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Buddha Buzz: E-blessings, Art, and Ceasing to Be Human
Buddhism and modernity have sat down together at the table once more.
Last Friday, the China Daily published the article "Buddhist temple offers e-blessing service," which covered one innovative method of controlling crowds, reducing the burning of incense, and making some money: sending blessings via text. Guiyuan Temple in Wuhan, China, in cooperation with China Mobile, is charging people 3 to 10 yuan (normal text messages, according to the article, cost 0.15 yuan) to send a blessing text, which includes the phone number of the person for whom the blessing is meant for. While China Mobile forwards the text to the appropriate person, the blessing appears on an LED board outside the temple, where monks are chanting prayers for all the texters and textees.
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Transforming Minds: Buddhism in Art
Starting today, Asia Society Hong Kong Center's inaugural exhibition celebrates the beauty and diversity of Buddhism. The exhibition showcases important art pieces from Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection as well as contemporary creations by Asian artists. Related cultural events include a public forum, lecture series, and Hong Kong's first International Buddhist Film Festival. The exhibition runs from Feb 10 to May 20, 2012.Read more at The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation site.
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Meditation Month, Day 10: Too Much Tea
It's Day 10 of the meditation challenge and I hope everyone's doing well! I was up very early this morning and when this happens I feel the illusion of efficiency and wonder how all the lazy people still sleeping ever get anything done. I consider it a very mild form of mania, exacerbated by caffeine consumption.
I had too much tea this morning, which made me wired and anxious, and then I inconveniently crashed back to earth around the time I was supposed to get to work, so I needed another caffeine boost. I've never considered myself a caffeine addict so I've never thought about stopping taking caffeine altogether, but after today, I'm realizing it may be the time!
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Meditation Month: Day 9
There is only one way to walk in New York City: mindfully. Actually, let me back up. You don't have to walk mindfully in New York, but if you don't you're roadkill. (In fact, the main reason that you should walk mindfully is because so many people don't.) Most of the time you have to be prepared to move quickly, to avoid other walkers, taxis, bicyclists, or a crazy person. At other times you need to exercise patience—waiting for the next subway or slowly shuffling through a bottle neck situation at Grand Central during rush hour. Either way, if you find yourself walking in New York, Peter Doobinin had some good advice in today's Daily Dharma:
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Journey Into Buddhism series on WGBH PBS Boston
On February 23, Boston's PBS channel 2 WGBH will play two parts of writer-director John Bush's breathtaking trilogy, 'Journey into Buddhism', which is sponsored in part by Tricycle. From 8pm-9:30pm, 'Dharma River' will show, presenting a look at the ancient temples and shrines along the coast of Laos, Thailand and Bhurma. Immediately after is 'Prajna Earth' 9:30-11pm, which takes the audience through Angkor in Cambodia, and also ventures down into Bali and Java to explore the convergence of Hindu and Buddhist cultures.
If you don't live in Boston, contact your local PBS station and request that they put it on the air. These films are beautifully shot, and the backing musical score by David Hykes only adds to their greatness.
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Mindful Eating: You Saw It Here First
Mindful eating has hit the New York Times!
One of our sharp-eyed editors spied this article yesterday in the Dining and Wine section of the Gray Lady: "Mindful Eating as Food for Thought." In it, Jeff Gordinier writes about his visit to the Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, N.Y., where he participated in a silent, vegan, mindfully-eaten lunch, something he found to be "captivating and mysterious." (Afterward, he tweeted, "& yeah I tried this mindful eating thing @ the monastery. Very cool. But not easy. Even putting my fork down was hard!")
But it's not just the New York Times who has trumpeted mindful eating. As Gordinier says in the article,
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Meditation Month: Broken Glass
Last night I broke a glass in my apartment, and as I was cleaning up the mess I realized that this was the third or fourth glass that I've broken in the past few weeks. As I was picking up the shattered pieces I realized that I've been moving through the world with a huge division between my body and my mind. My mind goes in one direction while my body operates as a disconnected entity. I bump into things, drop objects, and spill coffee. I was flipping through Tricycle Teachings: Meditation and I came across the excerpt from "Full Body, Empty Mind," an interview with meditation teacher Will Johnson:
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Meditation Month: Day 7
Dear fellow sitters: it has almost been a week since we kicked off our commit-to-sit daily meditation goal for the month of February. How is everyone doing? I began this month-long venture with the goal of sitting down on my purple zafu every morning. This has happened only once, and I find myself asking why. It isn't that the idea of sitting is incredibly daunting, or that I just can't make time to sit—it's the notion of forcing a specific time period and location into my schedule that causes a panic. The entire week I've spent practicing in my commutes to work, and they have been incredibly rewarding. Still, I raise a question regarding the sitting itself. Does the location matter?
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Tricycle Talks: Jason Siff on Unlearning Meditation
Why does meditation have to be so hard? According to Jason Siff, there is an inherent tension in meditation practice between your mind as it is and the meditation instructions you use. In his book Unlearning Meditation: What to Do When the Instructions Get in the Way (the December Tricycle Book Club selection), Siff encourages us to take a bird’s-eye view of our meditation instructions so that we can see the concepts and beliefs that are embedded within them. When we get behind the instructions and understand how the concepts within them function, we find that we often sort our meditation experiences into acceptable and unacceptable, right and wrong.
