Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2016 i Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly

Following two accidents in my teens and twenties, I live with a serious spinal injury, getting around with the help of a wheelchair or crutches and with pain as a constant companion. When I am on retreat, I need to change position regularly, either by lying down or standing up. I need to do this. And at the places where I teach and practice, I can do this. Taraloka, a U.K. retreat center for women where I often teach, has a dedicated living space for disabled retreatants. There is an accessible bathroom, and the whole venue is wheelchair accessible. I know how lucky I am. But I worry that others may not be so lucky. In the early days of establishing Buddhism in the West, disabled access was understandably not…

Q I have always believed that putting others’ needs ahead of my own is the way to happiness, but caring for a partner with a chronic neurological illness is putting that belief to the test. I feel fortunate that I can help in this way, but honestly, I resent the constant demands on my life. Why am I not deriving more joy from helping another sentient being? NARAYAN HELEN LIEBENSON: I find meditators to be some of the most idealistic people in the world. This is both a strength and a weakness. Its strength is that it encourages us to reach beyond what appears possible and to live with great meaning. Ideals guide us in our intentions and offer a direction for our lives. The weakness is that when we…

IN THE EARLY 1900s, the English occupation of Burma threatened to undermine the faith and practice of Burmese Buddhists. Monastic elders instituted a comprehensive offering of scholastic studies of buddhadhamma that resulted in an informed laity with devout faith. Mahasi Sayadaw capitalized on that base of Buddhist knowledge when he opened the Mahasi Meditation Center in Rangoon in 1949. There, he offered a semi-secluded physical retreat environment where people could practice in silence and away from any other worldly obligations and responsibilities. The daily schedule alternated mindful sitting and walking for up to twenty hours per day with simple, progressive, and pragmatic instruction. Faithful laymen and women could acquire the momentum of mindfulness sufficient for the development of liberating insight. This style of teaching and practice informs the foundation of…

I’M SURELY NOT THE ONLY ONE first attracted to Buddhism by hearing a whispered song in an artwork. In 1978, The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen’s searchingly honest tale of his pilgrimage into the Himalayas, left me longing for a clarity hard to name. Later, in the Japanese Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I was stunned by the Dainichi Nyorai, the Heian-period (794–1185) Supreme Buddha of the Cosmos, whose calm wooden form, subtly shimmering with gold leaf, spoke of a perfect heart of immaculate serenity and love. The Dainichi sits in its own temple enclosure in the museum, and millions of visitors walk by it. Many see it; some really see it. “Liberation through seeing” can send a shock wave to the heart, like clutching a…

David M. DiValerio’s The Holy Madmen of Tibet (Oxford 2015) examines some of Tibetan history’s most fascinating figures. Diving straight into the grotesque for which these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Kagyu “madmen” became known, DiValerio begins by describing Tsangnyon Heruka’s use of human remains as clothing and Drukpa Kunle’s verse about paying homage “not to the Buddha, but to an old man’s impotent member.” While the stories about these teachers are shocking (and highly entertaining), DiValerio frames their actions as a kind of “tantric fundamentalism” that involved taking Buddhist tantric texts literally and emulating the transgressive behaviors they detail. Far from being unhinged, DiValerio suggests they were upholding a vision of tantric Buddhist orthodoxy in order to forge a new identity for the Kagyu order—one that would provide a clear alternative…

MEDITATION CENTERS 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. CALIFORNIA TENDAI MONASTERY PO Box 811, Cobb, CA 95426. (707) 295-7733, vkleary9@yahoo.com, www.caltendai.org ❖ A training monastery for bodhisattva monks practicing Japanese Mantrayana: fire offering (goma); mountain walking asceticism; Ajikan meditation; and vegetarian diet. CHAGDUD GONPA RIGDZIN LING PO Box 279, Junction City, CA 96048. (530) 623-2714, FAX: (530) 623-6709, sangha@chagdudgonpa.org, www.chagdudgonpa.org ❖ Nyingma Buddhist center in serene Northern California Alps. Founded by Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. Daily meditation; teaching and retreat programs; individual retreat facilities. DHARMA ZEN…

Compassion and rebirth are two traditional Buddhist tenets that both came together for me recently as I sat reflecting on how I nearly drove my mother off the road. That incident had occurred another night long ago. Irritated by a slow driver ahead of me, I tailgated the vehicle so closely that I could not even see the license plate. I persisted until the car turned off onto a side road. But that side road was the very road that I intended to take to visit my parents—and the driver was my mother. The shame that overcame me in that moment was so great that, to this day, whenever I find myself following a particularly slow driver, I think, That could be my mother. This simple thought summons up images…

Stop Worrying about Your Self Instead of struggling over self and no-self, says Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, just relax and be kind. I don’t think you need to or that you can detach from the self. You would have to find it first. And because it continues to change with so-called “outer” experience, I don’t think that will happen. Try thinking of self as just being and responding to the world around you with intelligence. You are a part of the great nature of infinite interdependence. In this way you are not the same or separate from anything. You can’t separate your awareness from life around you. Therefore you can’t say you are independent or separate from other. And yet, you can’t really say you are the same, either. So how can…

AT THE END OF A BUSY DAY, we sometimes feel tired and disconnected from our true heart and from other people. We might have a conscious wish to sit down on a cushion, relax, and exhale completely, letting go of ourselves and our constricted way of being in the world. It’s difficult to say where this wish actually comes from, but if we follow it, then sometimes a larger awareness begins to dawn, zazen starts to sit zazen, and the heart begins to open. How does such a miraculous thing happen? Dogen Zenji writes, “The aspiration for awakening arises in the mystical communion between buddhas and sentient beings. It is not given by buddhas or bodhisattvas, it is not created by oneself, and it does not simply arise spontaneously.” This…