Roger Jackson Yetunde reviews Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the Indian Buddhist Imagination by Reiko Ohnuma. From the Winter 2017 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly. In his great poem, “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman reflects: I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look at them long and [...]
About Roger R. Jackson
Dzogchen Explained
Roger Jackson reviews Heart of the Great Perfection: Dudjom Lingpa’s Visions of the Great Perfection, Vol. 1 by B. Alan Wallace. From the Spring 2017 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly. 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 [...]
Review: Stephen Batchelor’s “After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age”
For over three decades, Stephen Batchelor has been the best-known exponent of an unapologetically modernist vision of buddhadharma. In such popular and controversial works as Alone with Others, Faith to Doubt, Buddhism Without Beliefs, and Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, he has promoted an approach to Buddhism that dispenses with metaphysics (including rebirth), miracles, or [...]
Was the Buddha Ecumenical?
The Buddha and Religious Diversity by J. Abraham Vélez de Cea Routledge, 2013, 245 pages; $13 Nearly forty years ago, at a meditation course I attended in Nashville, Indiana, Lama Thubten Yeshe was asked by a Christian woman in the audience, “Are God and dharmakaya the same?” Lama remained silent for several minutes, rocking back and forth on his cushion, pondering, as [...]
The Tibetan Leonardo
The Treasury of Knowledge By Jamgön Kongtrul 10 volumes Snow Lion Publications, 2003–2012 Reviewed by Roger R. Jackson Addressing a dinner for Nobel Prize laureates in 1962, President John F. Kennedy quipped that never before had so much genius been present in the White House—“with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” The same might be said about [...]
Whose Book of the Dead?
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography By Donald S. Lopez Jr. Princeton University Press, 2011 $19.95; 192 pages The search for extraterrestrial life has come up empty so far, but the publishing industry—perhaps compensating for its own sense of mortality—seems intent on finding new forms of sentience right here on earth. Or so one might conclude, watching the [...]
Poems of a Renegade Monk
In the Forest of Faded Wisdom: 104 Poems by Gendun Chopel, a Bilingual Edition Edited and Translated by Donald S. Lopez, Jr. University of Chicago Press, 2009 192 pages; $26 (hardcover) Donald Lopez’s pioneering translation of 104 poems by Gendun Chopel (1903–51) is a welcome addition to the growing shelf of works devoted to the “angry monk,” as a recent documentary film [...]
Review of “No Time to Lose”
"No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva" by Pema Chödrön, reviewed by Roger Jackson No Time to Lose is a fruit of the encounter between one of the most respected of all Western Buddhist teachers, bhikshuni Pema Chödrön, and one of the most beloved of all Mahayana Buddhist texts, the Bodhicharyavatara by the eighth-century Indian monk, Shantideva. The [...]
