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

PEMA KHANDRO RINPOCHE is a lineage holder in the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as one of the few Westerners recognized and enthroned as a tulku. She is the founder of the nonprofit organization Ngakpa International, and residential meditation communities in Virginia and California. She holds a master’s degree in Tibetan Studies and is completing a doctorate specializing in Tibetan Buddhism at the University of Virginia. RANDY ROSENTHAL is a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School and the cofounding editor and publisher of the literary journals The Coffin Factory and Tweed’s Magazine of Literature and Art. His work has appeared in such publications as the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New York Journal of Books. He teaches writing at Harvard. GESSHIN…

KEIRYU LIÊN SHUTT: I’ve heard it said by Zen teachers that the function of the mind is to secrete thoughts. From that perspective, “to rest in nonconceptual, open, ‘don’t know’ mind” isn’t so much to stop or transcend thinking as to simply let thoughts be “just thoughts” and to know that the mind is doing its thing. Thinking is simply what the mind does, in the same way that ears hear and eyes see. What we endeavor to stop is not thinking itself but the obsessive energy that gets caught up in the content of the thoughts. We practice to recognize thoughts as just another phenomenon arising. We practice to stop our belief in the solidity of our interpretation of our thoughts—our “story”—and the emotional patterns and judgments that often…

A YEAR AGO, it would have been hard to imagine publishing an article with this headline in our journal. But a lot happened in a year: the #MeToo movement hit the world by storm, and shocking revelations of abuse by Buddhist teachers in high-profile communities, including Shambhala and Rigpa, became mainstream news. While communities are still grappling with these allegations and legal issues remain to be resolved, these allegations have given rise to many questions and concerns regarding the role of the teacher in Buddhism. In light of the most recent upheavals, we’ve chosen in this discussion to focus on the guru model in the Tibetan tradition, in which the teacher is central to the path. Our panelists are deeply involved in guru practice and offer, from the inside, insights…

Do not aspire to great realization. Great realization is everyday tea and meals.—Dogen Zenji, Shobogenzo Gyoji I USED TO HATE ZEN. In fact, sometimes I still don’t really like Zen. My ex-boyfriend introduced me to Zen, and this is probably why I hated it so much. He was a lovely, idealistic, over-intellectual type who could not cook or clean, and his mom bought his clothes. He loved the koan of Nansen killing the cat. It goes like this: Some monks are arguing over a cat. The master, Nansen, holds up a cat and says to his monks, “If one of you can say a word, I’ll spare the cat. If not, I will kill it.” No one can say anything, and so he kills the cat. Later he tells this…

RECENTLY, WHILE TEACHING in Brazil, I happened to mention devas and rebirth. The next morning, I received two complaints. The first was, “Why do we have to listen to this supernatural stuff? I don’t believe in anything except for the natural world I can see with my own eyes.” The second complaint was of a different sort: “Why are Western Buddhist teachers so afraid to talk about the supernatural side of the Buddhist tradition?” To answer the second question, all I had to do was point to the first. “It’s because of questions like these. They scare teachers away from the topic.” I might have added that there’s an irony here. In an effort to be tolerant, Western Buddhist teachers have admitted dogmatic materialists into their ranks, but these materialists…

The second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna had it out for anyone addicted to logic. He recognized logic’s importance in the context of philosophical discourse but observed that many of his non-Buddhist contemporaries wrongly believed in the ultimate reality of their system. Even worse, to his mind, they believed that logic would liberate them from the cycle of birth and death. In Crushing the Categories (Wisdom 2018), Jan Westerhoff translates Nagarjuna’s critique of logic (Vaidalyaprakarana) and offers detailed commentary on the implications of its verses. He emphasizes that Nagarjuna’s goal in this text is to demonstrate that complex logical systems can be carefully harmonized with Buddhist teachings on emptiness, and thus can be adapted to overturn the extreme views of others. Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura’s The Mountains and Waters Sutra (Wisdom…

THESE WORDS ARE HERE because of Aaron, known to many as the Angry Asian Buddhist. He forged the path for their publication in this Buddhist journal, creating a place for them in the wider public discourse on Buddhism in the West. Blogging at Dharma Folk and Angry Asian Buddhist, Aaron J. Lee was steadfast in his nearly decade-long campaign to make visible the ongoing exclusion of Asian American Buddhists from the dominant conversation around American Buddhism. He was especially keen on holding popular Buddhist magazines accountable for positioning white Buddhists—who represent a minority of US Buddhists—as the norm while simultaneously excluding perspectives from Asian American Buddhists. In the guise of his pissed-off, Excel-wielding alter ego, arunlikhati, Aaron diligently detailed the extent of the displacement, poring over the latest Buddhist books…

WHEN RECHUNGPA, a student of the eminent Tibetan yogi Milarepa, was returning home from his studies in India, his master went out to meet him. Along the way it started to rain, and Rechungpa lost sight of his guru in the wind and fog. He could hear the master singing through the storm but couldn’t see him. When Rechungpa finally caught sight of Milarepa, he was sheltering from the rain inside a yak horn, singing and laughing. As mystifying as that feat was, the part that really blew Rechungpa’s mind was that Milarepa fit within the yak horn without making his body smaller or the yak horn bigger. To us, as well, the baffling thing about this story is not the possibility of magic—which is a given in so many…

If You Meet The Buddha On The Road: Buddhism, Politics, and Violence by Michael Jerryson Oxford University Press, 2018 240 pages; $99 AS MYANMAR, a country with a Buddhist majority, carries out genocide against its Muslim Rohingya population (amidst other campaigns of violence), the need to understand how and why Buddhists are engaging in violence is urgent. Despite the prevalent narrative, the reality of “the world’s most peaceful religion” mobilizing to the drumbeat of war is not a new development. Against that backdrop, Michael Jerryson’s If You Meet the Buddha On the Road: Buddhism, Politics and Violence is part of a growing body of scholarship examining the historical and contemporary entanglements of Buddhists in war and oppression. Jerryson, a professor of religious studies at Youngstown State University, analyzes how Buddhists…

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 REALM BUDDHIST UNIVERSITY 4951 Bodhi Way, Ukiah, CA 95482. (707) 621-7000, info@drbu.edu, www.drbu.edu • Dharma Realm Buddhist University (DRBU) is an accredited university in northern California dedicated to liberal education in the broad Buddhist tradition. DHARMA ZEN CENTER 1025 S Cloverdale Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90019. (323) 934-0330,…

Listen up, old bad-karma Patrul,You dweller-in-distraction.For ages now you’ve beenBeguiled, entranced, and fooled by appearances.Are you aware of that? Are you?Right this very instant, when you’reUnder the spell of mistaken perception,You’ve got to watch out.Don’t let yourself get carried away by this fake and empty life. Your mind is spinning aroundAbout carrying out a lot of useless projects:It’s a waste! Give it up!Thinking about the hundred plans you want to accomplish,With never enough time to finish them,Just weighs down your mind.You’re completely distractedBy all these projects, which never come to an end,But keep spreading out more, like ripples in water.Don’t be a fool: for once, just sit tight. —from Patrul Rinpoche’s “Advice from Me to Myself,” translation by Constance Wilkinson…