When the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, offered its first summer program in 1974, no one expected more than a few hundred people to register. But when Barbara Dilley arrived there to teach dance, she found 1,300 people eager to listen to talks by spiritual teachers such as Chögyam Trungpa, Ram Dass, and Kobun Chino, as well as poets and artists such as Allen Ginsberg, [...]
Women in Buddhism Study Initiative, University of Hamburg
Bhikkhu Analayo spent many years poring through the voluminous discourses of the Pali canon, trying to unravel an enduring mystery. What, he wondered, was the Buddha’s true view on the ordination of female monastics, or bhikkhunis? For followers of the Theravada school, it’s not an idle question. In countries such as Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand, where Theravada Buddhism [...]
Profile: The New York Buddhist Church
The weathered bronze statue of Shinran Shonin, the thirteenth-century Japanese religious reformer, gazes watchfully across Riverside Drive toward the Hudson River, greeting visitors arriving for Sunday-morning services at Manhattan’s New York Buddhist Church. Taking their seats in rows of chairs, they will spend the next hour chanting together in Japanese, singing Western-style [...]
Profile: Sanshin Zen Community
The last thing he wanted to do was speak English. Shohaku Okumura had studied Buddhism and the thirteenth-century writings of Eihei Dogen at Tokyo’s Komazawa University, then taken priest’s vows and entered training at Antaiji, a Soto Zen temple in Kyoto headed by his late teacher, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. But because many Americans and Europeans were studying there, Uchiyama [...]
Profile: Mangala Shri Bhuti
Growing up in rural northern India amid the Tibetan diaspora, Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche was always fascinated by America, but he never dreamed he would one day wind up living there, leading a vibrant sangha of dedicated practitioners. Yet by his early twenties he had met and married an American, Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, and the two were living in Nepal, where she was teaching [...]