Showing posts with label Buddhism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buddhism. Show all posts

Life is Tough: Six Ways to Deal With It - The March 2013 Shambhala Sun magazine

Featuring Norman Fischer on six ancient Buddhist slogans that can help transform life's difficulties into awakening and benefit, tales of trauma and transformation from Buddhist practitioners, and a profile of three psychotherapists who combine Western psychology and Buddhism into a powerful path to love and fulfillment.

Plus: a survey of the world of Buddhist-inspired popular music, Rick Bass on friendship and eco-warriorship, and much more.

feature section: life is tough / here's how to deal with it

• Life is Tough: Six Ways to Deal With It

An ancient set of Buddhist slogans offers us six powerful techniques to transform life’s difficulties into awakening and benefit. Zen teacher Norman Fischer guides us through them.

• Mind Training for Today

Norman Fischer on why 52 sayings formulated almost a thousand years ago are more relevant than ever.

• When Ego Meets Non-Ego

Andrea Miller talks to Tara Brach, John Welwood, and Barry Magid, three psychotherapists who are combining Western psychology and Buddhism into a powerful path to love and fulfillment.

• Tales of Trauma and Transformation

Inspiring stories and helpful methods. Preview these via the links below.

• Ruth Ozeki: Nothing is Wasted • Josh Korda: Every Day a Reprieve • Margaret Roach: The Gift of Connection • John Tarrant: You Don't Have to Know

more features

• Ruin, Beasties, & Constant Craving

Jazz, metal, rap, and beyond: Rod Meade Sperry reports on the intersection of Buddhism and popular music. Featuring Tina Turner, Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, Born I Music , and more fascinating dharma-music innovators.

• The Best Place 

Rick Bass showed his friend Scott the best places, the secret places, of Montana’s remote Yaak Valley. Together, they fought to protect the wilderness and dreamed of a new Atlantis in the mountains.

• Spirit and The Boy

Mother to one, sister to the other—award-winning novelist Karen Connelly on three interwoven lives and the call she will always accept.


• The Supreme Thought 

The intention to benefit all sentient beings is the best of all thoughts, says Sakyong Mipham. Dedicating ourselves to others, we become bodhisattvas.
RELATED SHAMBHALA SUN SPOTLIGHT:

• Sakyong Mipham: His best from the Shambhala Sun

• This Whole World is a Poem

This oriole, this friend, this daughter, this fox—Michael Sowder on all the poems that are just waiting for us to write them down.

• The Most Valuable Cups in the World

Leanora McLellan’s grandma handed down many skills and four crazy cups that have no price.

• What's Your Verdict?

Recognizing the judgments we all pass on ourselves, says Bonnie Friedman, is the first step to freedom.

• Review: "Loving-Kindness for Your Body"

Diana Winston reviews May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga and Changing My Mind, by Cyndi Lee.

 • Books in Brief

Andrea Miller reviews new books by Marc Lesser, Jeffrey K. Mann, Rachel Neumann, Zachiah Murray, and more.

• About a Poem: Roger Housden on Ellen Bass' "If You Knew"


Shambhala Sun, March 2013, Volume Twenty One, Number 4. On the cover: Inset #1 by Frank Yang, #2 by Randy Beacham

 

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The November 2012 Shambhala Sun magazine

Featuring Pema Chödrön on the compassionate life of the bodhisattva-warrior; three woman teachers changing Buddhism; Norman Fischer on how to live in our topsy-turvy world; three steps to creative power; a Jewish Buddhist in Germany, and more.
Also inside: "Jolly Good" — a never-before-published piece by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche on the Shambhala teachings.

this issue's editorial:
• We Can Be Heroes

By Shambhala Sun Associate Editor Rod Meade Sperry


feature section: pema chödrön / "a greater happiness"

• A Greater Happiness

We've all got the potential to awaken and help others in meaningful ways, big and small. Pema Chödrön shows us how we can let go of self-centered worries and become a bodhisattva-warrior. It's the greatest happiness of all.

• You Can Do It!

Make your vow to help others real with this tonglen meditation teaching from Pema Chödrön.


• Thank You, Pema

Best-selling author Margaret Wheatley on her friend and teacher.




