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Arts & Culture

 The growing influence of Buddhist artistic expression in contemporary culture
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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 »
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    Wisdom and Compassion: Sacred Art of Tibet Paid Member

    By Tamara Wasserman Hill
    STRAINS OF LONG SILVER TRUMPETS and the deepthroated chanting of monks greeted the arrival of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco in April. The religious and temporal leader of Tibet's exiled Buddhist population had come to grant a special blessing, initiating the creation of a large-scale sand mandala for the opening of "Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet." This stunning exhibition of Tibetan paintings, sculpture, and tapestries dating from 900 to 1900 C.E. has been assembled from prominent museums and private collections in North America, Europe, and the Soviet Union. Notably, none of the pieces were borrowed from either institutional or official sources in the People's Republic of China, to which Tibet has been politically bound for more than thirty years. More »
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    The Quality of Mercy Paid Member

    By Robert Coe
    Meredith Monk’s latest work, mercy, is the culmination of the performance artist’s legendary career. Robert Coe traces her path from her days as a student in the 1960s to her work today and life as a Buddhist practitioner. More »
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    Radical Presence Paid Member

    By Sonya Lee Ralph
    The New York Times has called Anne Waldman that “combination of oracle, siren and den mother . . . at once deadpan and ferocious.” An explorer of poetry, she has written forty books and pamphlets in almost as many years. Her recently released Vow to Poetry (Coffee House Press) is a mix of autobiography, manifesto, poetry, and essays on poetics, Buddhism, politics, and more. Cofounder, with Allen Ginsberg, of Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Waldman divides her time between teaching, writing, performing and traveling. Writer Sonya Lea Ralph had a chance to speak with her last summer in Seattle. More »