violin at age six but reports that his serious interest in music didn’t begin until he took up the flute two years later. After his sophomore year in high school, he entered the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. He graduated at […]
Jiddu Krishnamurti mistrusted all religions and denounced the Eastern convention of deifying living spiritual masters. But by the time he died in Ojai, California, in 1986 at the age of 91, he had helped—perhaps more than anyone in this century—to introduce Eastern teachings on the nature of mind to the West. In Lives in the […]
In 1987, Pico Iyer, author of Video Night in Kathmandu, arrived in Kyoto, Japan, bearing two suitcases and the name of a local Buddhist temple. Determined to learn, from the inside, all that he could of Zen and of Japanese culture, Iyer cultivated friendships with both natives and foreigners: with Mark, an artist from San […]
An eleventh-century Burmese king honored his conversion to Theravada Buddhism by building Pagan, an imposing city containing 13,000 temples and pagodas on the fertile plains of the Irrawaddy River. Slaves constructed this spectacular homage to the teachings of the Buddha. In the late twentieth century, a Burmese dictator commands a military government that tortures, murders, […]
The procession carrying the body of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was heralded by the wails of a lone bagpiper and the slow, steady heartbeat of a deep bass drum, followed by the hoarse guttural cries of Tibetan horns. As a crowd of more than three thousand American students and guests watched in silence, the funeral procession […]
Tenzin Norbu Namseling, the sixth Khado Rinpoche, is the son of Namseling, as aristocrat and finance minister of the former Tibetan government. In 1958, the elder Namseling was sent to the south of Tibet to negotiate with the Khampas, or Tibetan resistance fighters, but joined them instead. After helping safeguard the Dalai Lama on his […]
Here in the nunnery the afternoon is for sleep, study, contemplation. The night before, Ayya Khema suggested that we imagine we are going to die shortly and then see what we cling to. I find I am sad to lose my possibilities—for achievement, and, yes, for liberation. Why am I here, after all, if I […]
Poems by Patricia Donegan
On Friday afternoons, in a lecture room in the northwest corner of Philosophy Hall, at Columbia University, a small, wiry, and very aged Japanese named Dr. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki regularly unwraps a shawlful of books in various ancient Oriental languages and, as he lovingly fingers and rubs them, delivers a lecture in an all but inaudible […]
AUSPICIOUS BEGINNINGS The first issue of Tricycle was superb—a most auspicious beginning. I especially enjoyed Joel McCleary’s fine tribute to Geshe Wangyal, Dean Rolston’s moving “Memento Mori,” and the delightfully unorthodoxSpalding Gray interview with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The quality of the writing was very high and was matched by a marriage of intelligence, […]
Following the failed coup in Russia a cartoon in a New York newspaper featured two people standing in front of the Kremlin. One was saying to the other, “If you miss the one-party system, go to America.” As the cartoon implies, new political alliances threaten to recast the United States as, at best, a beleaguered […]
Anathemas and AdmirationsBy E. M. Cioran. Translated by Richard Howard.Arcade: New York, 1991. 256 pp. $22.95. I’ve always been a sucker for well-articulated despair and fin de siecle weariness, and what better way seemingly to serve this indulgence than with the latest acerbic and eloquent offering of E. M. Cioran, the solitary Romanian aphorist and philosopher, […]
By Shundo Aoyama
Enlightened Livig: Teachings of Tibetan Buddhist MastersTranslated by Tulku Thondup. Edited by Harold Talbott. Shambhala Publications: Boston, 1990.178 pp. $12.95 (paperback). In these cynical times, when political and religious scandals hit the newspapers daily and the erosion of an ethical basis for personal and community-based behavior seems to be in full swing, it is refreshing […]
The Anguish of TibetEdited by Petra K. Kelly, Gert Bastian, and Pat Aiello. Parallax Press: Berkeley, 1991.382 pp. $17.00. Tibet may be in vogue in this International Year of Tibet, but the iron yoke of Chinese oppression continues unimpeded by world opinion. Despite the fact that the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, […]
