Indholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2021 i Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly

KAIRA JEWEL LINGO teaches Buddhist meditation, secular mindfulness, and compassion internationally. She spent fifteen years as a nun in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community and is now a lay dharma teacher in both the Zen and Vipassana traditions, with a focus on racial, climate, and social justice. Her book, We Were Made for These Times: Skillfully Moving through Change, Loss, and Disruption (Parallax), is scheduled for release in October. JOY BRENNAN is a Soto Zen priest with the Mount Vernon Zen Sangha in Mount Vernon, Ohio, as well as a professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions at Kenyon College. Her academic work focuses on Buddhist conceptions of identity construction, such as those found in early Yogacara teachings, and the ways in which human beings construct their own worlds of…

A DEEP CURRENT OF PAIN moves through our world, ancient but immediate. It is the weight of unwholesome karma. It is the ignorance of our true embrace. In Japanese, Avalokiteshvara is called Kanzeon, the perceiver of the sounds of the world. The sound of the world, that rush and roar that has filled our ears from beginningless time, is the sound of suffering, of a current of pain that flows without cease. The bodhisattva joins this current through vow, through this heart that does not long to leave the world of pain, but chooses instead to flow with it, to perceive, to respond. We feel this current reflected throughout our lives as an unwillingness—an unwillingness to face each other, and also to face ourselves. Another person takes their own life,…

When Thich Nhat Hanh was working to end the war in Vietnam, he was seen as a traitor from all sides, considered an enemy by the North and South Vietnamese armies. But he didn’t subscribe to either ideology; he just wanted the war to end. That is sometimes a challenge of equanimity—if you don’t take sides, then everyone sees you as their enemy. He wrote this poem in 1965 for the young people risking their lives to stop the war—a recommendation to die without hatred. Promise me,promise me this day,promise me now,while the sun is overheadexactly at the zenith,promise me: Even as theystrike you downwith a mountain of hatred and violence;even as they step on you and crush youlike a worm,even as they dismember and disembowel you,remember brother, remember:man is…

WHEN I ARRIVED at Buddhadharma eight years ago, I was stepping between two worlds. For twelve years, I had been living in Japan, where I trained as a Soto Zen monk. Not all those years were in the monastery, but I was rarely far from it. So when I first sat down at my desk as deputy editor, I was steeped in a very particular dharma, one that smelled like incense and had the black sheen of wood floors that had been polished every day for centuries. It felt like my hands pressed together in gassho, like my forehead on the ground as I bowed, like robes wrapped around me. Before leaving Japan, I visited a well-known older monk, a teacher to one of my teachers, and told him I…

THE BUDDHIST TRADITION has long posited that important features of one’s collective identity are based on karmic inheritance. Some collective, karmically shaped identities are social, like one’s sexual identity as male, female, or another category. Others are cosmological, such as being born human rather than animal, god, hell being, or hungry ghost. These cosmological identities are sometimes also understood as psychological in nature, or as referencing both a life in a given cosmic realm and the presence of certain psychological traits or characteristics. So we find, for example, that hell beings are dominated by hate, while hungry ghosts are dominated by greed. These examples clearly illuminate the tradition’s commitment to identifying shared experiential conditions based on shared kinds of bodies, worlds of experience, and psychological traits, and linking these shared…

S. N. Goenka: Emissary of Insight By Daniel M. Stuart Shambhala Publications, 2020 345 pages; $26.95 I FIRST HEARD THE NAME of the meditation teacher S. N. Goenka in the early 1990s, while living in Nepal. I was there conducting research on the rise of Theravada Buddhism among ethnic Newar Buddhists in the Kathmandu Valley. From the very first years of the revival, the story of Theravada’s return to Nepal had been bound up with modernist efforts to reform and strengthen Buddhism. In interviews, at public events, and over bountiful meals at laypeople’s homes, my interlocutors praised what they perceived as Theravada’s rationalism and transparency—a purity that they contrasted favorably to the Mahayana–Vajrayana tradition that they were born into and had known. I was more than a little surprised, then,…

SOSAN THERESA FLYNN: In order for this teaching not to produce anxiety, we need to let go of our usual way of thinking. If I think of myself as a separate individual, the responsibility for all of my thoughts, words, and deeds becomes overwhelming. When I remember that I am not separate from all beings, then I can feel how the whole universe is actually supporting me, supporting my every thought, word, and deed. However, usually we think we are separate, in control of our own destiny, and able to do things under our own power. Even if we say, “Oh, I know everything is interconnected and I am only a part of that,” it is still pretty hard to let go of that “I.” In Yui Butsu Yo Butsu…

THERE IS A POWER that can help us meet the intense challenges of all that we face—Covid-19, climate chaos, racism, economic and political breakdown. That power is equanimity, one of the faces of love. In his book Compassion and Emptiness in Early Buddhist Meditation, Bhikkhu Analayo distinguishes the four Brahmaviharas, or immeasurable minds—the four qualities of true love— using images of the sun. Metta, or loving friendliness, he says, is like the sun at noon, bright and strong, shining on everyone. For karuna, compassion, the image is of the sun setting, meeting the darkness of suffering with tenderness and care. Mudita, appreciative joy, carries the image of the sunrise, brightening up everything in its path, moving upward with freshness and inspiration. And the image for upekkha, equanimity, is of the…

SOMEBODY ASKED the eighth-century Zen master Ma Jo (Chn., Mazu), “What is Buddha?” He said, “Mind is Buddha, Buddha is mind.” Centuries later, Mu Mun (Wumen) commented, Sun shining, blue sky;avoid looking around.Again ask, “What is this?”Holding stolen goods, shouting, “Innocent!” That’s his commentary on Ma Jo’s response, particularly the last line. Let’s leave that hanging in the air for a bit; there’s a meaning underneath that. In another case, Ma Jo’s student Nam Cheon (Nanquan) said, “Mind is not Buddha; cognition is not path.” Here’s Mu Mun’s comment: Sky is clear, and the sun appears;rain falls, and the ground is wet.Feelings spent, talking finished,only afraid of disbelief. I love that phrase: “Only afraid of disbelief.” Mu Mun has two killer last lines in these poems, but especially this “only…

OF THE HANDFUL OF WELL-KNOWN women in the life story of the Buddha, Yasodhara—his wife before renunciation—and Mahaprajapati—his aunt and foster mother—certainly rank amongst the most important. Yet accounts of these two women’s lives are either frustratingly scarce or confusingly fragmented. Two recent publications make sense out of this disarray, reclaiming them as protagonists in the story and history of Buddhism. The first is Barbara McHugh’s debut novel Bride of the Buddha(Monkfish), told in the first person by Yasodhara herself. This Yasodhara, visited by grief and touched by anger, was not blindsided by Siddhartha’s decision to leave; on the eve of his departure she knew, she suffered, and she accepted. In fact, among the many reversals and revelations in this clever retelling, the first is that it was Yasodhara, not…