Indholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2020 i Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly

STEPHEN BATCHELOR began his Buddhist studies in 1972 in India, received full ordination as a bhikkhu in 1979, and disrobed in 1985, following three years of training in Korean Seon. The author of Buddhism Without Beliefs and cofounder of Bodhi College, he is known for his secular approach to the dharma. He is married to dharma teacher and author Martine Batchelor, whom he met in Korea, where she trained as a Seon nun for ten years. KRITEE (dharma name Kanko) is a Rinzai Zen priest, climate scientist, and founder of Boundless in Motion, a community in Boulder dedicated to “Zen meditation and strategic activism.” A microbiologist and isotope biogeochemist by training, she is a senior scientist in the Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Program, through which she helps implement climate-smart farming…

BHANTE SUJATO: In 2014 I coauthored, with Bhikkhu Brahmali, a book called The Authenticity of the Early Buddhist Texts. The “early Buddhist texts” are essentially the main parts of the Pali suttas and vinaya, as well as the cognate texts in Chinese and other languages. We examined a wide variety of textual features: historical, linguistic, political, geographic, doctrinal, archaeological, and more. We showed that these can best be explained by the simple, rational thesis that the texts stem primarily from the teachings of the historical person known as the Buddha, as collected and edited by his followers. There are skeptical scholars who resist this conclusion. But in their analyses they usually pick out just one or two details, scorning any serious attempt to acknowledge the nature and scope of the…

The Rice Seedling Sutra is one of the most important Buddhist sutras on the topic of dependent arising, the basic Buddhist doctrine that everything depends on something else for its existence. Spoken by the bodhisattva Maitreya, it recounts a teaching that the Buddha had given while gazing at a rice seedling. “Whoever sees dependent arising sees the dharma,” the Buddha states, which means that understanding dependent arising is essential to our knowledge of his teachings. In other words, if the goal is to overcome suffering, then any hope of attaining this goal hinges on recognizing the profound interrelations that make up our world. A sutra of this scope can be read in many ways, including taking it as a teaching on the environment and our place in it. The Rice…

A MEDITATOR’S JOB is to remember to be aware. Whether you are standing, sitting, lying down, or walking, if you remember that you are aware, then you are meditating, and you are cultivating the positive qualities of the mind. We always start with awareness. It is that quality that grounds us and allows all the wholesome mind-states to arise, especially the quality of wisdom. When awareness and wisdom are working together like this, we gain the confidence and the motivation to keep exploring and moving into the uncharted regions of our minds, where suffering gets started at a subtle level. What the mind is aware of—the objects of awareness such as sensations, thoughts, perceptions, and emotions—isn’t really important. What’s important is the quality of the observing mind that is always…

In The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns (Shambhala 2020), Matty Weingast reinterprets the Therigatha, a collection of poems by the earliest female students of the Buddha. Taking poetic license from the Pali originals, Weingast transforms the poems into sharply penetrating and profoundly moving English free verse. The voices of these women are gentle but defiant, loving yet blunt: Do you want freedom? What does true freedom look like? Why shouldn’t freedom be for you? These are women who sought out enlightenment long before it was safe to utter “women” and “liberation” in the same sentence, yet Weingast has given voice to them in a way that renders the distance of two and a half millennia inconsequential. They speak as though they are here and now, about…

One day, as he encounters a Zen mastera samurai scolds him sharplyyou walk like a pigyou eat like a pigyou breathe like a pig The Zen monk looks at him and replies peacefullyyou walk like a Buddhayou eat like a Buddhayou breathe like a Buddha unsettled, the samurai asks the monk whyhe is talking to him like that the monk explains that a Buddha sees only Buddhasand a pig sees only pigs a consciousness thingified by the concept Isees only thingsfor such a consciousness,thoughts, emotions, and mental statescan only be things From “thoughts” in Beyond Tranquility, by Charles Genoud (Wisdom 2020)…

THE IMAGE ON this issue’s cover, the head of a Buddha statue at a coal yard near China’s Yellow River, was captured by French photographers Sébastien Tixier (above) and Raphael Bourelly (right). The owner of the coal mine built a golden statue more than thirty-five feet high; when the head was damaged, no one felt comfortable destroying it or disposing of it, so it remains in the coal field, an emblem of impermanence. The photo is from their series Shan Shui, meaning “Mountains Water.” Using collage, paper folding techniques, and mixed media, German photographer Alma Haser (right) raises questions about her subjects and explores the possibilities of portraiture. The details from the series Twin Puzzle (page 70) reveal Haser’s fascination with identical twins—she breaks photos of twins into puzzle pieces,…

NOWADAYS I WAKE UP even earlier than usual to check the news. It’s an obsession but it feels like a duty; I’m a sentry in a war zone, scanning the horizon for smoke and fire. Threats multiply every day. Environmentally, socially, politically, and technologically, the world seems locked in a death spiral. I feel overwhelmed and, to be honest, complicit. What have I done to alter the course of human ignorance, greed, and hatred? Clearly not enough. Then I go sit. As Buddhist practitioners, indeed, as citizens of planet Earth, we might wonder if there’s a better use of our time than sitting still in silence. Shouldn’t we be raising our voices, righting wrongs, and fighting the good fight? There are people to help and causes to champion, protests to…

IN THE MADHYAMAKA, or Middle Way School, a critical element of wisdom is seeing beyond the two extremes of eternalism and nihilism. In transcending eternalism and nihilism, you’re not trying to achieve some half-and-half mix of the two; you’re transcending both. So you’re not trying to cling to some new thing in the middle or to a both existent and nonexistent state, or some such oddity. Nihilism may be more familiar and easier to identify in our culture. You might have friends whom you would say have a nihilistic bent, or maybe you, yourself, have certain leanings in that direction. But what is eternalism? Eternalism, on the surface, would be a belief in a permanent soul. There are, of course, many people in the world who have such a belief.…

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. INSIGHT LA MEDITATION 1430 Olympic Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90404. (310) 450-1821, programs@ insightla. or, insightla.org • InsightLA Meditation is a meditation center teaching the highest quality evidence-based mindfulness practices throughout the Greater Los Angeles area. For 17 years, we have offered classes, retreats, and special events in an open and welcoming community. LOTUS SCULPTURE 1834 Ord Way, Oceanside, CA 92056. (760) 994-4455, info@mangalamcenter.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…