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Arts & Culture

 The growing influence of Buddhist artistic expression in contemporary culture
  • Tricycle Community 2 comments

    Mindful Music Paid Member

    By Danny Fisher
    “This is why we come early,” Buddhist singer-songwriter Ravenna Michalsen says for the third time this trip, as we search for the correct turn into Wellesley College. She’s playing a show for the college’s Buddhist Community tonight, and we’ve driven up to Massachusetts from New Haven, Connecticut, where various karmic causes and conditions have brought the two of us together again for another semester. More »
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    Gatha by the Boatman Monk Paid Member

    A thousand-foot fishing line hangs straight down.One wave moves, ten thousand follow.The night is still, the water cold, the bait untouched.The empty boat carries home a full load of moonlight. [Image: Hattachi #346, Tokihoro Sato, 2000, gelatin-silver print ©Tokihoro Sato, courtesy of the Leslie Tonkonow Gallery, New York] More »
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    Reel to Real Paid Member

    By Gaetano Kazuo Maida
    BRUCE JOEL RUBIN, 48, was recently awarded the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Ghost, 1990's top-grossing film. He also wrote the original screenplay, Jacob's Ladder. Influenced by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Jacob's Ladder was acknowledged as one of the" best unproduced screenplays" in Hollywood for a decade until Adrian Lyne took it on last year. Rubin's life has been informed by his encounters with Buddhism in the Himalayas and by his continuing meditation practice. Recently he spoke with Tricycle's On Film editor Gaetano Kazuo Maida about film and spirituality. Tricycle: What has inspired your work in film? More »
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    Everything's About the Heart Paid Member

    By by Daniel Goldman and Tara Bennett-Goleman
    Tricycle: You just finished a two-week retreat. What practice did you actually do? RG: It was a Tibetan deity yoga practice, mostly mantra and visualizations. It’s quite an intricate practice. Certainly at this point, I don’t know how to do it perfectly, and probably won’t for many years. It’s like playing the piano: you have to keep doing it and keep doing it. Tricycle: Did you devote most of the day to practice sessions? RG: Yes. When my teacher was laying out the parameters for me, he said it would probably take me about three weeks to do it. But unfortunately I had some other commitments and had to get this done in two weeks. So I was practicing about 10-12 hours a day. I was pushing pretty hard. There was one really bad long day where I just was totally haywire - what the Tibetans call the “winds” had gone nuts. I didn’t know where I was. I was lost, didn’t know what to do. And unfortunately my teacher was in India at the time. More »
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    Monkey Business Paid Member

    By Lynda Barry
    I PAINT THESE MONKEYS with a brush and hand-ground Chinese ink. What began as a response to the death of a friend has become something I lean on, just as I depend on the alphabet to be there when I want to write.I found the paintbrush when I was working on my novel Cruddy, getting nowhere because I was trying to write it on a computer. The problem with writing on a computer was that I could delete anything I felt unsure about. This meant that a sentence was gone before I even had a chance to see what it was trying to become. More »