Home › Living in the World › Community

Community

 Living and practicing harmoniously with others is essential to Buddhist teachings
  • Tricycle Community 0 comments

    What Would William Penn Think? Paid Member

    By Elizabeth Redden
    SITTING UP STRAIGHT in tall Shaker-style chairs, the members of Lilac Breeze Sangha follow their breath to the tune of Quaker silence. Like many other Westerners, they’ve taken to Buddhist sitting practice without giving up their religious roots, combining traditions for a customized spiritual experience. For math teacher David Shen, who combines Catholicism, Taoism, Quakerism, and Buddhism in his practice, mixing faiths works to their mutual enrichment: “In Quaker meeting,” he says, “when people speak, I now listen deeply, the way Buddhists would listen.” More »
  • Tricycle Community 0 comments

    Beloved Community Paid Member

    By Sallie Jiko Tisdale
    More »
  • Tricycle Community 0 comments

    Coming Home Paid Member

    By Brigid Brett
    Jesse has been blinded by shrapnel. Paul cannot swallow properly or digest his food. Claudia doesn’t remember giving birth to her daughter. Although they’re no longer in Iraq, the war is still with them. More »
  • Tricycle Community 18 comments

    Who's Zoomin' Who? The Commodification of Buddhism in the American Marketplace Paid Member

    By David Patt
    After the Buddha attained enlightenment under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, he walked the dusty roads to the Deer Park in Sarnath, where he delivered his first sermon, The Sutra of the Turning of the Wheel of Dharma. Here for the first time he described life’s conditions in terms of the Four Noble Truths, declaring desire, craving, “thirst” as the driving force that keeps us stuck in the mire of suffering called samsara. More »
  • Tricycle Community 10 comments

    Life Or Death Paid Member

    By David Edwards
    The one thing I have never fully understood about many Buddhists is why they devote so much attention to the individual roots of greed, hatred, and ignorance, yet so little attention to the manifestations of these poisons in social institutions. Is it simply understood that the real work needs to be done on our individual failings, with social greed, hatred, and ignorance being someone else’s problem? Or is it that Buddhists, like so many people, have been deceived into believing that political issues are “none of their business”? Have they been trained to see problems and solutions solely in personal rather than political terms? More »
  • Tricycle Community 9 comments

    Selective Wisdom Paid Member

    By Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano
    For most of us born in the Western world, remote from Buddhism of any institutional kind, knowledge of the dhamma has come entirely from books and, occasionally, spoken words, some quite excellent and informative, certainly. But this kind of learning still retains a somewhat ethereal air in the absence of actions, traditions, and spiritual observances in which we can participate. That the Buddhist religion has survived so long in the world is a result not so much of the durability of manuscripts as of the power of ideas embodied in custom; and custom, for all our abundant sources of information, is what we lack and cannot in the long run do without. Books crumble easily enough; thought crumbles faster, if not made firm by some sort of concrete practice that holds together believers and sees to the transmission of the teaching to the young. More »