Indholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2019 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 founded the nonprofit organization Ngakpa International, residential meditation centers in Virginia and California, and a new retreat center, Dakini Mountain, near Lake Tahoe. She is completing a doctorate specializing in Tibetan Buddhism at the University of Virginia. NARAYAN HELEN LIEBENSON has been a teacher at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center since its founding in 1985, as well as a longtime guiding teacher at Insight Meditation Society, where, for thirty-five years, she has taught the annual women’s retreat with Christina Feldman. She is the author of The Magnanimous Heart: Compassion and Love, Loss and Grief, Joy and Liberation, published by Wisdom…

LA SARMIENTO: When I think of the traditional loving-kindness phrases I was taught early in my practice, this immediately comes to mind: May all beings be happy.May all beings be peaceful.May all beings be free from suffering.May all beings awaken and be free. As a genderqueer person, hearing those words, I could finally feel a sense of belonging in a world that would rather deny my civil rights, my relationships, and my existence. I once considered ordaining as a monastic. But when I discovered that in Myanmar novice monks wore white robes and the women wore bubblegum pink robes, and there was no possibility of wearing the sherbet-swirl robe that would most represent me, that sense of external belonging faded away. For me to feel a sense of liberation was…

Women in Buddhism have a complicated history. It is a history of great heroines such as Mahaprajapati Gotami, who led the first women’s march in recorded history to campaign for women’s ordination. It is the history of a profound philosophy that posits the innate equality of all people based on teachings such as emptiness of self, the five skandhas, and buddhanature. Yet it is also a history that bears the weight of misogynistic literature describing women as demonic, hypersexual temptresses whose female birth makes them ineligible for enlightenment. A mere fraction of the Buddhist histories that have been written down include stories of women, who even then remain largely unnamed. Still, voices both for and against gender equality in Buddhism have been present throughout its history. No one bears the…

Inseparable Across Lifetimes: The Lives and Love Letters of Namtrul Rinpoche and Khandro Tare Lhamo translated by Holly Gayley Shambhala, 2019 304 pages; $24.95 WITHIN TIBETAN BUDDHISM, much has been written about the consorts of great lamas—their remarkable lives, and also their role in helping the dharma to flourish through assisting male partners achieve spiritual realization. Many scholars have easily critiqued the tradition of sangyum (“secret consort,” an honorific term for wife or long-term partner of a spiritual master), pointing out the obvious sexism in determining a woman’s value from her sexuality and caretaking role rather than her own qualities. Holly Gayley’s Inseparable Across Lifetimes is not this kind of story. Gayley introduces readers to an extraordinary woman and to a couple deeply in love, not just with the dharma…

Stephanie Kaza combines decades of Buddhist practice with scientific training in natural history and ecology in Green Buddhism (Shambhala 2019). Through stories of personal struggle and anxiety with the devastating facts of climate change, the book attempts to address the grave situation of our environment with an optimistic, Buddhist-inspired activism. Kaza sees that Buddhist ideas such as compassion, interdependence, and no-self can be uniquely applicable not only to our practices but also, by extension, to our environmental concerns. As just one example, she offers the “Indra’s Net” practice as a way of building up our spiritual capacities to meet the challenges of climate change yet to come; in this Green Buddhist meditational practice, one focuses on the dynamics of climate change and, “rather than resisting the frustrations and setbacks of…

IN ONE WELL-KNOWN episode in the Lotus Sutra, we meet an unlikely candidate for buddhahood: the eight-year-old daughter of the dragon king. Our introduction to her comes through gossip. Discussing—behind her back—the girl’s rumored readiness for buddhahood, the bodhisattvas Manjushri and Wisdom Accumulated mull over whether or not she could possibly be as advanced as they have heard. Wisdom Accumulated argues that, since it took the Buddha a very long time to become the Buddha, he “cannot believe that this girl in the space of an instant could actually achieve correct enlightenment” (Burton Watson, The Lotus Sutra). Young, female, non-human—the daughter of the dragon king, in Wisdom Accumulated’s view, cannot attain the accomplishments of a buddha, accomplishments he himself has not yet achieved. But the daughter of the dragon king…

