Jeff Wilson reviews Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism by José Ignacio Cabezón. From the Winter 2017 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. Decades in the making, José Ignacio Cabezón’s Sexuality in Classical South Asian Buddhism is a massive, ambitious, and important project. Given its in-depth investigation of the subject, and Cabezón’s status as [...]
About Jeff Wilson
The Path of Gratitude
Photo by Michael Kenna. The goal of Shin Buddhism’s central practice, nembutsu, is not to attain buddhahood for ourselves, says Jeff Wilson, but to express gratitude for all we have received. I visit a lot of Buddhist temples and groups in North America, and it’s pretty common for people to ask, “So, what’s your practice?” It’s a sort of icebreaker in the Buddhist world. I [...]
Why Buddhist Communities Should Include Children
Jodo Shinshu minister Jeff Wilson on why teaching children the dharma is genuine bodhisattva work. I’ve noticed that you can basically divide North American Buddhist communities into two types: those with children present and those without. Many other things, such as styles of practice, lineages, race, class, institutional size and stability, and so on often fall into [...]
What is Pure Land?
When beings awaken to buddhahood, their realization affects the environment around them. In Mahayana Buddhism, this idea was extended to assert that buddhas exist in a purified sphere of realization that reflects their blissful, enlightened perception of reality. Free of all ignorance, aggression, and attachment, this environment is called a pure land or buddha-realm. All [...]
A Successful Subculture
James Wilson discusses how Zen Buddhism in America has shifted from a counterculture religion to a institutionalized normality. My colleagues in Buddhist studies often wonder why I would want to focus on a marginal phenomenon like American Buddhism—isn’t the real action back in Asia, either in the past or the present? But for me, there is something tremendously exciting [...]
