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  • Tricycle Community 102 comments

    What's at Stake as the Dharma Goes Modern? Paid Member

    By Linda Heuman
    In the summer of 2010, I sat a Dzogchen retreat at Garrison Institute with my teacher, a well-known Tibetan lama. He gave teachings during the day and then in the evening handed the microphone over to several academic luminaries who were also attending. In the morning and afternoon we received instructions on attaining buddhahood; in the evenings we heard lectures on how Buddhism’s contact with the West was leading to cutting-edge advances in brain-science research, medicine, and psychology. More »
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    What the Buddha Thought Paid Member

    Dr. Richard Gombrich has spent much of his life studying Buddhism, but he does not call himself a Buddhist. The only child of two educated and broadminded parents, he was brought up to hold humanistic values, notably reason, and to look on religion as irrational and best left alone. He became a historian like his father, Ernst Gombrich, and since his father seemed to have Europe well covered in his work, the younger Gombrich turned to Asia, specifically India. He learned Sanskrit and Pali, and encountered the ideas of the Buddha in his reading. Having decided early on that he was an atheist, yet following his parents in placing a high value on morality, Gombrich was drawn to Buddhism because, he says, “it is atheistic and also emphasizes ethics.” More »
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    The Nuns of Monkol Won Paid Member

    By Willa Schneberg
    At the time these photos were taken, the nuns and monks of Monkol Won Pagoda in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, were cautiously optimistic that the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia might bring democracy to their country. For a number of months in 1992, the nuns allowed us, U.N. volunteers, to set up registration sites in their pagoda for the first "free and fair" election in Cambodia since the era of French colonization, which ended in 1953. Their optimism was rewarded. In May 1993, ninety percent of those who registered cast their votes in the U.N.-sponsored election. Hun Sen, the leader of the Vietnamese-installed government, and Prince Norodom Ranariddh, King Sihanouk's son, would become co-prime ministers. More »
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    Swimming in the Infinite Paid Member

    Robert A. F. Thurman is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. A former Tibetan Buddhist monk—the first Westerner ever to be so ordained—he is the cofounder and current director of Tibet House in New York City. For decades he has been a close friend of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and a prominent champion of Tibetan Buddhism and the Tibetan cause. He has translated classic texts from Tibetan to English and is the author of numerous books, most recently Circling the Sacred Mountain (Bantam, 1999) and Inner Revolution (Penguin, 1999). This interview was conducted at his office at Columbia University. More »
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    The Truth About Truth Paid Member

    By Rita M. Gross
    Since 2007, I have taught a course on Buddhist history during the intensive study program, or shedra, at Lotus Garden retreat center, in Stanley, Virginia, the Western center of my teacher, Her Eminence Jetsun Khandro Rinpoche. In the second year of the course, I began a discussion of the historical origins of Mahayana Buddhism. According to Mahayana legend, the Buddha hid his Mahayana teachings in the realm of the nagas, serpent-like creatures who dwell under the sea, because his students were not yet ready to receive them. Eventually these teachings were retrieved by the great 2nd-century master Nagarjuna. This account has been passed down as if it were factual history, but of course it isn’t. What historical research tells us is that the Mahayana scriptures gradually emerged after the Buddha’s lifetime over the course of centuries. More »
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    Allegiance to Life Paid Member

    It’s no secret that our world is in a tough spot. The critical problems that we face today—political, economic, and ecological—can be overwhelming even to think about. Joanna Macy, Ph.D., however, believes we are in a moment she calls “The Great Turning”: a transition from a society shaped primarily by industrial growth to a society structured to be life-sustaining. In her workshops, Macy—a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology—encourages people to take part in this collective transition not by hiding from their pain for the world but by embracing it. In honoring our despair, Macy says, we discover our love for the world. More »