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The Buddhist Review
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IdeasMagazine | Special Section
Dharma on No Dollars a Day
True dharma is free
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
A Visible Illusion
The Truth about Money
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
The Money Mind
How to ride the horse of money instead of it riding you
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
Wheels of Dharma
Lawrence Shainberg solves the famous Zen koan “How do you buy a car you already own?”
IdeasMagazine | Special Section
The Economy of Gifts
An American monk looks at traditional Buddhist economy.
Personal ReflectionsMagazine | Special Section
Death, Sex, Enlightenment & Money
The first time I came to the Tibetan center the teachings were just beginning and I found a place on the floor in the back of the shrine room. Had I arrived five minutes earlier, I…
Features
BOOM!
An Interview with Zen Master Seung Sahn
The Emperor’s Tantric Robes
An Interview with June Campbell
Personal ReflectionsMagazine | Feature
Bare Bones Meditation: Waking Up from the Story of My Life
I was born in Chicago in 1948. I was born without a right hand. It had been amputated in the uterus by a strand of ruptured amnion. Newborn, I was brought to a room where there…
The Mystery of Doubt
Spalding Gray interviewed by Francine Prose
Departments
The Zenmoir
A Zen Romance, Ambivalent Zen, Nothing on My Mind
Letters to the Editor Winter 1996
Conflicts of Interest Every time I turn to your letters page I find another batch of readers canceling their subscriptions, citing some outrage to their sensibilities like gay tantra or Richard Gere. Do you realize that…
A Non-Repeating Universe
Years ago Richard Baker Roshi described the field of Zen practice as a “non-repeating universe.” Whenever I sow seeds, I remember these words. Every garden sown from seed is a world within a world, a complete…
Books in Brief
LAO-TZU’S TAOTECHINGTranslated by Red PineMercury House: San Francisco, 1996.179 pp., $12.95 (paper). This new translation by Red Pine (himself a kind of modem-day Taoist) comes complete with 2,000 years of commentaries on each of Lao-Tzu’s laconic…
MeditationMagazine | On Practice
Liberating Self-Righteousness
Some aspiring Buddhists appear to be hindered in their progress by a form of secular Calvinism that has persisted as a deeply buried fossil from childhood. This fossil manifests itself as self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is another word…
IdeasMagazine | From The Academy
Digesting the Dharma, Part I
Last year, a new anthology of Buddhist texts, entitled Buddhism in Practice, was published. It seems that only once in each generation does someone have the audacity to produce such a book, and in this case,…
Letters of Nichiren
Translated by Burton Watson and others
IdeasMagazine | Uncommon Sense
The War on Words and Images
It’s that time when responsible citizens pinch their nostrils tightly, hold their collective breaths, and vote for the lesser of many unsavory evils. Most of us have listened to enough empty rhetoric in this presidential year…
Black Teapot
When I say “the black teapot” I’m surprised that everyone knows what I’m talking about. So little of it is black. And yet you and I know which teapot I mean. We’ve agreed to call this…
Wake Up and Cook
E is for Ego
Whaddya Mean, “We”?
So far we have received some fifty responses to the anti-gay letters published in the previous issue. To provide a brief synopsis: in issue number 20 we published an interview with Tibetan scholar Jeffrey Hopkins and…
How to Be a Help Instead of a Nuisance: Practical Approaches to Giving Support, Service, and Encouragement to Others
How to Be a Help Instead of a Nuisance: Practical Approaches to Giving Support, Service, and Encouragement to OthersKaren Kissel WegelaShambhala: Boston, 1996.240 pp., $13.00 (paper). Most of us have experienced, in a moment of pain…
In the News Winter 1996
IN MEMORIAM: PHILIP YAMPOLSKY Philip Yampolsky, renowned translator and scholar of Zen Buddhism, died of complications due to pneumonia on July 28, 1996. He was seventy-five years old. Yampolsky, born in New York City on October…
TeachingsMagazine | Dharma Talk
A Single Handful
To call something “a fundamental principle of Buddhism” is correct only if, first, it is a principle that aims at the quenching of dukkha (suffering) and, second, it has a logic that one can see for…
The Design of Poetry
These pages are from the book The Design of Poetry by Carl Lehmann-Haupt.The book is modeled on those little books of poetic form that attempt to desrcibe the different aspects of poetry, such as rhyme and…
Sit: Zen Teachings of Master Taisen Deshmiaru
Edited by Philippe Coupey
Magazine | What Does Being A Buddhist Mean To You
What Does Being a Buddhist Mean to You? Winter 1996
Re: How much money is enough?
Keep Sweeping: A Ch’an Life in Rural Tennessee
If anyone in Monteagle, Tennessee, took notice of a “Chinaman” walking down the street in 1965, dressed like a coolie, they would have dismissed the implausibility with one of two explanations: He worked as a cook…