Letters to the Editor

In response to Tricycle Online’s “What Do Buddhists Think of Fort Worth’s ‘Walk for Peace’ Monks?”:

My heart has aligned with Buddhism since my earliest memories—about forty-five years ago. This past year has been a challenge—mentally, physically, and spiritually. I am sure it has been for many. Watching the United States crumble daily in the news made it that much harder.
I do not know when I became aware of the “Walk for Peace,” but when I became very sick with the flu, or some such illness, at Christmastime, I was forced to be still and quiet for days. I started watching the “Walk for Peace” and could not turn away. It gave me a different perspective. So I watched it every day.

I developed the habit of claiming my “peaceful day”—a concept I learned from the “Walk for Peace” monks. It became a conscious choice. I started driving differently. I would not become angry. If I did, I would stop the anger in its tracks. I began asking myself, “Do I truly want to be angry, or do I truly want myself and the other person to be safe?” I started treating myself with the love with which I would treat a child who doesn’t know the correct thing to do or say.

As days passed, I knew I would have to go see the monks in person. I put together a small carpool of people who might also want to go. The weather became tough as the monks drew closer to North Carolina. The closest stop on the monks’ route was three hours away from our home. It was difficult to figure out where they would be in the city and on what day. We stayed on hold until the night before the monks entered Siler City.

A few days before, I felt a shift. I did not feel the urgency to go see the monks that I initially did. By virtue of watching the “Walk for Peace” unfold online, in a sense, I was walking too. I was on the journey.

Ultimately, I am pleased I made the decision to go. It was an interesting day for me to observe myself. The day we headed to Siler City, I found myself, as the driver and organizer, so anxious to keep everyone from the caravan together that I almost missed the monks.

We met them on the highway as they were walking into Siler City. As they came closer, I could only keep my head bowed. I could hear the rhythm of their feet like a soft drumbeat in my heart. I can hear them as I type.

In the city center, we were able to watch them pass again. This time I had the insight that I do not need to herd cats but to simply allow the moment to happen. Since coming home, I continue to carry that peace. My meditation is deeper and richer than I have known. It’s nice to look at my day and say, “Today was my peaceful day.”

–Cheryl Sharp

 

I was fortunate to see the venerable monks outside a small town in rural Georgia. As they approached the gathering place, down a two-lane blacktop, a cheer erupted from hundreds of folks lining the road, many of the onlookers likely never having seen a Buddhist monk before. What followed was astounding.

After the monks, law enforcement, and numerous volunteers had lunch, the monks offered to feed anyone wishing to partake. The monks had nothing to sell and asked for nothing. Instead, their leader, Venerable Pannakara, taught the crowd basic mindfulness and how to cultivate peace during our everyday lives. The teaching was received quietly, with respect and gratitude. If you’re not from the South, trust me: This was a cultural-
spiritual sea change on many levels.

Shortly after stopping in my town, “Walk for Peace” exploded into a national phenomenon: 2,300 miles on foot, through heat, rain, sleet, snow; camping along the road, staying in Baptist churches, hosted by governors, mayors, and chiefs of police; huge crowds cheering them on, handing the monks fruit, flowers, water, many along the road in tears.

What deeply rooted longing have they touched? As many have said, “The world is filled with so much conflict; we need peace now more than ever.”

As the monks tell us: “Let us walk together in spirit today—wherever you are, whatever you’re doing. With each mindful breath you take, with each compassionate choice you make, you are helping peace bloom more beautifully in this world.”

–Ned Mudd

 

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Tricycle featured Haemin Sunim as the lead teacher for 2026 Meditation Month. Below are some responses to his series of video teachings entitled “Awakening with Zen Koans”:

Thank you, Haemin Sunim. The Week 2 video teaching (“Boundless Freedom”) is serious fun and so mind-opening. These koans are not new to me, I met them twenty-five years ago. But this is the first time that I have enjoyed them so much and felt so changed by them. Walking outside into the world holding this question: “What is not a thing, not the mind, not the Buddha?” and then experiencing my own “That’s not it!” over and over is great. Space? That’s not it. Consciousness? That’s not it. Curiosity? That’s not it! Commenting? That’s not it. I am smiling all day. Thank you again, Haemin Sunim, for being a great teacher, and thank you, Tricycle, for this offering.

