Innehållsförteckning för Spring 2017 från Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly

I recently came across a news report stating that 2,500 religious leaders had signed a petition urging Congress to reject Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees as “a cabinet of bigotry.” I looked over the list of signatories, designated by religion, and saw only one who identified as Buddhist. This observation reinforced my puzzlement as to why Buddhist teachers and leaders in the U.S. are not more outspoken in addressing issues of public concern. Considering that Buddhism is widely hailed as the preeminent religion of peace and compassion, why, I ask myself, aren’t we more visible as advocates of peace, basic sanity, and social justice? Granted, our numbers are small, but I don’t think that is the only reason for our reticence to speak up. Several other factors may also be involved.…

The work of Ajahn Buddhadasa (1906– 1993) in Theravada Buddhism has been to recover the core perspectives that have been ignored, lost, or obscured as buddhadhamma was encumbered with the trappings of religious ritu als, moralistic beliefs, afterlife speculations, donation-seeking rational izations, and quick-fix meditation techniques. As a clerical caste emerged over the centuries following the Buddha’s passing, Dhamma was segregated into Dhamma for those identified as renunciate wanderers (bhikkhus) and Dhamma for householders (upasakas). Further, a moralizing tone crept in, and emphasis began to shift from liberation in this life to earning a better life after death. While such developments may have their place, something crucial was muddled in the process. Ajahn Buddhadasa did not accept the segregation of practice and the bias underlying it, nor the superficial mor…

In my early twenties, I went on a trip to Europe. This was before cell phones or the internet—each new country meant a new language, new money, new phone systems, and a hope for the best. One evening, it wasn’t working out. I had just arrived in Austria and made arrangements to meet a friend. I was exhausted, hungry, low on money, and stressed. And I didn’t speak German. Getting on the bus to go meet my friend, I pointed to the stop in my guidebook to show the driver where I wanted to disembark. I was sure the bus driver would tell me when we were there. In retrospect, I don’t know why it felt like such a big deal, but I felt desperate to meet my friend and…

How Will You Greet the Tiger? Whether your attackers are tigers or terrorists, says the Seventeenth Karmapa, you must be ready to meet them with a compassionate heart. Universal openheartedness and compassion exclude no one whatsoever. We can enlist our imagination as a supportive condition in cultivating this noble attitude. We could imagine a tiger coming to attack us and envision ways to stay connected with compassion for this being who is driven by hunger and rapidly losing its territory to human encroachment. We can be creative and think up any scenario that allows us to keep a connection of compassion alive in our heart and mind. Perhaps we imagine we are a villager feeling great compassion while we safely trap the tiger and call the authorities to take it…

The first Tibetan Buddhist retreat I attended, right out of college, was an intensive weekend at Tarthang Tulku’s Nyingma Institute in Berkeley in the fall of 1972. The retreat concluded on a most auspicious note, with the arrival of none other than Dudjom Rinpoche, the head of the Nyingma lineage. As a friend visiting from upstate exclaimed afterward, “My first day in the Bay Area, and I get to meet the holiest man in the world!” Dudjom Rinpoche (1904–87) was a towering figure in twentieth-century Tibetan Buddhism whose many activities included helping the Tibetan exile community through the transition to diaspora and writing his authoritative history of the Nyingma school. He himself was the “mind emanation”—an incarnation or tulku—of Dudjom Lingpa (1835–1904), an extraordinary lama from Tibet’s northeastern nomad lands.…

KONIN CARDENAS: Practicing with nonattachment means remembering that all things and all people are constantly changing. In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, Shakyamuni Buddha recounted that he was concerned that it would be too hard to teach what he had discovered because “beings take delight in attachment. It is hard for beings to see this truth, namely, specific conditionality, dependent origination.” Thus, nonattachment means living in accord with the fact that this body and mind momentarily arise dependent on myriad conditions. It doesn’t mean lacking in human emotion; it means not clinging to any one way of seeing or responding to a conditioned, changing world. Therefore, it is related to upaya, a skillful response to the way things truly are in this moment. For example, one way that nonattachment might show up…

Threaded through the entirety of the Buddha’s pathway of awakening are the teachings on cultivating the boundless heart— immeasurable kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. These qualities are referred to as the brahma viharas. Brahma refers to the sublime or noble tenor of these qualities; vihara originally comes from the word for “monastery,” or the place we abide and make our home. We are encouraged, whether standing or walking, sitting or lying down, whenever we are awake to make kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity the home of our heart. The brahma viharas are relational qualities. They are the foundation of all respectful, healthy, and dignified societies, communities, families, and relationships. Kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity are virtues, wholesome qualities that are the foundation of all ethical thought, speech, and action. They…

REV. ANGEL KYODO WILLIAMS ??AJAHN AMARO ??PEMA KHANDRO RINPOCHE ??NOAH LEVINE WHEN I FIRST CAME to Buddhism as a teenager, I wanted to see the world through a particular lens, one that was clear and panoramic and, if I’m honest, a bit detached. I also wanted to be a certain kind of person, the type of spontaneous, uncompromising, powerful Zen person I’d read about. If you had asked me then how my future self would act, how I would actually behave in the world, I would have said that of course I would behave ethically—but I would do so as a natural, almost unconscious result of all those other qualities. I would know what to do and I would do it, effortlessly. It didn’t work out that way. Today, in…

One of the oldest examples of Buddhist writing is the Book of Eights, or Atthakavagga, a short collection of poems preserved in the Pali Canon. In The Buddha Before Buddhism: Wisdom from the Early Teachings (Shambhala 2016), Gil Fronsdal explores this ancient anthology, arguing that it is remarkable in that it presents “the Buddha’s teachings pared down to their most essential elements, free of the more complex doctrines often associated with Buddhism.” In it we find no numbered lists or complicated doctrines. There is no mention of the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the four foundations of mindfulness, or the five aggregates. The text even denies the role of ultimate truth in finding peace. Instead, it simply offers insight into human life that still resonates today. Scholar-monk Bhikkhu Bodhi’s…