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    Dharma Deluxe Paid Member

    By Richard Shrobe
    A student came to call on Zen Master Hyang Bong and said, “Please, master, teach me the dharma.” Hyang Bong said, “I’m sorry, but my dharma is very expensive.” “Oh, then how much does it cost?” asked the student. “How much can you pay?” was Hyang Bong’s answer. The student put his hand in his pocket and took out some coins and told him, “This is all the money I have.” More »
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    Da, the Buddhist Paid Member

    By Anne Donovan
    What happens when a lapsed-Catholic house painter from Glasgow suddenly takes up Buddhist meditation? For Jimmy McKenna—”Da” (Scottish for “Dad”) in Buddha Da, Anne Donovan’s acclaimed first novel, just published in the U.S.—it’s the undoing of his pleasant if predictable life with wife, Liz, and adolescent daughter, Anne Marie. The three chronicle the fallout from Jimmy’s spiritual quest in alternating chapters (and Scottish dialect). Here’s Anne Marie: More »
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    Buddha Buzz Fall 2004 Paid Member

    Victoria's Dirty Little SecretVictoria’s Secret got in hot water with Buddhists around the world in May, when the lingerie retailer offered the “Asian Floral Bikini” in its spring catalog. The skimpy two-piece ladies’ bathing suit featured brightly colored flowers . . . and pictures of the Buddha and the bodhisattva Kwan-yin yanked from the catalog, and Victoria’s Secret issued a formal apology for offending religious sentiments. More »
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    The Age of Noise Paid Member

    By Aldous Huxley on flouting the will to silence.
    The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise, and noise of desire—we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder, for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which prefabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. More »
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    Give and Take with Norman Fischer Paid Member

    What was the last book you read that really excited you? Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals Of Thought. Nussbaum is a terrific thinker—thorough, exhaustively so, which I admire because I find I can barely think at all! What was the last thing you read that really ticked you off? I can’t remember anything I read lately that ticked me off—if a book ticks me off, it means I don’t have any regard for it, so I stop reading after the first sentence or two. I read for enjoyment and edification. Some of the utterances of our government officials tick me off because they are so often a bending of the truth—but I don’t read these; I usually hear them on the radio (I don’t listen to the radio for edification and enjoyment). More »
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    Udder Compassion Paid Member

    By B. Alan Wallace
    When Geshe Rabten was explaining the difference between boundless compassion and great compassion to a small group of students in a monastery in Switzerland, he gave the analogy of different ways of responding to a cow that has gotten bogged down in a sewage pit. A person who had cultivated boundless compassion would view the cow as if it were his dear friend, and he would try and free it with ropes and the assistance of other people helping out from the firm ground outside the pit. More »