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The Buddhist Review
Back Issues
A Profile of Thanissaro Bhikkhu and the Metta Forest Monastery
A Talk by the Director of Gampo Abbey
An Interview with Korean Zen Master Samu Sunim
Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka Call for Equality
The Monastic Imperative
SHOKOKU TEMPLE is in Northern Kyoto, on level ground, with a Christian college just south of it and many blocks of crowded little houses and stone-edged dirt roads north. It is the mother-temple of many branch temples scattered throughout Japan, and one of the several great templesystems of the Rinzai Sect of Zen. Shokoku-ji is […]
On the Origins of Buddhist Monasticism
An Interview with Sangharakshita, head of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order
Few would disagree that monasticism, with its vows and disciplines, provides the time and freedom to reflect on the dharma and a conducive framework for cultivation of concentration and insight. For this reason, since the time of the Buddha, the survival of the dharma has been seen as dependent upon the survival of a monastic community. […]
13th-century Zen Master DOGEN
This special section looks at monasticism East and West. Here, Westerners challenge the Asian traditions of granting supremacy to monastics over the laity, and of monks over nuns. Contemporary teachers in Europe and North America, influenced by views that go back to the Age of Enlightenment, bring their own heritage to bear on redefining the […]
An Interview with Konchog Tendzin
I-TSING, 671-695 C.E. At a distance of ten days’ journey from the Mahabodhi Vihara [in Bodh Gaya] we passed a great mountain and bogs; the pass is dangerous and difficult to cross. It is important to go in a company of several men, and never to proceed alone. At the time I, I-Tsing, was […]
A personal account
On Pilgrimage in Buddhist India
THE BODHI TREE The spot under the fig, or Bodhi, tree where the Buddha attained nirvana is a kind of geographical omphalos or axis mundi for Buddhists. Buddhism was conceived under the Bodhi tree, the only spot on earth, the texts tell us, that was perfectly stable. PETER MATTHIESSEN, 1978 In what is now known […]
I HAVE OFTEN STOOD on interminable lines—at the bank, the post office, the airport, the supermarket—and succumbed to sharing with other corporate-held hostages those rolled-up eyes, grimaces and audible sighs that communicate extreme annoyance. But more than once I have entertained myself by wondering if being in monastic garb would mitigate my own behavior, contain […]
A Review by Jeff Zaleski
A Review by Allan Hunt Badiner
A Review by Dan Wakefield
A Review by George Vecsey
A Review by Jeffrey McIntyre
On April 15, 1925, the French founder of the Theatre of the Absurd, Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) published his “Letter to the Schools of the Buddha” in the third issue of La Revolution Surrealiste. In the same issue were addresses to the Dalai Lama and the Pope and a “Letter to the Directors of Insane Assylums.” […]
TIBET OR NOT TIBET At the U.N.’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing this past September and the parallel Non Governmental Organizations (NGO) Forum in the suburb of Huairou several issues had delegates and Chinese officials toe to toe. Not the least of these was the issue of Tibetan sovereignty. On September 1, as […]
A FIRST-RATE DEMONSTRATION of the World Wide Web—which shows instantaneous global access to information about any conceivable subject—presents a dizzying realm of connective possibility. For some, the Net embodies a way to physically wire together human consciousness into All-Embracing Mind, the culmination of human evolution elaborated by the French Jesuit and mystic Teilhard de Chardin […]
EVERYBODY KNOWS there is really no such thing as Hinduism. The name is derived from an ancient word for sea, sindhu, used also for the Indus River. Persians living to the west of the Indus modified it to hind, and used it to refer to the land of the Indus valley. Eventually, Muslims used hindu to refer […]
THE WINTER SOLSTICE DRAWS NEAR. Now is the “standstill of the sun.” Germinid meteor showers of early December claim the night sky, obscured only by the huge disc of the Wolf Moon. This is the best season to see the bones of garden plants. More than twenty years ago, at Green Gulch Farm we celebrated […]
IF THE ANCIENT CHINESE proverb has much relevance today, I would say that I am cursed by living in interesting times. Beginning zazen while wearing the uniform of a U.S. Marine thirty years ago, I began to question “authority”—not only the authority of the Marine Corps and ultimately of the U.S. government, but the authority […]
Skillful Scenes Do Buddhists believe in God? It seems that they do! I read in your recent report on religious leaders’ opposition to the patenting of animals [“In the News,” Fall 1995], that four well known Buddhist leaders: Robert Aitken Roshi, Jack Kornfield, Tenshin Reb Anderson and Stephanie Kaza had signed a statement: “We believe […]
BURMA IS, IN ITS WAY, a kind of shadow Tibet, Tibet without the glamour or mystique, a “Land of Buddhas” as devoutly constant as the land of six thousand monasteries to the north. The charms of its premodern culture have been preserved from the modern world by a policy of inwardness. Its people have a […]
re: life as a Korean Nun