Pilgrimages to sacred Buddhist sites led by experienced Dharma teachers. Includes daily teachings and group meditation sessions. A local English–speaking guide accompanies and assists.
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Nature Unfolding
Central Building of the Eishin Campus, built by Alexander in Japan in 1985 IN THE LATE 1970S, a book with the odd title A Pattern Language became a bible to me and to many of my friends. Ostensibly about architecture, it was really a handbook on how to live. In the evenings, I’d sit under a lamp and turn its thin, almost translucent pages, looking at lists of design elements like “Cascading Roofs,” “Alcove,” and “Sunny Spot.” These “patterns” could be cobbled together to make a house. More » -
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Lotus in the Fire:
Tricycle: How do you understand karma in terms of your sickness? Harrison: If I seek an answer as to why I am HIV-positive and why somebody else isn’t, I’m going to drive myself crazy because I’m never going to get an answer to that. Tricycle: I didn’t mean it in quite that way. Rather, that AIDS has pushed you deeper into practice than you may have gone without it, and you often refer to your life now as a blessing. More » -
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Empty Phenomena Rolling On
Joseph Goldstein, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies (both in Barre, Massachusetts), has been leading retreats in the vipassana tradition of Southeast Asia for nearly twenty years. His teachers include Anagarika Munindra, S. N. Goenka, Dipa Ma, and the Venerable V Pandita Sayadaw of Burma. He is the author of The Experience of Insight: A Simple and Direct Guide to Buddhist Meditation and co-author of Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation. His new book, Insight Meditation: The Practice of Freedom, was published by Shambhala in the fall. This interview was conducted by editor Helen Tworkov at IMS in October. More » -
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Living Two Traditions
Gil Fronsdal has been a student of Buddhist practice for more than twenty-five years. He trained in the Soto Zen tradition, receiving dharma transmission in 1995, as well as in the Vipassana—or Insight Meditation—lineages of Theravada Buddhism. Since 1990, Fronsdal has served as resident teacher at the Insight Meditation Center of the Mid-Peninsula in Redwood City, California. Only the second urban Insight Meditation center in America, it is funded entirely by dana contributions. Tricycle Editor-in-Chief James Shaheen interviewed Gil Fronsdal at his center in August 2002. It is unusual for someone to be a teacher of both Zen and Vipassana. Since you started out in the Zen tradition, can you describe how you first came to the practice? More » -
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Everything's About the Heart
Tricycle: You just finished a two-week retreat. What practice did you actually do? RG: It was a Tibetan deity yoga practice, mostly mantra and visualizations. It’s quite an intricate practice. Certainly at this point, I don’t know how to do it perfectly, and probably won’t for many years. It’s like playing the piano: you have to keep doing it and keep doing it. Tricycle: Did you devote most of the day to practice sessions? RG: Yes. When my teacher was laying out the parameters for me, he said it would probably take me about three weeks to do it. But unfortunately I had some other commitments and had to get this done in two weeks. So I was practicing about 10-12 hours a day. I was pushing pretty hard. There was one really bad long day where I just was totally haywire - what the Tibetans call the “winds” had gone nuts. I didn’t know where I was. I was lost, didn’t know what to do. And unfortunately my teacher was in India at the time. More » -
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First Lesson, Best Lesson
Born in Baltimore in 1937, Philip Glass began studying the violin at age six but reports that his serious interest in music didn't begin until he took up the flute two years later. After his sophomore year in high school, he entered the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics and philosophy. He graduated at age 19 and determined to become a composer, moved to New York in order to attend the Julliard School. A few years later he was in Paris for intensive study with Nadia Boulanger, and at that time he was hired by a filmmaker to transcribe the Indian music of Ravi Shankar. For the next ten years, Glass composed a large collection of new music, some of it for the Mabou Mines Theater (Glass was one of the cofounders of that company) but most of it for his own performing group, the Philip Glass Ensemble. In 1976 Einstein on the Beach initiated a series of Glass operas that include Satyagraha and Akhnaten. More »
