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shakyamuni buddha: a life retold
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    Rolling the Wheel Paid Member

    By Nikkyo Niwano
    This episode of the life of Shakyamuni Buddha, as retold by Nikkyo Niwano, starts in Bodh-gaya following the Buddha's enlightenment under the Bodhi tree. The decision to turn the dharma wheel initiates a teaching mission that lasted over forty years and took the Great Sage back and forth across the breadth of northern India. More »
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    Wake Up, Episode Five Paid Member

    By Jack Kerouac
    In the deer park Isipatana, sat the five mendicant ascetics with whom he'd spent those futile six years in the Forest of Mortification. They saw him coming, slowly, his eyes cast down with circumspection and modesty a plough's length along the ground as if he was ploughing and planting the Ambrosial crop of the law as he went. They scoffed. "There comes Gotama who broke his first vow by giving up ascetic practices and mortification. Don't rise in salutation, give him an offhand greeting, don't offer him the customary refreshments when he comes." More »
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    Wake Up Paid Member

    By Jack Kerouac
    In this, the third of nine installments of Jack Kerouac's previously unpublished life of the Buddha, we pick up the story after Prince Siddhartha has left his father's palace, adopted the homeless life, and taken a seat under the bodhi tree, vowing not to rise from the spot "until, freed from clinging, my mind attains deliverance from all sorrow." The complete manuscript of Wake Up will appear in a volume entitled Some of the Dharma, due out from Viking Penguin in 1995. Note: All of Kerouac's original spellings and usage have been retained. More »
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    The Austerities of the Bodhisattva Paid Member

    By Nikkyo Niwano
    THE PRINCE WHO WAS to become the historical Buddha has generally been referred to as the Bodhisattva when spoken of during the period of quest and religious disciplines following his great renunciation and up until his enlightenment. A bodhisattva has been described as one who "seeks upward for bodhi [wisdom]" and "teaches downward to all beings," that is, one who on the one hand perfects himself by aiming at the attainment of enlightenment, but on the other hand also descends to the level of the unenlightened in order to save them. (In the simplest Mahayana Buddhist terms, a bodhisattva is one who devotes himself to attaining enlightenment not only for himself but for all sentient beings.) More »
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    Wake Up Paid Member

    By Jack Kerouac
    The Buddha, studying the person and then teaching the law, perceived that the King and his proud consort were men who had wealth and power but had come to see him because of a considerable doubt that it could do them any good in the end. Truly enlightened, he showed them that there was no individual in the matter of either wealth or poverty, of either enlightenment or ignorance, nay, in either being alive or being dead. He taught them that a man is but a heap of composites. "After a stronghold has been made of the bones, it is covered with flesh and blood, and there dwell in it old age and death, pride and deceit. "Look at this dressed up lump, covered with wounds, joined together, sickly, full of many a scheme, but which has no strength, no hold. More »
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    Wake Up, Episode Two Paid Member

    By Jack Kerouac
    In the first installment of Jack Kerouac's previously unpublished life of the Buddha (Vol. I/, No.4), we learned of Siddhartha's protected upbringing within the palace walls, his marriage at age sixteen to Yasodhara, and the birth of his son, Rahula. We also learned that at the age of twenty-nine, after encountering suffering in the form of old age, sickness, and death, he bid farewell to his wife and son, saddled his horse in the middle of the night, and left the palace in pursuit of a spiritual life. In this, the second of nine episodes to be published in Tricycle, we pick up the story after the young prince has shorn his hair, traded his clothes for those of a beggar, and vowed homelessness. The full manuscript will be published in Some of the Dharma by Viking Penguin in 1995. Note: All of Kerouac's original spellings and usage have been retained. More »