Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2018 i Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly

JUDY ROITMAN (Zen Master Bon Hae) says she found herself walking into Cambridge Zen Center in 1976, having no idea what she was getting into, and in some sense never left. After moving to Lawrence, Kansas, in 1978 she helped found the Kansas Zen Center with, among others, her husband Stan Lombardo. She was granted authorization as a teacher (inka) in the Kwan Um School of Zen in 1998 and received dharma transmission in 2013. JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN cofounded the Insight Meditation Society in 1975 and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in 1989. He has studied and practiced meditation since 1967 under the guidance of teachers from India, Burma, and Tibet, becoming one of the first American vipassana teachers. Currently, he is a core teacher in the new IMS teacher…

KONDA MASON: The Buddha stressed that the work we choose, how we sustain ourselves, is central to living an ethical life. Within the eightfold path is right livelihood, the teaching that one’s work should be compatible with sound moral principles and should cause no harm. In a less complicated world 2,600 years ago, the Buddha listed five livelihoods he considered unethical: trading in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison. Fair enough. Today, however, we live in a complex industrialized society driven by a hungry market economy; many livelihoods now fall short of the principle of nonharming. In our deeply interconnected world, is it even possible to make a living in a way that is compatible with right livelihood? Let’s consider some hypothetical, yet typical, slices of American life. Imagine…

Meditation, Buddhism, and Science Edited by David L. McMahan and Erik Braun Oxford University Press, 2017 272 pages; $24.95 SINCE 2004, when studies confirmed that expert meditators could consciously induce gamma brain waves that demonstrated increased learning, contemplative training has been linked to neural plasticity, one of the great paradigm shifts in modern neuroscience. News of this linkage launched an industry. Today, the mindfulness movement manifests in ways both serious and downright silly. Nonetheless, scientific research on meditation remains in its infancy. Meditation as a subject of scientific inquiry traces its historical roots back to the 1930s, with the first published study appearing in 1966. However, much of the research to date has been conducted in the vacuum of laboratories and consequently has neglected the environments, social-relational fields, and cultures…

On this issue’s cover, the wrathful deity Mahakala takes a selfie. Ritual objects, once used as a means of communicating with the gods, are replaced with an iPhone, all against a backdrop of quotations from Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. This is the unmistakable work of Lhasa-based painter GADE, whose work juxtaposes traditional symbolism and iconography with the capitalist culture that has permeated contemporary Chinese and Tibetan society. Born to a Tibetan mother and a Han Chinese father, he straddles two worlds: “My generation has grown up with thangka painting, martial arts, Hollywood movies, Mickey Mouse, Charlie Chaplin, rock ‘n’ roll, and McDonald’s. We still don’t know where the spiritual homeland is.” In the artist CRYPTIK’s paintings (p. 42), Buddhist and Hindu mantras merge with cholo graffiti writing in an…

A GOOD PART OF MY LIFE has been spent relating to situations that might be deemed hopeless—as an anti-war activist, a civil rights worker, a caregiver of dying people. I have also volunteered with death row inmates, served in medical clinics in remote areas of the Himalayas—where life is hard, food is scarce, and access to health care is nil—and worked in Kathmandu with Rohingya refugees who have no status, anywhere. You might ask, why bother? Why hold out hope for ending war or injustice? Why have hope for people who are dying, or for refugees fleeing from genocide, or for solutions to climate change? I have often been troubled by the notion of hope. But recently, in part because of the work of social critic Rebecca Solnit and her…

The term “psychedelic” was coined in the 1950s by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond and championed by Aldous Huxley, Al Hubbard, and Timothy Leary. The Greek roots of the word are psyche, “mind” or “soul,” and delic, “manifest” or “visible,” with a combined meaning of “mind/soul manifesting.” Wanting to avoid the cultural baggage from the 1960s and 70s, the term entheogen was coined in 1979, meaning “generating God within.” The following are the entheogen/psychedelics substances most commonly used by American Buddhists. Ayahuasca is a tea traditionally brewed from a combination of the vine banisteriopsis caapi, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and the leaves of the psychotria viridis, which contains dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a chemical known for radically altering mental states. Shamans in the Amazon offer ayahuasca sacramentally, often with songs of healing,…

Homage to Jizo Bodhisattva, protector of those crossing over, guardian of children who have died, comforter of loved ones struggling on the path of crossing over from this life and those who grieve their deaths; homage to your great vow and to the fearlessness you illuminate and inspire in those who grieve; and deep gratitude for the balm and healing your fierce love illuminates in this world of striving and love and suffering. THERE IS A RITUAL that, over the years, I have come to participate in often. I know it as the Jizo ceremony, or the “Ceremony for Children Who Have Died”; in Japan, it’s called Mizuko Kuyo. When I join in this ritual, my ways of perceiving and engaging are shaped by three of my identities: that of…

Ajahn Jayasaro’s STILLNESS FLOWING: THE LIFE AND TEACHINGS OF AJAHN CHAH (Abhayagiri 2017) is a remarkable testament to the legacy of the Thai Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah (1918–1992). Over eight hundred pages in length, the book begins with Ajahn Chah’s death in Ubon Ratchathani in Northeast Thailand, which prompted over a million people (yes, a million) to travel to his monastery and bow before his body in the year between his death and cremation. This fact alone gives us a sense of Ajahn Chah’s impact on Buddhism in Thailand, and thanks to his numerous Western disciples, his Forest Tradition has now spread well beyond Thailand’s borders. One striking feature of Ajahn Chah’s approach is that he did not espouse any specific meditation technique. Jayasaro explains that his teacher accepted any…

CALIFORNIA AGAINST THE STREAM BUDDHIST MEDITATION SOCIETY 4300 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90029. (323) 665-4300, Fax: (323) 665-4404, service@againstthestream.org, www.againstthestream.org • Founded by Noah Levine, author of Dharma Punx, Against The Stream has two centers in Los Angeles and Santa Monica offering weekly classes, daylong retreats, and special class series. AGAINST THE STREAM BUDDHIST MEDITATION SOCIETY 2701 Folsom St, San Francisco, CA 94110. bayarea@againstthestream.org, www.againstthestream.org • Meditation center in the Mission offers weekly classes, daylongs, class series and residential retreats. DHARMA ZEN CENTER 1025 S Cloverdale Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90019. (323) 934-0330, info@dharmazen.com, www.dharmazen.com • Clear teaching, clear mind. Please join us for regularly scheduled practice and retreats. A Kwan Um School Zen Center. EMPTY GATE ZEN CENTER 2200 Parker St, Berkeley, CA 94704. (510) 845-8565, info@emptygatezen.com, www.emptygatezen.com…