Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2019 i Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly

KONJIN GAELYN GODWIN is the abiding teacher and abbot of Houston Zen Center. In 2003, after eighteen years of training at San Francisco Zen Center, Green Gulch Farm, and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and six months at Hosshinji in Japan, she moved to Texas to help establish HZC. Last year, she was appointed director of the Soto Zen Buddhism International Center, becoming the first woman and the first Westerner to hold the position. RICHARD SALOMON is the director of the University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project and general editor of the Gandharan Buddhist Texts series published by University of Washington Press. Since 1981 he has taught Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at University of Washington, where he is now professor emeritus. His…

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo is a distinguished nun in the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism and the founder of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in India JETSUNMA TENZIN PALMO: In traditional Buddhist countries, the concept of punya has always played an important role. Usually translated as “merit” or even as “goodness,” punya represents the positive karmic results of good intentions and actions. This belief in the power of meritorious actions is perceived as an ethical force that can be directed toward any chosen object. So people set about “making merit” and rejoicing in it; the merit is then dedicated to others and thus shared. This serves as an encouragement to perform acts of goodness such as generosity and kindness. We can also rejoice in and share the goodness we see others perform.…

AS BUDDHISTS, WE SPEND SO MUCH of our time talking about awakening, about developing a compassionate heart and an enlightened mind, about freedom and liberation. While the centrality of those experiences can’t be disputed, neither should they become an excuse for denying the reality of our situation right now. We give short shrift to the places where we get caught, where we are not inspired or really not living up to our vision of who we aspire to be. From my perspective, spending our time longing for some idealized state of mind is not genuine Buddhist practice but merely spiritual bypassing. If we focus only on awakening, we miss most of the spiritual practice. I’m much more interested in how we practice with not awakening, with not being enlightened, because,…

There’s a saying in Tibetan Buddhism that while we might start off with a personal teacher, at some point the entire phenomenal world becomes our guru. This adage expresses the idea that all internal and external phenomena can be a catalyst for awakening. But it’s also true that nature, in particular, is a great teacher. The natural world continually arises as a vivid and ephemeral display. By tuning in to it through our sense perceptions—by hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, and feeling the natural world fully—we discover a connection with a deeper and more awake dimension of our being, one that is free from the usual overlay of our conceptual thoughts. As guru, the natural world reveals that being present with things as they are can be a transformative experience. Texts…

SINCE THE KAVANAUGH hearings last fall and the flood of painful stories that emerged across the country—both of harm and of people refusing to admit wrongdoing—I find myself thinking about the power of repentance ceremonies. In the Soto Zen ceremony, we repent, take refuge, and recite the sixteen bodhisattva precepts, all reminders that every behavior of body, speech, and mind, can be beneficial—or not. The ceremony originates with the earliest wandering followers of the Buddha, who gathered at the new and full moons to take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha, confess their lapses, and deeply question each other on fine points of practice. They would then disperse, renewed, to continue their efforts. We have this same opportunity today. The ceremonial movements of offering, chanting, bowing to the ground,…

MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS have passed since twenty-eight fragile birch bark scrolls, now known to be the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts in the world, came to light. Dating back to as early as the first century BCE, the scrolls—originating in the ancient kingdom of Gandhara, which once straddled the border between present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan—predate the earliest Pali manuscripts by several centuries. Since that initial discovery, hundreds of similar manuscripts and fragments have been recovered, all from the same region. Buddhist academics in several countries in North America, Europe, and Asia have engaged in arduous study of the Gandharan manuscripts, the contents of which have been the subject of eight books and innumerable articles. But what does the discovery of these relics mean for Buddhist practitioners? Are they merely a…

I THINK WE ARE FINALLY at a place where we can accept the truth that no one escapes from oppression, not one of us. Everyone is deeply wounded. It’s true, some people seem to be in a position of what we call privilege, but we have to rethink that word. We get stuck on this notion of white privilege, or dominant privilege, as if the marginalized people want what the people with privilege have. But I want no part of it. I want no part of any illness that renders people unable to see the beauty of all of our differences, the beauty of my own mixed raced-ness, blackness, queerness, all of the things I am. I want no part of an illness that renders me unable to connect to…

A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real by Glenn Wallis Bloomsbury Academic, 2018 232 pages; $114 “WESTERN BUDDHISM MUST BE RUINED.” With that ringing sentence, Glenn Wallis throws down his challenge to readers. In his provocative new book, A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real, Wallis takes on the complacencies and complicities of what he identifies as Western Buddhism and offers a rigorous philosophical remediation: “ruin,” in the special sense in which he uses the term. Drawing on Continental European philosophical traditions, in particular the contemporary French thinker François Laruelle, Wallis attempts to open new critical and philosophical possibilities from within Buddhism. Wallis’ distaste at what he identifies as Western Buddhism’s neoliberal accommodations and consumerist desires clearly fuels the urgency of his mission. He…

Lama Zopa Rinpoche has long dreamed of creating a massive statue of Maitreya Buddha in India, a wish that originated with his guru Lama Thubten Yeshe (1935–1984) as a thank-you for India’s acceptance of Tibetan refugees. This vision led to the creation of the Maitreya Project, an international organization responsible for the statue’s construction. Initial efforts to build it in Bodhgaya failed, and when ambitions shifted to a rural area in Kushinagar, a grassroots resistance movement of local Indian farmers fought to halt the project and maintain ownership of their land. In Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built (Cornell 2018), Jessica Marie Falcone draws on fieldwork and her own personal engagement with the resistance to describe the struggle over the creation of…

CALIFORNIA DHARMA REALM BUDDHIST UNIVERSITY 4951 Bodhi Way, Ukiah, CA 95482. (707) 621-7000, info@drbu.edu, www.drbu.edu • Dharma Realm Buddhist University (DRBU) is an accredited university in northern California dedicated to liberal education in the broad Buddhist tradition. KUNSANG GAR PO Box 65, Freedom, CA 95019. (831) 471-7883, kunsanggarcenter@gmail.com, http://kunsanggarcenter.org • Kunsang Gar, under the spiritual direction of Rime teacher Geshe Dangsong Namgyal, offers Dzogchen meditation classes, retreats, and purification practices. PURE LAND FARMS 3265 Santa Maria Rd, Topanga, CA 90290. info@purelandfarms.org, www.purelandfarms.org • We offer a wide variety of programs from meditation classes, Zen Buddhism, philosophy, Lotus Scouts children’s program, stress-reduction, healing arts, outdoor adventure programs, as well as educational outreach. SHASTA ABBEY 3724 Summit Dr, Mt. Shasta, CA 96067. (530) 926-4208, Fax: (530) 926-0428, guestmaster@shastaabbey.org, www.shastaabbey.org • A Soto…