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  • Tricycle Community 2 comments

    Inquiring Mind, Jet Li, and the Buddha's Tooth Paid Member

    Posted by Philip Ryan on 17 Jul 2007
    Happy birthday, Inquiring Mind! The Bay Area journal is throwing a daylong 25th anniversary party / benefit at Spirit Rock on July 21st, according to the Berkeley Daily Planet. There'll be music, auctions, a lot of great guests, and all kinds of stuff, so if you're in Marin County, swing by and help celebrate a great publication. More »
  • Tricycle Community 3 comments

    Metta Forest Monastery Paid Member

    Posted by Philip Ryan on 26 Jun 2007
    This past Saturday I drove up to Metta Forest Monastery in Valley Center, California with my friend Sally. (Ok, she drove.) The abbot, Thanissaro Bhikkhu, known as Ajaan Geoff to his students (Ajaan is a Thai word for "teacher") gave a two-hour teaching centered on the Introduction to his book The Wings to Awakening. There are several other monks in residence at MFM (I spoke to a very nice monk named Than Isaac, whose mother is a schoolteacher in Oklahoma) and soon maybe there will be one more: The young man sitting next to me in the class was due to be ordained as a bhikkhu in July. More »
  • Tricycle Community 1 comment

    India and China fight over... Buddhism Paid Member

    Posted by Philip Ryan on 20 Jun 2007
    This from the Times of India: India and China are engaged in a competition for soft power supremacy in Asia - the battlefield is ownership of one of the world's oldest religions, Buddhism. Well, we all know China and India aren't really fighting over Buddhism. Neither country really cares about that. What's at stake is being Asia's economic top dog, and no religion is as pan-Asian as Buddhism. The article isn't really interesting or illuminating, but it does talk a bit about Luoyang, home of maybe the oldest Buddhist temple in China. More »
  • Tricycle Community 3 comments

    Does it belong in a museum? Paid Member

    Posted by tricycleblog on 19 Jun 2007
    According to the good people at Empty Hand Zen Center, for three Saturdays in July, meditation will become art at the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase in Purchase, New York. (I recall another mixing of meditation and art in Dallas in early June, as mentioned on Bad Buddha.) It sounds very cool. I was recently at the Dia Beacon in Beacon, New York, which seemed like a good place for meditation too. I guess museums are designed to be interesting spaces, so it shouldn't surprise us that other activities flourish there too. Also, museums generally have more money than most dharma centers. More »
  • Tricycle Community 0 comments

    China's Busy. Are You? Paid Member

    Posted by tricycleblog on 15 Jun 2007
    The PRC is working overtime, making everything we'll ever need or want to buy (including, of course, our food and foodlike products) and destroying Tibet piece by piece. But they did institute some (probably meaningless) curbs on gold mining because of environmental concerns. Russian playwright and historian Edvard Radzinsky wrote: "One-party rule cannot survive where someone has even minimal economic freedom." But China seems to violate this rule as it violates all others. More »
  • Tricycle Community 1 comment

    Karmapa on MySpace Paid Member

    Posted by tricycleblog on 13 Jun 2007
    The media's tittering over the Karmapa's MySpace page -- supposedly set up in anticipation of his visit to the West this summer. The attention is great, but all the interest over the page's existence seems to betrays a common Western notion that Buddhists all live in caves and have never heard of the internet, pop music, sports, or Lindsay Lohan. Some will argue the oddness of the cultural encounter is not the stupification on the Western end but rather a culture where designating young people as incarnations of dead people or saints is accepted as an everyday thing. Well, fair enough. Our understanding of monastic culture is very dim in any case. More »