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Hula Video featuring June Tanoue
The Spring 2012 issue of Tricycle features an interview with Zen priest and hula instructor June Tanoue. But our interview doesn't show June at her finest, which is performing. You can see her singing and dancing in both traditional and modern styles in the video below, which was shot in September 2011 at New York's Lincoln Center as part of a memorial for June's student, the dancer Becky Jung.
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Allan Lokos: Patience in Relationships
During the month of February, we're reading Allan Lokos's Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living at the Tricycle Book Club. Pick up a copy and join the discussion here. Below is an excerpt from the book.
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Meditation Month: Day 6
The Monday blues have hit meditation month—at least they have for me.
I spent the weekend researching Milarepa, the famous Tibetan poet-yogi, because of a journalism assignment. You know, this Milarepa...
...the one who went through agony just to receive basic Buddhist teachings from Marpa, and then, when he got them, stayed in solitary meditation for years. When his food ran out, he ate nothing but the nettles that grew outside his cave (which is why he is often portrayed with green skin) until he became fully awakened.
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Buddha Buzz: Burma, Uganda, and a Rare Genetic Mutation Unleashed
A few weeks ago on the Tricycle blog we featured the guest post Burma in 2012: A Political Report Card, by Deborah Weinberg. The post spoke of freedom, hope, and progressiveness, but Weinberg expressed enough skepticism of Burma's government to end with the line, "We’ll find out in the coming months if the progress is real and a genuine road to freedom."
It was cheering, then, to read this piece of news from yesterday: Monastic Council Restores Status of Released Monks. From the article:
The official body that governs Buddhist monastic affairs in Burma has restored the status of three monks who were released from prison last month after serving more than four years behind bars for their involvement in the 2007 Saffron Revolution.
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Meditation Month: Day 3
So, day 3. It's said of the Sentinelese islanders that they only count to two, and anything above that is called "many." While I think this is a very wise policy generally, it's unfortunately often true of our resolutions, too—we hold fast for a day or two, and then, well.... Don't let Day 3 be the day you fell off the cushion. Keep sitting! This morning I had a terrible sit. I was resentful and restless, and couldn't count above two, like the Sentinelese. But as Brad Warner writes in the new issue of Tricycle, it's like brushing your teeth: You just do it.
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The Shape of the Question
Last month, we published the essay Starting Points by Tricycle's Features Editor Andrew Cooper, about approaching issues of race in our Buddhist communities. In light of the positive and productive dialogue that essay engendered, we've decided to publish another "oldie but goodie" by Cooper. This one, The Shape of the Question, was first published in Inquiring Mind, in an issue highlighting the teachings of Tibetan Dzogchen, Advaita master Hari Lal Poonja, and Toni Packer. In the article, Cooper explores non-dual dharma, crafting a historical perspective on the longstanding debate of sudden versus gradual enlightenment.
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Tricycle Talks: Ken McLeod speaks to Richard Eskow, Part 3 of 3
Teacher and translator Ken McLeod and Tricycle Contributing Editor Richard Eskow got acquainted at the 2011 Buddhist Geeks Conference in Los Angeles. (In 2012, the conference will be in Boulder.) They enjoyed their talks so much that they decided to meet up after the conference and continue talking, and they were gracious enough to share it with us. Part 3 of their conversation is below.
In this third and final installment, they discuss the idea of "the enemy." As Ken McLeod says, "We regard someone as an enemy when they elicit in us feelings that we cannot tolerate."
Listen to Part 1 and Part 2 of this discussion.
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Meditation Month: Day 2
Last weekend, my 20-year old brother and I meditated together in my studio apartment in Brooklyn. We sat down, side by side, on cushions that have seen better days. To get started, I read aloud from the "Breathing Meditation" chapter of Sharon Salzberg's Real Happiness, and then we listened to the first track of the book's accompanying CD. We crossed our legs, closed our eyes, and sat there breathing. It was my brother's first time meditating."I could get into that," my brother said afterwards. "I've always been hyper-aware of my thoughts, but the non-judgmental awareness is a whole other thing."My brother would appreciate today's Daily Dharma, which offers advice on non-judgmental awareness. It comes from "The Refuge of Sitting" by Narayan Liebenson Grady:
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Allan Lokos: Patience With Self
During the month of February, we're reading Allan Lokos's Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living at the Tricycle Book Club. Pick up a copy and join the discussion here. Below is an excerpt from the book. What is there about the quality of patience that causes so many of us to respond to the very word with a sense of deficiency? “I don’t have enough,” we say, suggesting that patience is some sort of commodity.
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When the Iron Bird Flies
Tricycle is pleased to be partnering with the BuddhaFest Film Festival once again. The festival takes place June 14-17, 2012 in Washington DC and is a tremendous showcase for Buddhist films. Tricycle partnered with BuddhaFest last year, and we had a lot of fun and got the opportunity to show six great Buddhist films here on our site that the members of our community found truly inspirational.
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Meditation Month begins today!
At the beginning of 2012 I committed to reinvigorating my meditation practice. But we're only a few weeks into the new year and I've already let myself off the hook. I feel as though I have a million things to do and as a result I've put finding time for practice on the back burner. There just doesn't seem to be space in my day for meditation. But this morning, as I read through the meditation tips that Zen teacher Brad Warner offers in the new issue of Tricycle, I found some simple advice on how to make space in my day for meditation:
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