Special Section
What Does Being a Buddhist Mean to You? Winter 1992
Re: Euthanasia
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The Buddhist Review
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Re: Euthanasia
Looking back I wince at the memory of reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead to my dying grandfather. The arrogance of imposing those terrifying descriptions of the final deterioration on the faltering impulses of an old Jewish man born in Odessa and dying in Brooklyn! My brother, having arrived from California expectedly, found me transmitting […]
An Interview with Stephen Levine
The pneumatic mattress massaged her skin; there were pads between her knees, and they had a hoop over them to prevent the sheets from touching; another arrangement stopped her heels touching the draw-sheet: but for all that, bedsores were beginning to appear all over her body. With her hips paralyzed by arthritis, her right arm half […]
Mercy, Deliverance, and the Nature of Suffering
I exit the subway to my quiet Brooklyn neighborhood and there he is again, wearing a ragged T-shirt, torn jeans, and dirty sneakers, sweeping the subway steps with an old broom. He looks at me pleadingly. Feeling generous, I reach into my pocket for a coin but find only crumpled bills. Too much, I think. Mumbling […]
with actor Peter Coyote
A sacred outlook in everyday life
The search for the new Karmapa
Five years go, I traveled to Kyoto to learn about stillness and focus in the Zen temples whose pictures I had long admired. What I quickly learned was that Zen required much more commitment and rigor than the postcards could suggest: dilettantes need not apply. Returning to California, I stumbled, without meaning to, upon a small […]
An Insider’s view of Nichiren Shoshu
Jerry Brown talks with Les Levine
Some people in Western culture remember that holiday gift-giving is meant to be a joyful commemoration of great sacred events. In this all but forgotten spirit, here are a few books by the Dalai Lama of Tibet, an embodiment of Peace on Earth and good will toward all sentient beings. The Meaning of Life From […]
By Mitsu Suzuki, translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Gregory A. Wood
By Namkhai Norbu
Edited by Max Oelschlaeger
Translated by Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary
By The Twelfth Tai Situpa
By Thomas A. Tweed
By Sogyal Rinpohce, edited by Patrick Gaffney and Andrew Harvey
The Birth of Siddartha
Translated by Lucien Stryk with the assistance of Noboru Fujiwara
A few years ago I spent a week doing a retreat next to a stream at the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains in southern Colorado. The ground rules were fairly simple: retreatants were to live as close to “nature” as possible. Instead of sleeping in a tent, I slept either under the stars or […]
Edited by Kenneth Kraft / By Christopher Ives
Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992. 238 pp. $14.95 (paperback). In the desperation sweeping our world today, religion plays an increasing role in civil conflict. Yet the case of Sri Lanka seems particularly, tragically puzzling. For this is Dhammadvipa, isle of the dharma, home of teachings that enshrine nonviolence. […]
From anger to patience
Thoreau’s Translation of the Lotus Sutra
IN MEMORIAM On October 19, environmentalist, feminist, and Tibet activist Petra Kelly who was best known as the founder of the Green Party in Germany, was discovered dead along with her longtime companion Gert Bastion in their home in a suburb of Bonn. Both were former members of Parliament. At the time of death Kelly […]
From a Zen Workshop with John Daido Loori
Buddhism emphasizes that death has only one intrinsic quality: not deliverance or joy, sadness or salvation—but certainty. In a universe of variables, it remains the only reliable beacon. To contemplate death, then, and allow this one certainty to inspire our daily behavior is, from a Buddhist perspective, a sane and radically pragmatic inquiry for everyone. Historically […]
Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn
TURNING WHEEL The Journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship has undergone a name and format change. Now known as Turning Wheel, this well-designed magazine edited by Susan Moon does an excellent job exploring the twofold purpose of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship: to raise peace, environmental, feminist, and social justice concerns among Western Buddhists; and to […]