Honoring “Silent Mark” April 29, 2010
Posted by Monty McKeever in : Buddhism, Events, News , 6 commentsIn his recent Tricycle Online Retreat on Green Meditation, Clark Strand told the story of his friend Mark Rogosin. A one time patent attorney in New York City, Rogosin suffered a mental breakdown and retreated to a simpler life in Woodstock, NY. Often referred to as “Silent Mark,” he was a man of very few words, and whether it was due to his wild scraggly beard or the fact that he once dug a massive perfectly circular hole in the ground for no apparent reason, he was viewed by many as quite the eccentric. Nevertheless, Mark became famous in Woodstock for inscribing Buddhist characters onto thousands and thousands of stones and promptly gifting them to whoever would accept. He did this for over twenty-five years until his death this last February. These deeply cherished “mani stones” can still be found all throughout Woodstock and beyond.
Today, we at Tricycle were very happy to learn that Mark is to be honored in a birthday memorial service tomorrow (April 30th) in Woodstock where community members will be painting stones of their own to pass on.
The following via The Woodstock Times,
“Mark didn’t want to get entangled in words. Silence was his way to express the universal language of friendship and compassion. He often greeted people silently just by offering stones. People have tales about how he would go on ‘talk fasts’ for indeterminate periods of time, and then they would say, ‘But he always talked to me.’”
Clark Strand, local author and former Zen monk, is accounting for the frugal speaking habits of Mark Rogosin, the gentle, long-bearded Woodstocker often called “Silent Mark”, who wandered the town handing out stones inscribed with the Buddhist “mani” mantra, “Om Mani Padme Hum”, or sometimes simply “Om”. Strand and other friends of Mark, who died in February, will honor his memory on his birthday, Friday, April 30, by inscribing and distributing “mani stones” at the Woodstock green.
“People intuited that the stones Mark gave out were some form of blessing or gesture of friendship,” says Strand, “but they didn’t realize was it was ancient practice going back 2000 years. It was considered a very meritorious practice in Tibet, Nepal, and northern India, a way of offering blessing or good karma to others. Lama Yeshe [a Tibetan master who taught in the West] used to teach students that even if you don’t want to develop compassion, reciting the six-syllable mantra will nevertheless cause compassion to grow within your mind.”
Read the entire article here.
“Wisdom: An Endangered Natural Resource” by Lama Surya Das April 28, 2010
Posted by Monty McKeever in : Buddhism, Buddhist Teachings , 1 comment so farVia The Huffington Post, the most recent article by Lama Surya Das,
Can you tell me What is Wisdom while standing on one leg? This was the challenge put to a rabbi of old.
King Solomon said that wisdom was the knowledge and judgment to know right from wrong. He received his vaunted wisdom from God in a dream; would that we too had such dreams!
“Blessed is the man who finds wisdom,
the man who gains understanding,
for he is more profitable than silver
and yields better returns than gold.”
– Proverbs 3:13The Talmud says that the wisest among men is he who learns from all. My father’s view on the subject was that it would be wise if I did what he said and didn’t say what he did. Wisdom is as wisdom does.
Wisdom is an endangered natural resource today in our Over-Information Age, where knowledge is rising and genuine sagacity increasingly rare. If we wish to become wiser and more sane, we’d do well exploit and develop our own innate natural resources for a change while furthering the sustainability of our planet and civilization. For example, time too is a natural resource; though we seem to live in a time-starved era, I personally believe that it’s not time we lack but focus and prioritization. This is an inside job. The evergreen subject of how to live our lives is the very purview of wisdom and the necessary cultivation of self-knowledge and awareness. Perspicacious wisdom is the highest form of sanity.
There was a time when wisdom, as the pinnacle of human insight and understanding, was prized above anything else. Knowledge looks around, wisdom sees deeper. Wisdom is available within each and every one of us, a combination of clear vision–seeing things as they are, not as we might like them to be–combined with understanding how things are interconnected and function. Truth or reality is things as they are, just as they are–stripped of concepts, preconceptions and judgment — and not as we are, heavily conditioned by projections and interpretations.
