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Back Issues
A Profile of Thanissaro Bhikkhu and the Metta Forest Monastery
By Barbara Roether
A Talk by the Director of Gampo Abbey
By Pema ChödrönAn Interview with Korean Zen Master Samu Sunim
By TricycleBuddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka Call for Equality
By Laura M. Markowitz
The Monastic Imperative
By John Loori
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 […]
By Gary SnyderOn the Origins of Buddhist Monasticism
By Stuart Smithers
An Interview with Sangharakshita, head of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order
By Tricycle
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. […]
By Stephen Batchelor
13th-century Zen Master DOGEN
By Tricycle
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 […]
By Tricycle
An Interview with Konchog Tendzin
By Clark StrandI-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 […]
By Tricycle
A personal account
By Lawrence ShainbergOn Pilgrimage in Buddhist India
By Tricycle
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 […]
By TricycleI 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 […]
By TricycleA Review by Jeff Zaleski
By Tricycle
A Review by Allan Hunt Badiner
By TricycleA Review by Dan Wakefield
By TricycleA Review by George Vecsey
By TricycleA Review by Jeffrey McIntyre
By TricycleOn 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.” […]
By Antonin ArtaudTIBET 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 […]
By TricycleA 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 […]
By Mitchell KaporEVERYBODY 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 […]
By Donald S. Lopez Jr.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 […]
By Wendy JohnsonIF 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 […]
By Sam HamillSkillful 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 […]
By Tricycle
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 […]
By Pico Iyer
re: life as a Korean Nun
By Tricycle