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    Somebody Special Paid Member

    By Noelle Oxenhandler
    Recently someone asked me, “What’s the funniest experience you’ve ever had?” When I thought about it, I realized that everything at the top of my list occurred in the context of spiritual practice. Once, during a weeklong retreat at the Rochester Zen Center, my friend Sarah was given the task of laundering the long brown robe of our teacher, Toni Packer. As soon as Sarah saw she’d been chosen for the task, she began to imagine the care with which she would handle the robe: washing it on the delicate cycle, pulling it out of the dryer at just the right time, lovingly ironing every fold and pleat. When Toni saw the robe, it would confirm that Sarah was, indeed, an extremely special Zen student. But when Sarah pulled the robe out of the dryer, it turned out that she’d forgotten to remove a wad of Kleenex from inside the long sleeves. More »
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    Hero, Villain, Yeti Paid Member

    By Anne Doran
    Tin Tin did it, Lara Croft did it, and even Donald, Bugs, and Mickey did it. Travel to Tibet, that is—not the actual Himalayan country (since 1951 a part of the People’s Republic of China) but the mythical place that has existed in the Western popular imagination since Europeans first arrived there 800 years ago. More »
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    How Buddhist Is Modern Buddhism? Paid Member

    By David Loy
    The Making of Buddhist Modernism David L. McMahan New York: Oxford University Press 2008, 320 pp., $29.95 paper Buddhism was the first major missionary religion, and by all accounts it seems to have spread peacefully. The merchants and monks who transported the dharma did not accompany conquering armies or attempt to defeat the local gods. Most often, Buddhism engaged with native traditions in a co-creative process that led to the development of something new. Buddhism in Tibet has been significantly influenced by its interaction with the indigenous Bön tradition, Taoist and Confucian thought helped shape Chinese Buddhism, elements of Shinto are woven into Buddhism in Japan, and so forth. Buddhist teachings about impermanence and insubstantiality apply to Buddhism too. More »
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    Art of Gandhara Paid Member

    By Anne Doran
    This revelatory exhibition of Buddhist art from Gandhara—an ancient kingdom whose center was the present-day Peshawar valley in northwest Pakistan—nearly didn’t happen. Slated to open at New York’s Asia Society last spring, the show was delayed for six months when loans from museums in Karachi and Lahore were jeopardized by (among other things) a flood, the dissolution of the Pakistani Ministry of Culture by constitutional amendment, and deteriorating diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Pakistan. That it opened at all was a testament to the persistence and vision of Asia Society’s director, Melissa Chiu, and her counterparts and associates in Pakistan. More »
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    The Science of Awakening Paid Member

    By Richard Eskow
    Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod called it a “historic moment.” But the first Buddhist Geeks conference, held at the University of the West near Los Angeles over three days last July, began with a more modest goal: discussing topics raised on the Buddhist Geeks website (buddhistgeeks.com) and in its podcasts. Buddhist Geeks was created out of curiosity, cofounder Vincent Horn told the 200-plus participants on opening day. “We don’t have a mission statement, we have a question: How best can we serve the convergence of Buddhism, global culture, and emerging technology? “Will this work? Will there be another conference after this?” he shrugged. “We don’t know.” More »
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    My Reincarnation Paid Member

    By Mary Talbot
    As a young man growing up in Italy, Khyentse Yeshi Rinpoche, son of the famous Dzogchen master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu, was the embodiment of many things, chief of which were conflicting emotions and views about his mostly absent father. “I’ve always had dreams, since I was 5 years old—strange visions—and I was really scared about this,” says 18-year-old Yeshi in the opening scene of My Reincarnation, a remarkable documentary by Jennifer Fox about the complex, changing relationship between father and son, filmed over three decades of their lives. “So I asked my father—but he is not answering.” Indeed, Yeshi, born in 1970 in Italy to an Italian mother and identified in infancy as a tulku, or reincarnate lama, had a lot of questions about his role in the world, but the master never offered an overt response. More »