Read the entire article here
Huffington Post’s James Rotondi on Burma VJ
Posted by Philip Ryan in : Film , 1 comment so far
We covered Burma VJ and its HBO premiere here. Read more information about the film and its premiere from Huffington Post blogger James Rotondi.
Burma VJ: Reporting From A Closed Country airs on HBO on April 27 (1:00 PM), April 30 (4:00 PM), May 2 (11:00 AM, 5:25 AM), May 6 (10:00 AM) and May 12 (12:30 AM). HBO2 will air the film on April 28 (8:00 PM) and May 8 (12:00 Noon). For more information, visit the Burma VJ website, and the Burma Campaign UK.
Tibetan writer Zhogs Dung held for organizing quake donations April 27, 2010
Posted by Sam Mowe in : General, Politics , add a commentThe Times Online reports on the detainment of Zhogs Dung, a leading Tibetan intellectual, for his efforts to raise money for victims of this month’s earthquake:
Tra Gyal, better known by his penname of Zhogs Dung, was detained at 5.30pm on Friday in Xining, capital of the western province of Qinghai where the April 14 tremor killed more than 2,000 people, Tibetan sources said.
Half a dozen police picked him up from his office at the Qinghai Nationalities Publishing House, took him to his home and carried out a meticulous search of his study, taking him away at about 10.00pm.
The officers returned in the early hours of the morning and removed two computers, written documents and pictures and came back again at about 3.30am to show the writer’s wife a formal arrest warrant for her husband.
Tra Gyal – both first names – who is aged about 45, has gained renown as Tibet’s premier intellectual and essayist, a moderniser who has not hesitated to credit religion in the deeply Buddhist region and who has long been seen as closely associated with the ruling Communist Party.
However, he appears to have run foul of the authorities in recent weeks through his writings that have become more critical of Chinese rule of Tibetan regions, and also because of his activism after the earthquake.
Read the rest here.
Tibetan Nomad photos by Alison Wright April 26, 2010
Posted by Philip Ryan in : Tibetan Buddhism, Travel , 2 comments
The New York Times features a photo essay by—and interview with—photographer Alison Wright.
Q: Why were you attracted to the Tibetan nomads?
A: There’s a real visual beauty about them. Not to be a romantic pastoralist, but you see this woman walking down the street with a waterfall of amber and turquoise and carrying a bag of cement or something. The issue for me is how much they have really endured — not only the difficulty of living on the land — with the Chinese coming in and telling them how they can live and where they should live, having their land taken away and now having to seek out a whole other way of living. They’re being forced to leave the land, to no longer be nomadic and to move to the city.
[Image © Alison Wright. Hat tip: Rev. Danny Fisher]
Discount Buddha April 23, 2010
Posted by James Shaheen in : Buddha, Humor , 10 comments
Here’s a picture contributing editor and founding art director Frank Olinsky took on the streets of Brooklyn. I can’t think of a better deal. But if you wait a few days it’ll probably be free.
(c) Frank Olinsky 2010
Joan Oliver interviews Bernie Glassman on the Symposium for Socially Engaged Buddhism
Posted by Monty McKeever in : Buddhism, Buddhist Teachings, Events, Interview, Mindfulness, News, Politics, Tricycle , 6 commentsFrom August 9th to 14th, 2010, the Zen Peacemakers will be hosting “The First Symposium for Western Socially Engaged Buddhism”, in Montague, MA. It will be a gathering of leading Western activist practitioners, sponsors, and academics in this ever-important and growing field.
Throughout the coming months, we at Tricycle will be posting a series of video interviews with prominent figures from the world of Socially Engaged Buddhism, beginning with this one with Bernie Glassman, who is a pioneer of the movement, founder of the Zen Peacemaker order, and co-organizer of the symposium.
*we improved the sound quality since the original posting!
Slogan 1: “First Train in the Preliminaries.”
