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A Match to the Heart
In August 1991, the writer Gretel Ehrlich was struck by lightning, flung across a remote mountain road on her ranch in Wyoming, and left for dead. She had been struck before—had even written about being struck before—but this time it was a fatal blow, and even when she was nominally brought back to life, she felt as if she were a posthumous soul of sorts, passing in and out of consciousness like a refugee from the afterworld. Writing from that penumbral state—the bardo state of Tibetan Buddhism—she has produced a wry and haunting, dreamlike book about what it means to have one's heart stop, and what exactly is this self that's here today and gone tomorrow. More » -
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Rugs and Ritual in Tibetan Buddhism
In the visual language of Tibetan Buddhism, fearsome images are often metaphors for transformation. A lucid reading of a few such images was provided in “Rugs and Ritual in Tibetan Buddhism,” a small but revelatory exhibition of Tibetan ritual art organized by John Guy, curator of south and southeast asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. At the center of the show, which ran through June of this year, was a group of unusual 19th-century Tibetan carpets portraying flayed animals and people, severed heads, and demonic figures. Accompanying them was a modest grouping of sculptures, ritual implements, and paintings. All of the objects were once used by Vajrayana Buddhist practitioners in rituals associated with the worship of wrathful protective deities. More » -
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Crazy Wisdom
In 1983, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the controversial lama who introduced Tibetan Buddhism to North America in the tumultuous early 1970s, asked one of his students, the director Johanna Demetrakas, to make a “Shambhala film.” Demetrakas, who had studied with Trungpa Rinpoche since 1971 and was familiar with his vision of an enlightened society based on the secular spiritual teachings later outlined in his book Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, agreed to make the movie, although she had no idea what Rinpoche meant by a “Shambhala film.” In a recent interview, she said, “It was a command. And then he died.” That is, Demetrakas failed to fulfill her duty. Until now. More » -
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BuddhaFest 2011
Good news for those looking for signs of enlightenment in our nation’s capital. From June 16 to 19, the second annual BuddhaFest took place right outside Washington, D.C., at the Artisphere’s Spectrum Theatre in Rosslyn, Virginia. Featuring Buddhist films, teachings, and meditation, BuddhaFest was organized by Eric Forbis and Gabriel Riera, two members of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW). (Tricycle cosponsored the festival.) “We want to serve the dharma by telling stories,” says Riera. “Films are a really good way of spreading the dharma.” More » -
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Finding True Love
The Novice: A Story of True Love Thich Nhat Hanh HarperOne, September 2011 160 pp.; $23.99 cloth More » -
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Stones of the Dalai Lama
In this North American road novel, an introspective "perfessor" and his lubricious sidekick take off into the Wild Blue Yonder—except that the Official Road Novel Vehicle, a '58 GMC pickup, breaks down just before the book's opening paragraph, and the duo end up in Tibet, exploring the universe according to the Vajrayana—the school of Buddhism known as the Diamond Vehicle. At its best, this novel transports us far beyond any ordinary Yonder, revealing against exotic backdrops the multifaceted illusion/realities that spin within each human mind. At its worst, it reads like Lobsang Rampa (Tibetan Buddhism's dubious popularizer) narrated by Howard Stern. More »
