The worldview of the international Green movement often hinges on a set of simple beliefs that have become obstacles to facing the global crisis. Dogma and ideology develop when we treat beliefs as absolute truths. The…

Mountains and waters right now are the actualization of the ancient buddha way. Each, abiding in its phenomenal expression, realizes completeness. Because mountains and waters have been active since before the Empty Aeon, they are alive…

What is missing from eco-activism

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river Sparkling, bursting, borne away. —Percy Bysshe Shelley SO PROFOUND is the largely human-caused contraction of plant and animal life on…

RECOGNIZING the inherent Buddha-nature of rocks and clouds is not that hard—many acknowledge this in principle. Liberal thinkers admit most animals and plants and even microbes to the select company of sentient beings. Rocks and clouds…

A Talk by Joanna Macy

WHY BE a Buddhist? After seventeen years of practice, I still sometimes think I need my head examined. How did my Burmese teacher convince me, for four whole years starting in 1984, that I was going…

“If one hears it, one is liberated simply by not disbelieving. . . .” —The Tibetan Book of the Dead Each day we broadcast to Tibet. This past spring the Tibetan Information Network said, “A major…

An Israeli Journal

Natalie Goldberg is a writer and writing teacher living in Taos, New Mexico. Her books include the best-sellingWriting Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Shambhala Publications) and its sequel, Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life…

No Right, No Wrong (Con’t.) I object to Pema Chodron’s (Vol. III, No.1) calling the suggestion to publicize the truth about misbehaving teachers “McCarthyism.” Joseph McCarthy slandered people, lied about them, unjustly destroyed their reputations, all…

An Interview with Joseph Goldstein

The third excerpt in a series of eight from Jack Kerouac's Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha

  Evan Sholle, age 7  Ossining, New York “The Buddha was a guy who sat under the Bodhi tree until he understood the meaning of life.” Caroline Kornfield, age 8  Woodacre, California  “I think Buddha is…

UNLIKE the media staples of sex, money, and power, the more we read about environmentalism, the less inclined we are to read more. And yet, there are the facts. Facts and more facts. One’s genuine interest…

Mountains Hidden by Mountains

THE VENERABLE Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, who passed away at the age of eighty-seven on July 8, 1993, was perhaps the best-known and most controversial Thai monk in the contemporary Theravada tradition. Although adhering strictly to the conservative…

SELF AND LIBERATION: The Jung/Buddhism Dialogue Edited by Daniel Meckel and Robert L. MoorePaulist Press: New York, 1992. 338 pp., $19.95 (paper). Michele Martin AFTER DECADES of exchange, many Buddhist practitioners and an increasing number of…

“EVERY DAY I work like this takes five days off my life,” grumbled the worker amid a cloud of fiberglass and marble dust as he scoured the bottom of a colossal head of Vairocana Buddha with…

SIT comfortably, with your back straight but not stiff or tense. Gently close your eyes and feel the sensations of the breath as the air passes the nostrils or upper lip. The sensations of the in-breath…

Between Two Worlds, by Joanne Hershfield and Susan Lloyd, 30 minutes, (512-444-7232), individuals, $39.95; institutions, $89.95. Japanese Pilgrimage: The Pilgrimage to the Eighty-eight Sacred Places of Shikoku, by Oliver Statler, 30 minutes, University of Hawaii Press…

ARIZONA UPDATE In July, jurors convicted Jonathan Doody, nineteen, of a mass murder that shook the international Buddhist community. In 1991, six Thai monks, a nun, a monk-in-training, and a temple helper were shot execution-style at…

A Buddha in the Woodpile lf there had been only one Buddhist in the woodpile In Waco Texas to teach us how to sit stillone saffron Buddhist in the back roomsjust one Tibetan lamajust one Taoistjust…

LIKE EVERYTHING the British poet Edwin Arnold wrote, The Light of Asia was quickly written: a poem in eight books of about five hundred lines each, mostly in blank verse, composed over a period of several…