World as Lover, World as SelfBy Joanna MacyParallax Press: Berkeley, 1991. 251 pp. $15.00. Joanna Macy has always considered it perfectly natural to feel the sufferings of the world as her own. She has worked with Tibetan refugees in India, developed a system of workshops in Europe and America to cope with the psychological fallout of […]
An Interview with Jon Kabat-Zinn
Strains of long silver trumpets and the deepthroated chanting of monks greeted the arrival of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in April. The religious and temporal leader of Tibet’s exiled Buddhist population had come to grant a special blessing, initiating the creation of a large-scale […]
“Dukkha is everywhere,” the Buddha said, by way of introducing his Four Noble Truths. “There is a cause of dukkha, there is liberation from it, and the way to this liberation is the Eightfold Path.” When we translate dukkha as “suffering” we get a certain worldview, but it may not be Buddhist. Suffer comes from […]
In the sixth century the Indian monk Bodhidharma took up residence at the Chinese temple of Shao-lin, where he introduced Dhyana Buddhism, the Indian school of meditation that in time gave rise to Chinese Ch’an (Zen). Since then, both the man and the monastery have been subjects of widespread rumor and speculation. Bodhidharma’s teachings at Shao-lin […]
All beings are dependent on food, that is, eating. There is food for the body, food for feeling, food for volitional action, and food for rebirth. The Buddha cried when he saw this endless cycle: the fly comes and eats the flower; the frog comes and eats the fly; the snake comes and eats the frog; […]
CAPITOL NEWS On a recent Washington Post list of best sellers, the predictable line-up of The T-Factor Fat Gram Counter and Revenge of the Baby-Sat was unpredictably followed by The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Published by Shambhala, this Thomas Cleary translation of a two thousand-year-old classic offers “wisdom in the palm of your […]
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910-1991)
In this episode of the life of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni encounters the treacherous murderer, Angulimala, who subsequently transforms into a monk more gentle than” a handful of earth. Excerpted from Old Path White Clouds, Thich Nhat Hanh’s biography of the Buddha, this story occurs after the Buddha has already acquired many followers among the […]
Terigatha, poems of the sisters
If you use your mind to study reality, you won’t understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you’ll understand both. Those who don’t understand, don’t understand understanding. And those who understand, understand not understanding. People capable of true vision know that the mind is empty. They transcend both […]
Like waves, all the activities of this life have rolled endless on, yet they have left us empty-handed. Myriads of thoughts have run through our minds, but all they have done is increase our confusion and dissatisfaction. Normally we operate under the deluded assumption that everything has some sort of true, substantial reality. But when […]
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 […]
This vipassana practice is based on the Mahasatipatthana Sutta, the scripture that deals with the four foundations of mindfulness. We started with the first domain of mindfulness: paying attention to body sensations. As a way of beginning, we have people bring their attention to the breath and to walking. But really, if you think about it, […]
ALINA STRAND Honduran Farmer in Kentucky “Being mindful of thought and deed in daily life.” NORA SAFRAN Potter Amagansett, NY “Pain, pain, pain, pain,—that’s thinking of the fourth day of a seven-day retreat.” JANET SKELTON VOORHEESPublic Health Administrator Placitas, NM “The difference between living fully and not living fully and […]
by Jeanne Larsen
Dakini Teachings, Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand, Transmission of the Light, Discourse on the Fruits of Recluseship, and The Practice of the Kalachakra
The Death of Echadon, Where is Tibet?, Prince Siddhartha, Hero of the Land of Snow, and The Children of Nepal
RIVERS & MOUNTAINS The first issue of Buddhism at the Crossroads (formerly Spring Wind Buddhist Cultural Forum), published by the Zen Lotus Society in Toronto, focuses on the environment. In her article on environmental ethics, Stephanie Kaza argues that “because Buddhism focuses on the mutually conditioned nature of mind and the interaction of mind and nature, […]