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G-20 Dharma
When I search for an image to describe the core of my spiritual practice, the one that presses up through the others is a memory of the G-20 summit in June 2010. I’m carrying my six-year-old son away from a burning police car in front of a bank tower on Bay Street in downtown Toronto. Three young protesters dressed in black jumped on the roof of the car as my son and I turned away and began making our way home. More » -
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Books in Brief Winter 2011
Zenju Earthlyn Manuel’s Tell Me Something about Buddhism: Questions and Answers for the Curious Beginner (Hampton Roads Publishing, 2011, $16.95, paper, 128 pp.) is a simple yet uncommon introduction to the Buddha’s teachings. Manuel, an African- American Zen priest, takes a direct and personal approach to the dharma. “What does Buddhism have to do with black people?” she recalls her youngest sister once asking her. Manuel goes on to reflect on the ways in which being black has informed and enriched her understanding of Buddhism. “The practice is to make companions of difference and harmony, see them both as oneness itself,” she writes. More » -
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The Protean Self
We are becoming fluid and many sided...evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time ... I have named [this mode of being] the "protean self" after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms. More » -
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Pure Heart Enlightened Mind
It's impossible to separate the journals and letters of Maura "Soshin" O'Halloran, a young Irish-American Zen Buddhist nun, from the brief, dazzling pattern of her life itself. Less a book than an intimate glimpse, this collection is a moving record (compiled by her mother) of personal notes, fragments, and fleeting impressions of the three years O'Halloran spent at Toshoji, a Tokyo temple, and at Kannonji, a remote temple in northern Japan. She was killed in a bus accident in 1982, at age 27, having just received official dharma transmission from her roshi. More » -
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Wonders of the Natural Mind: The Essence of Dzogchen in the Native Bon Tradition of Tibet
For most readers, these two books will serve as the first "insider" introductions to Bon, the indigenous spiritual tradition of Tibet that predates Buddhism in the Land of the Snows. Bon has been depicted by many Tibetan Buddhist teachers and their Western converts as the most primitive of religions, a sect of devilish animists who, failing to defeat Buddhism with black magic, sought instead to plagiarize and embellish its canon, grafting Buddhist ideas onto its own rituals. Most venal and unforgivable to many Buddhists is the Bonpos' (those who practice Bon) claim that their tradition predates the lineages of Shakyamuni Buddha by several thousand years and represents the teachings of the enlightened Persian prince Shenrab Miwoche. More » -
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The Country of Dreams and Dust
Russell Leong's The Country of Dreams and Dust is an outstanding book of contemporary American poetry. It is also, without question, a "Buddhist" book. The poems themselves are not formally or, for the most part, even in spirit Buddhist, but the humanistic and inclusive tradition of Buddhism clearly stands behind them all, giving them a context, a luminous complexity, and perhaps, finally, a moral authority that is lacking in most twentieth-century Western poetry. The poet's new-found Buddhist understanding makes this book a single work of art rather than merely a volume of "selected poems." Marked by sparkling imagery, the poems are consistently delivered in the phrasing and the rhythm of the spoken language of contemporary urban America. To read them aloud is to discover what a musical language that can be. More »
