Reader essays

I met my husband twenty-five years ago when he was a Buddhist monk. We were both full of enthusiasm for the traditional Rinzai practice in which we were intensely involved. We entered the relationship carrying a load of personal baggage and, unfortunately for us, practice offered little help in navigating our personal intimacy. It was all empty—except off the cushion. There, it was a catastrophe and full of drama.

At the time, there were many unethical goings-on happening in a number of monasteries and training centers, and we, like many others, left our community feeling betrayed and confused. We went on with our lives, staying together through determination and sheer luck. We became professionals, had two children, and got lots of therapy. Both of us yearned for what we had once tasted with practice, but we did not know how to find it again.

Eventually we stumbled into the community where we now practice as a couple and as a family. Here our teachers offer the teaching of “seamless practice”: there is no separation between the zafu, the dining room, the bathroom or the bedroom. Our children are our koans, as is our marriage. Our teachers and the monastics provide examples of how to make practice alive everywhere.

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Dharma Dictionary: “Nibbida”

Defined by Andrew Olendzki

So there you are, happily reading the primary texts of early Buddhism in order to better understand the essential teachings of the Buddha. You get to the part that talks about a person practicing in accordance with the dhamma—knowing things directly as they really are and seeing what is impermanent as impermanent with right view. Your head is nodding in affirmation, “Yeah, that’s me all right.” Then all of a sudden you get to the next sentence: “Therefore, one should abide in the utter disgust for the aggregates” ^[i] (Woodward’s translation).

“Whoa! Wait a minute. What’s up with that?” You think there must be something wrong here. How can the intimate awareness of moment-to-moment phenomena, the opening to states just as they are, lead to such a yucky response? We all know the monks and nuns are encouraged to contemplate death, the disintegration of the body in cemeteries, and other such, well, monastic things. But surely a lay Buddhist vipassana practitioner (for example) deserves a more positive outlook on life from all this mindful, conscious awareness.

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Never Born, Never Ceasing

A teaching on the nature of mind by the late Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

The great pandit Shantarakshita, who was instrumental in transplanting Buddhism from India to Tibet, promised that one of his students would come one day to complete his work. Kamalasila (Tib., Padampa Sangye) fulfilled this prophecy, making three trips to Tibet during the eleventh century. This was the time when the great yogi Milarepa lived, and his autobiography describes a momentous dharma debate between the two teachers.

The story behind the teaching presented here begins when Padampa Sangye throws a stone magically bestowed upon him by the Buddha, saying that he would teach wherever it landed. The stone landed in the village of Tingri, in Tibet, and true to his word, Padampa Sangye founded his monastic seat there and proclaimed The Hundred Verses of Advice to the villagers.

Translator Matthieu Ricard requested that his teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910-1991), considered an emanation of Padampa Sangye, offer a commentary on these pithy verses. A renowned Dzogchen master, Khyentse Rinpoche spent most of his early life in solitary retreat in mountain caves. He studied and taught tirelessly for many decades, influencing scores of teachers and thousands of students. He made several important teaching tours to Europe and North America and his works have been translated into many Western languages. In his final years, he was head of the Nyingma lineage.

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What Are We Ignoring About Breathing?

Five teishos by the late Taizan Maezumi Roshi on breathing, energy and the practice of qi gong.

The Dharma of Breathing

My dear dragons and elephants, do you know how many times an elephant breathes? You don't know? A Japanese scientist found out that an elephants breathes 500,000,000 times in a lifetime. Isn't it fascinating? Of course, this is merely a statistic. Kindly, he does not say how many times a human being breathes.

Usually we say there are three essentials in life: clothes, shelter and food. Breathing, the most important essential, is not mentioned. Not only do we ignore our own breathing, but we often ignore the breathing of other creatures. Animate and inanimate beings are all breathing. Breathing is a most important dharma. Without this very body, the dharma can't be appreciated. We must be aware of how this so-called body and mind exist. It is the most mysterious, subtle dharma; everything comes out of it.

We humans usually breathe fifteen to eighteen times per minute. We may think that we breathe only through the nostrils or lungs, but actually our whole body breathes. When we meditate, the frequency of our breathing can slow down to one to two times per minute. A baby breathes one to two times per minute in the mother's womb. So when you cultivate your breathing, your breathing rate becomes just about the same as a baby's in the mother's womb.

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Thinking Non-Thinking

by John Daido Loori, Roshi

John Daido Loori, Roshi is abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in Mt. Tremper, New York. He is a dharma heir of Taizan Maezumi Roshi.