–Anne Coldiron

“Haemin Sunim’s teachings have provided a renewed sense of wonder and curiosity.”

The month of meditation with Haemin Sunim is one of the most amazing things I have experienced with Tricycle. The koans are fascinating, and his discussions of them are so deep. Thank you all so much for bringing him to us.

–Karen Kunz

 

Thank you, Haemin Sunim, and thank you, Tricycle! I’ve been practicing for a long time now, but not in the Zen tradition. Today, the first day of the year, Haemin Sunim’s teachings have provided a renewed sense of wonder and curiosity. Not a bad way to start the year!

–Lourdes Anllo-Vento

 

Bhikkhu Anālayo’s work establishing the continuity between the Agama literature and the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita, as discussed in “The Birth of a Tradition” (Spring 2026), is a genuinely important contribution. His comparative method—setting the earliest extant Chinese and Gandhari versions side by side with Pali and Chinese canonical parallels—is rigorous and illuminating, and his demonstration that the Mahayana emerged organically from themes already present in early Buddhist discourse is a valuable reminder of our commonality that transcends sectarian distinctions.

The dating question deserves further thought. While the Astasahasrika is often cited as the earliest Mahayana sutra, this remains contested. Gregory Schopen and many Japanese scholars argue the Vajracchedika may be earlier. Kogaku Fuse placed the earliest verse layers of the Lotus Sutra in the 1st century BCE—roughly contemporary with Conze’s dating of the Astasahasrika. The Salistamba Sutra dates back to 200 BCE. And texts like the Ugrapariprccha and Pratyutpanna Sutra belong to the same early cluster. The picture that emerges from the scholarship is less a neat sequence and more a creative efflorescence—multiple communities producing visionary literature within roughly the same period. The Prajnaparamita and the Lotus Sutra were, for all practical scholarly purposes, contemporaneous texts developed in parallel—and possibly in conversation with each other. The only firm historical distinction between them is that the Prajnaparamita was first translated into Chinese about a century before the Lotus—Lokaksema, in 179 CE, versus Dharmaraksa in 286 CE. Beyond that, the best anyone can say with certainty is that both were developing at the same time.

There is never only one explanation of any Buddhist doctrine, and this interpretive richness is both Buddhism’s glory and one source of its fractious tendency toward sectarian division. We are all prone to slipping into the superiority of our own tradition, even when we try hard not to. Anālayo’s closing words—his call for a historically informed engagement that sees conditionality operating through history rather than elevating one tradition as the sole truth—are deeply appreciated and serve as balm for all of us. In that same spirit, it is worth noting that his characterization of the Lotus Sutra as effecting “a decisive shift” involving the denigration of arahantship is itself one reading among several. In the Tiantai and Nichiren traditions, the Lotus does not dismiss the arahants—it gives them prophecies of future buddhahood, recontextualizing their realization within the ekayana rather than negating it. In the Chan and Zen traditions, the Lotus’s insistence on one vehicle is read not as a doctrinal hierarchy but as the dissolution of the vehicle metaphor altogether—a pointing beyond conceptual categories that is entirely continuous with the Prajnaparamita’s own method. Anālayo persuasively demonstrates that the Prajnaparamita corrects the Sarvastivada Abhidharma’s reification of intrinsic nature; the Lotus, in turn, guards against the possibility of reifying emptiness itself into a new fixed position. These are complementary movements, not successive stages of decline.

What I find most compelling about Anālayo’s continuity argument is that it invites a further question: Continuity with what else? Astasahasrika’s oldest manuscripts come from Gandhara—one of the ancient world’s great intellectual crossroads, where Buddhist, Greek, Persian, and Central Asian thought co-existed for centuries. The Falk-Karashima Gandhari manuscript was produced in a culture where bilingual Greek-Kharosthi inscriptions were commonplace. If the Mahayana grew organically from what preceded it, “what preceded it” included not only the Agamas but also the entire cosmopolitan intellectual environment of the Silk Road.

None of this diminishes Anālayo’s achievement—his meticulous internal analysis is precisely the foundation that makes broader questions about cross-cultural influence worth asking. It is also fitting, and speaks well of both the scholar and the tradition, that a Theravada monk is doing some of the most careful and generous scholarship on the origins of Mahayana literature. That spirit of inquiry across traditional boundaries is itself a kind of perfection of wisdom.

–Mark Nichiryu Herrick

 

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