When Judy Roitman learned her favorite dharma text was actually a patchwork of phrases and poems lifted from other sources, she started looking into the authorship of Buddhist texts. What she found surprised her. From the Fall 2017 Buddhadharma. A long time ago, I was sitting my first retreat at the Cambridge Zen Center, which was, in those early years, located in a small [...]
Our Furry Friends
Each Friday, we share three topical longreads in our Weekend Reader newsletter. This week, LionsRoar.com's Rod Meade Sperry shares the lessons he's learned through the years from loving and losing pets. Sign up here to receive the Weekend Reader in your inbox. This is supposed to be the “pets” edition of the Weekend Reader. But for the first time in 17 years, I’m [...]
How to Cultivate Your Beginner’s Mind
Beginner’s mind is open, curious, and unbound by concepts and opinions — just like the mind of the buddhas. Ezra Bayda has some techniques you can use to cultivate the fresh mind of the beginner. Beginner’s mind (shoshin) is a term in Zen Buddhism that describes a mind that is eager, without preconceptions, and open to possibility. As the late Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki [...]
What Does It Mean to Be Kind?
In the opening editorial of the January 2019 issue of Lion's Roar, editorial assistant Haleigh Atwood shares how she defines kindness. I have recently realized that I’ve lived most of my life without knowing the whole definition of kindness. I figured it had something to do with being friendly—perhaps with a pinch of generosity thrown in for good measure. When I thought [...]
What Is Gassho?
Kobun Chino Roshi explains the meaning of gassho, a hand gesture that is often accompanied with a bow. Mudra means “identity.” The appearance of form, color, and shape along with your recognition of a flower or candle together makes an identity. In the mudra of attjali (in Japanese called gassho) with palms together, all kinds of dualism—man and woman, past and future, [...]
I Vow Not to Burn Out
Mushim Ikeda says it's not enough to help others. You have to take care of yourself too. At the end of January, one of my close spiritual friends died. A queer Black man, a Sufi imam “scholartivist” (scholar–artist–activist) and professor of ministry students, Baba Ibrahim Farajajé died of a massive heart attack. He was sixty-three, and I’m guessing he had been carrying [...]
Hello, It’s Halloween
What do you want to be for Halloween? Who do you want to be in life? Ira Sukrungruang on the costumes we wear. My son Bodhi is two and obsessed with Halloween. He doesn’t know what the day entails. He doesn’t know about trick-or-treating or costumes. What he knows of Halloween comes from the toddler cartoon he watches—endlessly—about a boy and girl who go into a haunted [...]
Why We Go for the Gun
Greg Snyder on how to reclaim the grace and humanity that our access to guns has led us to squander. Just over twenty years ago, a friend was shot five times in the face a few feet in front of me. He was a music venue doorman, and earlier that night he had asked a young college student to leave for drunken, aggressive behavior. The few words spoken by the shooter betrayed [...]
Sweeping My Heart
When Zenju Earthlyn Manuel was assigned to clean the Zen temple, she felt generations of oppression rise in her. Conversing with her ancestors about what this work really meant helped her see how it could be healing. Zen practice is a return to the ordinary. It is only in the secular world that Zen is perceived by some as a high and holy practice. The robes are seen as [...]
Inner Cities
With noisy neighbors and the homeless camped on street corners, city life offers many opportunities to practice kindness. Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche on how urban living can open our hearts. Spiritual practitioners often aspire to live alone in the mountains among wildlife, yet a city can be an equally or an even more supportive environment for practice. Unlike the [...]