Thinking Non-Thinking

John Daido Loori, Roshi explains why non-thinking is right thought in this commentary on Dogen's 300 Koan Shobogenzo, Case 129: "Yoashan's Non-Thinking"

The Main Case

When Priest Yaoshan was sitting in meditation¹ a monk asked,²
"What do you think about, sitting in steadfast composure?"³
Yaoshan said, "I think not thinking."⁴
The monk said, "How do you think not thinking?"⁵
Yaoshan said, "Non-thinking."⁶

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Ordained At Last

On February 28, 2003, Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, formerly known as Dr. Chatsumarn Kabilsingh, became the first Thai woman to receive full ordination as a Theravadin nun. Kristin Barendsen reports on Dhammananda's steadfast commitment to paving the way for other Thai women practitioners.

Just before dawn, bright spots of saffron and orange move slowly down the dim streets and low tones of chanting linger in the cool air. Thailand's estimated 300,000 monastics are out on morning rounds, cradling their alms bowls. Of these monastics, only three are women. One is the Venerable Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, who has just become a bhikkhuni despite living in a country where such ordination of women is forbidden.

Tall for a Thai woman and a youthful fifty-eight, Dhammananda wears the saffron robes with grace. A dozen women walk behind her; they are mae chees—Thailand's white-robed renunciates who are considered neither lay nor monastic. On the quiet street a line of laypeople and children are waiting. They carefully place their gifts of food in Dhammananda's black metal bowl, then kneel on the ground and prostrate three times. Dhammananda chants a verse in Pali, smiles and asks a child if she will be on time for her English lesson later that day. The girl looks up, giggles, and bows.

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Forum: Who Will Teach the Dharma?

A panel discussion with Ponlop Rinpoche, Jack Kornfield, Yvonne Rand, Ajahn Amaro and Richard Shrobe.

Panel Discussion

Buddhadharma: Perhaps we should start by enumerating the important qualities of a Buddhist teacher, the kinds of things a successful selection process would identify in a candidate.

Jack Kornfield: In short, the qualities are compassion and wisdom. The qualities a teacher needs include: true compassion and connectedness with all beings, so that whatever teaching is offered comes through as an expression of the universal compassion of all the buddhas; emptiness, liberation from the identity with the small sense of self; fullness, an ability to be present and awake; maturity, someone who has a great deal of life experience; and a kind of sensitivity.

And along with all that, profound dharma practice, deep experience of the teachings of the Buddha in their own heart and mind-stream, and a fundamental virtue and morality that is both beautiful and in some ways unshakable.

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The Simple Presence of Attention

3 Talks by Toni Packer

Toni Packer is author of The Wonder of Presence (Shambhala) and is resident teacher of Springwater Center, in Springwater, New York.

Finding a New Way to Listen

Before inquiring into a new way of listening, let me just share the joy of walking through the fields and woods on this extraordinary land. Just stepping out of the reception area, closing the door behind me, walking away from the overhang that shields one from the sun and rain, there isn't any enclosure left—not even a body! All I am is the birds singing and fluttering, bare branches swaying in the breeze, the ground partly frozen yet melting, the pond covered with a thin layer of ice, and the blue hills, sky and wandering clouds within close reach. There is also a throbbing heart and the people walking on the path. Even those who are not here—aren't we all together this one moment—beholding everything out of stillness?

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Politics & Dharma: No Separation

by Melody Ermachild Chavis

My earliest consciousness was political. I understood in a child’s way, but a deep way, that my own fate was connected to enormous events and the destinies of other people, even people half a world away.

Since the time I was old enough to ask, I knew that my father had been killed in the Second World War, when I was a baby. On October 12, 1944, he and six other men died together when their plane was shot down on a bombing mission over Germany. My mother married another soldier when I was five. I grew to love my stepfather. When I was eight, he left for Korea where he fought through a dark winter, leaving my mother, me and my two baby sisters waiting in a town where we were strangers. When my stepfather came back he was a different man. Later, he was forced to take part in atomic tests in Nevada. He died of cancer at age thirty-four. I know that the dread of war I learned so young was partly why I worked from 1965 to 1975 against America’s assault on Vietnam, and later against nuclear weapons and capital punishment.

I did not begin to study Buddhism until I was forty-three years old. After years of political activism, I took lay vows.

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Reader essays/Politics

Being a Zen student in the Korean Chogye tradition has taught me that all of my political thoughts, feelings, opinions and impulses arise by themselves like flowers in the springtime. They arise because of my family background, life experiences, education, and the influences of friends, neighbors, co-workers, politicians and the news media. They have no self-nature, they are transitory; next year or next decade I expect to have different beliefs. Therefore, I am very careful about not becoming overly attached to my beliefs or to the results of an election or legislative session.

When I push facts and data through my personal screens and sieves, I come to mostly conservative conclusions. I know this is quite different from many other sangha members, who come to liberal conclusions. However, common to both views is the desire to serve beings, and to serve beings through involvement in the shaping of public policy.

What disturbs me about the current political environment is that there is so little courtesy, respect and dialogue between political activists from opposite ends of the spectrum. It is so very toxic—definitely not Buddhist. There are opportunities for forming working coalitions focused on serving beings, but these opportunities are being lost at local, state, national and world levels.

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