Bob Doppelt Climate change will devastate the global economy, cause widespread conflict, and displace millions of people—this is how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarized its latest report released in March. Numerous other recent scientific studies have similarly sounded the alarm about the tremendous suffering that lies ahead if climate change is not [...]
Reviews: Milarepa, He Started Like Us
THE YOGIN & THE MADMAN By Andrew Quintman Columbia University Press, 2013 336 pages, $105 Reviewed by Karl Brunnhölzl What is it that makes a spiritual biography appealing? If the person is portrayed just like us mere mortals in every way, the story is hardly inspiring because it is simply too similar to our own lives. By contrast, most Tibetan biographies of great [...]
Reviews: How the Buddha Became St. Josaphat
IN SEARCH OF THE CHRISTIAN BUDDHA: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint By Donald S. Lopez, Jr. and Peggy McCracken W.W. Norton & Company, 2014, 272 pages, $24.95 Reviewed by Annabella Pitkin Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a king who wished for his son to succeed him on the throne. But wise men predicted that the child might turn to religion and become [...]
Book Briefs
Grains of Gold: Tales of a Cosmopolitan Traveler by Donald Lopez Jr. and Thupten Jinpa Zen Anarchism by Fabio Rambelli Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms by Shayne Clarke Buddhist Nuns and Gendered Practice by Nirmala Salgado The Life of Longchenpa: The Omniscient Dharma King of the Vast Expanse by Jampa Mackenzie Stewart Perspectives on Satipatthana by Analayo The [...]
Off the Bridge and Onto the Cushion
Illustration by Kim Scafuro By Brandon Dean Lamson Practice, for me, began on the Dunlavy Bridge that spans eight lanes of traffic on US-59 in Houston, Texas. Several stories above eighteen-wheelers and commuter Saabs, I grabbed the railing and considered jumping, suspended in the late-afternoon light that sifted through chemical fumes and flashed off of windshields below. At [...]
Forum: Your Teacher and You
Your relationship with your teacher can have a profound and lasting effect on your practice. But it can also be difficult and confusing to navigate. Our panel looks at what it means to have a teacher today, how you can make the most of the relationship, and what you can do when it’s not working. Buddhadharma: In this discussion we want to explore the question of how to [...]
A Meeting of Hearts and Minds
If you want to have a deep teacher-student relationship, says Jakusho Kwong, it’s not enough to know your teacher’s heart and mind. You need to know your own as well. Just before a teacher gives a dharma talk, the community of practitioners chants, “the dharma, incomparably profound and infinitely subtle, is rarely met, even in a hundred, thousand, million kalpas.” A kalpa is [...]
Falling in Love with a Buddha
Frank Berliner, a longtime student of the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, describes the ever-deepening stages of relationship one experiences with their guru. The first stage of falling in love with a buddha is embarrassment. the embarrassment comes from having our confusion and shortcomings so clearly exposed. we cannot argue with such a mirror, because it is so accurate and [...]
Let’s Talk: Cybersanghas—Do They Work?
By Dosho Port The Internet has transformed sanghas. Buddhists who have been geographically isolated with little access to teachers and senior practitioners for guidance now have teachers and entire communities at their fingertips. Information and opinions about dharma centers, teachers, and sanghas are also readily available to practitioners worldwide, effectively leveling the [...]
Reviews: What did the Buddha really teach?
The Bodhisattva Ideal: Essays on the Emergence of Mahayana Edited by Bhikkhu Nyanatushita Buddhist Publication Society, 2013, 240 pages Reviewed by Rita Gross The word “emergence” in the subtitle of The Bodhisattva Ideal is the key to the book’s central thesis that although the Mahayana teachings are attributed to “the Buddha,” they were not taught [...]