The Institute of Buddhist Studies provides graduate level education in the entirety of the Buddhist tradition with specialized instruction supporting Jodo Shinshu Buddhist ministry.
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A Two-Track Mind
Every time the salesman at Eastern Mountain Sports brought an item for me to try on—a Superwick undershirt, a fleece vest, a coated-nylon shell—I tried to gauge my level of comfort for various degrees of inclement weather. By the time he asked where I was going, he had every reason to expect me to say Mount Everest or Antarctica. It was Friday evening on January 19 and the forecast warned of a freak snowstorm moving north from the Carolinas and colliding with a cold front moving east from the Midwest. Sheepishly, I told him that I would be in Washington, DC, the next day stamping my warmly shod foot against fate, or at least against the Inauguration. To which the young man gave me a thumbs-up, then shrugged and said, taking my credit card, "Well, I guess it must have been different in the sixties." More » -
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Greener Grass
The movies Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet will introduce millions of Westerners to the cultural and religious heritage of Tibet, as well as to the Chinese takeover. Indeed, the hope of both screenwriters Melissa Mathison (p. 65) and Becky Johnston (p. 75) is that their movies will catalyze a grass-roots movement capable of influencing the Clinton administration's policy toward China--specifically, that country's systematic annihilation of its neighbor. More » -
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The Formless Field of Benefaction
There was a time when the Heart Sutra evoked associations with Asian monastic rituals, and not Florida hospitals; and when "the great matter of life and death," as the Zen tradition puts it, did not apply to the American abortion debate; and when running an AIDS hospice may have been considered too secular for Buddhist priests; and when Buddhist priests felt obliged to deny their sexuality, all the more so if it was homosexual. More » -
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Willy-Nilly Dharma
In Oliver Stone's new movie Heaven and Earth, Buddhism plays a major role in a Hollywood movie for the first time. (See interview with Oliver Stone in this issue.) Earlier, What's Love Got to Do with It offered a glimpse of Tina Turner's conversion to the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist sect, and Bernardo Bertolucci's film Little Buddha is now scheduled for release in April. Rumors of related film projects include plans for Martin Scorsese to direct the dramatic story of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. With all this high-finance film interest, both television and the printed news media have stepped up their coverage of things Buddhist—and with more sympathy than what long-time Buddha-watchers in this country have come to expect. More » -
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Buddhism: For Adults Only?
“How did you come to Buddhism?” It’s a question I’ve asked plenty of Buddhists I’ve met over the years. People often answer that they came to Buddhism because they felt their churches or synagogues had lost touch with their faith’s spiritual ground. Or that they felt they could no longer abide by mores or live by tenets that did not sufficiently address the realities of their day-to-day lives. Attending ritual after empty ritual, they associated key dates of the religious calendar more closely with holiday sales and seasonal vacations than anything else. And yet, when it came to weddings and funerals—and, even among the more secular-minded, baptisms—they found themselves seeking out the local rabbi or priest. More » -
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Mountains' Walking
UNLIKE the media staples of sex, money, and power, the more we read about environmentalism, the less inclined we are to read more. And yet, there are the facts. Facts and more facts. One's genuine interest in the work of planetary healing could be killed off by facts alone. So pervasive is this dilemma that it questions the value of information itself. More »