THE BUDDHIST COMMUNITY has always consisted of monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen, in that order, largely in deference to the social and cultural structures and conditions of the tradition’s birth. However, the question of women’s place and standing within Buddhism has, throughout its 2,600-year history, remained problematic and contentious. As Buddhist traditions have moved into Western geographic spaces, more attention has been focused on the issue of women, and various strategies and attempts to correct the historical record have been offered. Women are rediscovering and reasserting their place in Buddhism in a variety of ways. For example, the number of women who now head dharma centers, particularly in the West, is striking. Powerful books addressing the role and history of women in Buddhism have opened our eyes and helped women…

AS A YOUNG NUN, one day I was distractedly flipping through a series of small cards that depicted, in the artistic style of a Thai temple, the trajectory of the Buddha’s life. In the middle of the pack there was a picture of the emaciated Siddhartha, then him receiving milk rice from Sujata, then enlightened under the bodhi tree, peaceful, with a radiant halo. What leapt out to me was this: the Buddha only reached enlightenment by going through the portal of the feminine, or more broadly speaking, the sacred feminine. Generally, the term “sacred feminine” is not part of Buddhist lexicon. The place of the feminine, and of women, in Buddhism is indelibly marked by historic ambivalence. And while there are realized women, dedicated scholars, nuns, teachers, and practitioners,…

AS WITH MUCH of Soto Zen in Japan, there is a lot that Westerners don’t know about the world of Japanese nuns. At the forefront of their lineage and training is Shundo Aoyama Roshi: an enigma, a rock star, a laughing buddha, and a fiercely dedicated, humble practitioner of the Way. One American monk described her as a mountain—a mountain on fire. Aoyama Roshi, eighty-six years old, entered temple life at age five. Now the abbess of Aichi Senmon Nisodo, or Women’s Monastic College, she learned the traditional nun’s way, and then later also explored the traditional monk’s way, as well as the scholar’s way. A few years ago, she was awarded the title of Shike-kai Kaicho, or Master of Zen Masters, making her the highest-ranking nun in the history…

THE UNITED NATIONS SAYS that a million species could go extinct in the coming decades. What will that look like coming across our news feed? Imagine that the extinctions are announced one by one as they occur: how many alerts per day will that be? We’re entering a time of unimaginable losses, including the possible end of human life on Earth. If we hope to change this, we have to reckon with the fact that whatever we’re doing now isn’t working, since we’re still headed for the cliff, and something is preventing most people from engaging with the emergency, despite all the warnings. It’s possible that an important part of that something is a fear, conscious or unconscious, of the sorrow to come. How will we bear this grief? And…

Buddhist Feminisms and Femininities edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo SUNY Press, 2019 354 pages; $26.95 ONE SUMMER NIGHT in 2018, I found myself sitting in a small restaurant in Larung Gar, one of the largest centers for Buddhist learning in the world, slurping noodles and chatting away with a Tibetan Buddhist nun. I had been asking her about her role as an editor in several collections of writings by and about Buddhist women, about life as a nun at Larung Gar, and more. She asked me questions as well, mostly about gender in the US and mainland China; she was particularly interested in the history of the suffragette movement and in Roe v. Wade. At the end of our four-hour conversation, I asked her, “Would you consider yourself a Buddhist…

CALIFORNIA 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. KUNSANG GAR PO Box 65, Freedom, CA 95019. (831) 471-7883, kunsanggarcenter@gmail.com, http://kunsanggarcenter.org • Kunsang Gar, under the spiritual direction of Rime teacher Geshe Dangsong Namgyal, offers Dzogchen meditation classes, retreats, and purification practices. LOTUS SCULPTURE 1834 Ord Way, Oceanside, CA 92056. (760) 994-4455, info@lotussculpture.com, www.lotussculpture.com • Lotus Sculpture offers a sanctuary of Buddhist and Hindu sculpture open to all practitioners who would like to meditate fully immersed in the energy of the surrounding statues. MANGALAM CENTER 2018 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94704. info@mangalamcenter.com, mangalamcenter.com • Mangalam Center explores new ways of bringing wisdom…

Now in your kindness, I pray you to open for me the door of the Secret Mantra. For I am a timid woman and of scant ability; of lowly condition, the butt of everyone. If I go for alms, I am set upon by dogs; if food and riches come my way, I am the prey of thieves; since I am beautiful, I am the quarry of every lecherous knave; if I am busy with much to do, the country folk accuse me; if I don’t do what they think I should, the people criticize; if I put a foot wrong, everyone detests me. I have to worry about everything I do. That is what it is like to be a woman! —Yeshe Tsogyal, “Victorious Ocean of Wisdom,” known as…