The Spring 2020 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly features in-depth teachings for cultivating your Buddhist practice and manifesting those teachings meaningfully in everyday life. Inside, you’ll find thoughtful commentaries, reviews of the latest Buddhist books, Ask the Teachers, and more.
Features
What If Our Ordinary Experience Is All That Matters?
Stephen Batchelor poses the classical Zen question, “What is this?” The answer, he says, is right in front of us.
Why Bodhisattvas Need to Disrupt the Status Quo
According to Zen priest and climate scientist Kritee, part of our work in addressing climate change is to understand systems — how they work, how we’re complicit in them, and how we can change them to work for the good.
In Translation: The Rice Seedling Sutra
Spoken by the bodhisattva Maitreya, the Rice Seedling Sutra is one of the most important Buddhist sutras on the topic of dependent arising, the basic Buddhist doctrine that everything depends on something else for its existence.
Steadfast in the Midst of Samsara
Shinshu Roberts examines the suffering inherent in the bodhisattva path, what Dogen referred to as being “the blue lotus in the flame.”
Nothing Solid, Nothing Separate
When we look deeply into emptiness, says Phil Stanley, we find everything and nothing.
Awareness, from the Moment You Wake Up
We’re often encouraged to bring meditation “off the cushion” and into our everyday lives. Sayadaw U Tejaniya shows us what that really looks like.
Departments
Commentary
True Practice Is Never Disengaged, by Karen Maezen Miller
Ask the Teachers
If we can’t be 100 percent certain about what the Buddha actually taught, how do we determine what is true dharma?
Bhante Sujato, Avikrita Vajra Sakya, and Gesshin Greenwood respond.
Reviews
Buddhism and Whiteness edited by George Yancy and Emily McRae; Reviewed by Natalie Fisk Quli
Why I’m Not a Buddhist by Even Thompson; Reviewed by Michael Sheehy
Book Briefs
Reviews by Joie Szu-Chiao Chen
The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns by Matty Weingast
Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra by Jan Willis
The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up in the Land of Attachments by Eve Myonen Marko and Wendy Egyoku Nakao
Buddhist–Muslim Relations in a Theravada World edited by Michael Jerryson and Iselin Frydenlun
Modern Tantric Buddhism: Embodiment and Authenticity in Dharma Practice by Justin von Bujdoss
Tsongkhapa: A Buddha in the Land of Snows by Thupten Jinpa
Buddhist Suttas for Recitation: A Companion for Walking the Buddha’s Path by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
