Tricycle | Awake in the World

To celebrate our fifth anniversary, we have chosen to focus on a controversial issue that claims both a complex history and a contemporary revival: Buddhism and psychedelics. Dozens of controversies surround the subject of psychedelics. Some involve legal and medical issues; others, issues of empiricism and religion. Beyond controversy, however, is the historical relationship between Buddhism and Psychedelics (See Rick Fields’ “The High History of Buddhism,” p. 45). For the new Buddhists of the 1960s and 1970s it was the rare bird indeed who came through the dharma gates totally independent of “mind-expanding drugs.” Exceptions exist, but with such infrequency that they affirm the rule, and, according to Jack Kornfield (see p. 34), that includes those Western teachers who are now middle-aged. But the inflated idealism of a mass spiritual awakening through psychedelics faded fast.