Spirit Rock Meditation Center is dedicated to the teachings of the Buddha. We provide silent meditation retreats, as well as classes, trainings, and Dharma study.
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Clearing Clutter
In 1968, a couple of months into first grade at St. Mary’s Elementary School in Ayer, Massachusetts, I notice that my desk is looking kind of funky. From where I sit, I can peer into the desk of the little girl in the next row: mainly empty, with a neat stack of construction paper, a pair of blunt scissors, a box of crayons, and a few pencils lined up in a groove. More » -
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Wandering Clouds: The Poets of Ch'an Buddhism
Gnarled pines, wind-blown clouds, jutting mountain pinnacles, exiled scholars, horses, trailing willows. Moonlight on meandering rivers, fishermen, white cranes and mandarin ducks, the eerie screech of a gibbon, tiny white plum blossoms on twisted branches, a battered wooden boat moored in the distance. For more than a thousand years the poets of Buddhist China wandered a landscape that is vast and at the same time intimate, mysterious and deeply familiar: the same mountain peaks, the same villages, the same river gorges. What makes this landscape feel so much like home? The poets of China, many of them Ch’an practitioners, had a way of quickly getting down to elemental things. Using a vocabulary of tangible, ordinary objects, they composed unsentimental poems that seem the precise size of a modest human life - the reflective sadness, the fleeting calm pleasures. More » -
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Lobsang Rampa: The Mystery of the Three-Eyed Lama
A one-“L” Lama, he’s a priest, A two-“L” Llama, he’s a beast And I will bet a silk pajama There isn’t any three-“L” Lllama - Ogden Nash, 1945 In 1956, the British firm Secker & Warburg published The Third Eye: The Autobiography of a Tibetan Lama. It remains in print to this day, the best-selling book about Tibetan Buddhism. The Third Eye introduced Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism to hundreds of thousands of readers in Europe and America in the 1950s and ’60s. Over the last four decades, readers around the world have discovered the book in sidewalk kiosks, airport newsstands, and university bookstores. It is a work that has evoked sympathy for the plight of Tibet under Communist occupation and even inspired some to become Tibetologists, professional scholars of Tibet. Its author was Lobsang Rampa, the son of one of the leading members of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama’s government. More » -
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Vajra Gun
I have covered my badge with black tape so it will not reflect the light. The January midnight air is colder than the gun in my hand, a .357-caliber Magnum revolver, made of blued steel, so it won't reflect light. It has etched wooden handles so it won't slip. I am standing silently outside the basement window of a home on the San Francisco peninsula. I am focused completely on the three people inside, lying on the bed directly below the window. The window is partly open. The room is brightly lit. How can they sleep in that bright light? Are they asleep? The smallest one is only a month old. She lies between her father and mother, who are both fully clothed, both very young themselves. Far too young for the trouble they have brought upon themselves, and the threat they are now bringing to their child. More » -
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Bearing Witness: Notes from Auschwitz
I have just returned from 12 days in Poland. I went as a photographer and participant in an interfaith meditation retreat at Auschwitz organized by the American Zen roshi, Bernard Glassman, and his new “Zen Peacemaker Order”. During American Thanksgiving week a group of 150 people - Poles, Germans, French, Swiss, Italians, Americans - Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and Sufi Muslims - gathered for meditation and discussion, to “bear witness” to what happened at Auschwitz 50 years ago, and to listen for the ways in which those events echo in our lives today. More »
