Buddhism
Meditating with My Father’s Friends
We were all there for the same purpose—to understand our own suffering and maybe find some relief.
Even Religious Freedom Victories Harbor Defeats
How a 1927 Supreme Court case helps us understand today’s controversies over travel bans, border walls, and executive orders.
Zen and the Art of Zen and the Art of Books
Anything can be done gracefully. Consider: one can peel an orange such that the rind is removed in a single, spiraling helix of citrus. Or, one can carelessly stab at the rind with stubby fingers, extracting chunk by little chunk, ending up sticky and frustrated. Similarly, one can write a Zen and the Art of…
Home Taping Is Skill in Buddha
We are musicians, sampling his breaks, writing our own songs hundreds of times.
Crazy Wisdom
For those of you in New York City, our friends over at the ever-incredible Rubin Museum of Art are partnering with the Shambhala Meditation Center to present Crazy Wisdom, a film about the life and times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Allen Ginsberg made him his guru. Joni Mitchell wrote a song about him. It was 1970 and…
World Peace for Free and Pay in Washington
On July 9th, the Dalai Lama appeared on the West Lawn of the US Capitol to talk about world peace. He was in town for the ten-day Kalachakra Ceremony for World Peace, a Tantric initiation rite. His lawn talk was the only Kalachakra-related function that did not require tickets, which ran from $35 to $45…
War and Peace in Newark
On my way into the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, an agent of the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service made me take my camera out of my bag. “It’s a common ruse to pack C4 into a camera,” the agent told me, inspecting the device. Ruses in Newark are becoming increasingly common. Last November, a tight…
Zen Master Scandal Talk
Y’all will definitely enjoy our friend Joel Whitney’s “last interview” with the late Zen master Aitken Roshi in Tricycle, complete with sex scandals, wordplay, and mortality. On the first Monday in August, a day overcast with fog, I’d scheduled a 10 a.m. interview with the legendary teacher, who—at 93 and now quite frail—was, I learned, in…
“Clerical Impropriety” Is So Hot Right Now
Those of you who thought Buddhism was still the proverbial last righteous man in Sodom might be disappointed to read August 20th’s New York Times. In his article “Sex Scandal Has U.S. Buddhists Looking Within,” Mark Oppenheimer likens a recent sex scandal in a New York-based Japanese Buddhist society to the slew of sexual improprieties…