Posted by Philip Ryan in : Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism , add a comment
Every Friday, Acharya Judy Lief is providing commentary on Atisha’s lojong (mind-training) slogans for Tricycle. Today she posted about the first lojong slogan:
“First train in the preliminaries.”
She writes:
This slogan raises the question of what is the best foundation for dharmic practice. How should we prepare ourselves to dive into the slogans? This naturally leads to the further question of how we prepare ourselves to launch into anything.
Preparation is not something that we just do once and then forget about it. It is easy to enter into meditation and other practices, and just continue along. But along the way, we lose track why we decided to do any of this in the first place. By starting with the preliminaries, and going back to that starting point repeatedly, we can reconnect ourselves over and over again our initial inspiration. Trungpa Rinpoche used the analogy of combing our hair: each time, we go back to the root.
Read the whole thing.
Earth Day: The World Without Us April 22, 2010
Posted by Sam Mowe in : Books, Environment, General, Interview, Tricycle , 4 comments
Happy Earth Day to all! May all beings wake up to the beauty and gravity of our planet!
Here is part of a conversation between environmental journalist Alan Weisman and Tricycle contributing editor Clark Strand (see his writings on “Green Meditation” in the most recent issue of Tricycle) about global warming, population control, and what the world might look like when we’re gone.
People have described the experience of reading your book (The World Without Us) as a definitive moment in the development of a collective ecological awareness, like first encountering Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. Yes. One interviewer compared it to the first Earth Day, which was inspired by photographs of Earth taken from outer space. For the first time, we got far enough from the Earth that we could turn around and take a photograph of it, and what we saw completely changed our way of looking at the planet. We were mesmerized by how beautiful and utterly unique it was. And that new way of seeing the planet in its totality yanked our consciousness to a whole new level of reverence and of concern. Immediately the environmental movement sprang to life. That same interviewer suggested that The World Without Us gives a similar kind of distance by extracting human beings from the equation, allowing us to think about the planet on its own terms, apart from the innumerable distractions and noise of human life. It’s a way of tearing down the walls that separate us from nature.
Read the full interview here.
Earth-touching articles from Tricycle April 21, 2010
Posted by Sam Mowe in : Buddha, Buddhism, Environment, General, Tricycle , 5 commentsMara is tired and cranky. The demon tempter has tried everything in his power to prevent this sitting man from attaining his goal, and now he’s finally out of tricks. In a desperate last hurrah to stop Siddhartha he sputters:
So you think you’re going to wake up, do you? Go on then, become a Buddha. Who cares? Who is here to vouch for your achievement? I demand to know, wise guy: who will be your witness?
Siddhartha—under the Bodhi tree, who at this very moment is becoming the Buddha—says nothing. In what has got to be the best possible response to Mara’s harassment (it gives me gooseflesh!), the Buddha silently reaches down and touches the earth with his fingertips.
Boom. Rivers roar, flowers bloom, and the mountains walk. The earth bears witness.
This earth-touching, enlightenment moment is celebrated now by both Buddhists and environmentalists as an indicator that ecological thinking is central to the Buddhist tradition. Over the years, Tricycle has made an effort to explore Buddhism’s relationship to the natural environment. As you prepare to celebrate Earth Day tomorrow check out some of our favorite earthy articles:
- Allan Badiner looks the relationship between Buddhist practice and social activism in “Eco-Dharma.”
- In his essay “Facing the Heat,” Joseph Goldstein considers the climate emergency.
- David Rome imagines what enlightened environmentalism might look like in his article “The Green Buddha.”
- “Mountains and waters right now are the actualization of the ancient buddha way,” says Zen Master Dogen in his incredible “Mountains and Waters Sutra.”
- In his article “Radical Confidence,” James Thornton asks, “What’s missing from eco-activism?”
- Susan Moon outlines some Buddhist practices to save the planet in “Stop Shopping.”
- In “A Breath of Fresh Air,” Mark Coleman discusses seven meditations for connecting with nature.
Enjoy!