Tis always the season for giving. Six Buddhist teachers on why generosity is the starting place of all the virtues. Macaroni Art By Karen Maezen Miller I begged my father to take me to the store. It was the day before Christmas, and I had nothing to give to my mother except an art project I had brought home from school. It was a picture made with painted macaroni. How [...]
The Heart of Generosity
Gina Sharpe offers a short introduction to generosity, explaining how it can be the beginning of the end of suffering. The mental states we encounter when we sit in meditation—difficult emotions, negative thoughts, and even the pains in our bodies—are the consequences of life-long habit patterns and viewpoints that result in dukkha, or suffering. We know from the second [...]
How to Do Metta
Kuan Yin, bodhisattva of compassion. Photo by Liza Matthews. Jack Kornfield on beginning this time-honored, heart-opening practice. In our culture, people find it difficult to direct loving-kindness to themselves. We may feel that we are unworthy, or that it’s egotistical, or that we shouldn’t be happy when other people are suffering. So rather than start loving-kindness [...]
Overcoming Ego With the Practice of Chöd
Lama Tsultrim Allione looks at how the traditional Buddhist practice of chöd — offerings ones own body to frightening demons — can inspire us to let go of ego and practice joyful generosity. There is a story of a rich man who said that he could not practice generosity because he was unable to give anything away. The Buddha’s advice to him was to begin by simply taking a piece [...]
In Search of the Genuine
Feeling disillusioned with this artificial world is the starting place of the spiritual path, say Anyen Rinpoche and Allison Choying Zangmo. They offer a Buddhist take on the genuineness we long for. Many of us turn toward the spiritual path because of our disillusionment with the world we live in. Some of us have felt disillusioned for as long as we can remember. Even as [...]
The More You Give, the Richer You Feel
Judy Lief looks at why generosity is the starting place for virtue. The practice of generosity may seem simple—it is learning how to give—but it is the ground that allows discipline, patience, exertion, meditation, and wisdom to flourish. It establishes the basic attitude of magnanimity that is the defining characteristic of the path of the bodhisattva. The word [...]
Nothing to Give, No One to Receive It
Norman Fischer on why giving is the Buddha way. “May we with all beings realize the emptiness of the three wheels, giver, receiver, and gift.” Zen practitioners chant these words before eating a meal. They remind us that the food about to be eaten has not been earned; it’s a gift. But this gift is not to be understood in the usual way. “The emptiness of the three wheels” [...]
About a Poem: Genine Lentine on Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “The Last Time I Saw Amelia”
Section one from: "The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart" Clem Sanders, bystander It was late spring and silent, beach-grass switched like skirts of women walking past shop windows on their way to church, heads bent beside their husbands come up from orange groves just greening. I was distracted by a bird, which was no more than shoal-dust kicked up by [...]
Books in Brief – January 2014
THE TRAUMA OF EVERYDAY LIFE By Mark Epstein Penguin Press 2013; 225 pp., $25.95 (cloth) Illness, old age, and death—the story is that Siddhartha Gautama first confronted these realities as an adult when he ventured out from the family palace. Psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein, however, points to an earlier source of trauma for the Buddha-to-be: seven days after he was [...]
Editorial: This Laughing, Hurting, Busy World – January 2014
Deputy Editor Andrea Miller's editorial introduction to the January 2014 issue of Lion's Roar magazine. On retreat at Blue Cliff Monastery, a teenager got up in front of the eight-hundred-plus retreatants and posed this question to Thich Nhat Hanh: “What is the hardest thing that you practice?” As he always does before speaking, the Zen master paused. “That is,” he finally [...]