RELATED SHAMBHALA SUN SPOTLIGHT:• Pema Chödrön

• Enter... the Bodhisattva

David Loy says the bodhisattva ideal — updated for modern times — is what the world needs now.


more features

• Feminine Principal

Andrea Miller profiles Trudy Goodman, Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara and Lama Palden Drolma, three women teachers who are changing the face of Buddhism. (You'll also find a teaching from each inside the magazine.)

RELATED SHAMBHALA SUN SPOTLIGHT:• Women and Gender Politics in Buddhism

• The Great Perfection of Creativity 

Geshe Tenzin Wangyal teaches us how to unleash powerful creative energy we can use anywhere from the office to the artist's studio.




• Don't Go There 

As a Jew and a Briton, Henry Shukman had avoided all things German. But as a Buddhist, he knew he had to when he was asked to teach at a zendo in the Black Forest. Together, he and his students faced the unfaceable.

RELATED SHAMBHALA SUN SPOTLIGHT:• Buddhism and Judaism

• The Vagabond Queen of Craigslist 

Hopscotching through Brooklyn apartments, Bonnie Friedman discovers the delight in nonattachment.



PLUS: we continue our year-long celebration of the Shambhala Sun's founder, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, with a series of never-before-published teachings. In this issue: Rinpoche on the Shambhala teachings.

RELATED SHAMBHALA SUN SPOTLIGHT:• The Teachings of Chögyam Trungpa

other voices

 

• An ICU for the Soul 

When a friend is dealt a heavy emotional blow, Pico Iyer suggests to her that silence and stillness might be the best medicine. Sometimes, it seems, you've got to retreat before you can move forward.

RELATED SHAMBHALA SUN SPOTLIGHT:• Pico Iyer in the Shambhala Sun

• Something to Believe In

While belief can be just dogma or preconception, it can also be a guiding polestar that gives us a sense of direction. Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel on the power of belief to move us out of a small, self-focused world and into a bigger way of being.

• Is This Worth It?

Sara Eckel discovers that volunteering isn't about getting back more than you give. It's just about giving.


• Topsy-Turvy World

The strength of mind that comes from meditation, says Norman Fischer, can help us end the denial that keeps a world of problems spinning.


departments

• No-Self 2.0

Andrew Olendzki reviews The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity by Bruce Hood.



• Books in Brief

Andrea Miller reviews books by Bhante Gunaratana, Thich Nhat Hanh, Lew Welch, and more.


• About a Poem: Carole Glasser Langille on Czeslaw Milosz's "Love"

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:

The Mindful Society: Dispatches from the Mindful Revolution, from the editors of MINDFUL.

Source here


Shambhala Sun, November 2012, Volume Twenty One, Number 2.

To order a trial subscription to the Shambhala Sun, click here.

ON THE COVER: Bhikshuni Pema Chödrön. Photo by Robin Holland.
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Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly - spring 2011

Thanks to Gene Smith

Monday, February 7, 2011 at 12:25PM
Gene Smith dedicated his life to preserving Tibet’s literary heritage, and played a key role in its survival. In December he passed away, at the age of 74. Janet Gyatso remembers the man and his historic contribution.
Gene Smith was an academic maverick and preeminent pioneer of Tibetan Studies who singlehandedly preserved for posterity the vast heritage of Tibet’s texts on philosophy, history, and culture. For decades, he had been recognized by scholars around the world as the de facto dean of Tibetan Studies and held in the highest regard due to his extraordinary accomplishments in protecting and sharing Tibet’s imperiled literary treasures and his dedication to making Tibetan literature universally accessible. Smith had extensive knowledge of Tibetan religious history, and provided generous assistance to scholars worldwide for more than forty years.
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Lighten Up

Monday, February 7, 2011 at 11:45AM
By Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
In traditional Buddhist countries, people are quite realistic and laid back concerning dharma practice. Although they have deep faith and devotion, they understand that we are all flawed human beings. So they tend to be less critical both of themselves and others.
Western students, on the other hand, often try to become the perfect practitioner, to transform themselves into a Japanese or Tibetan, assuming not only the outer etiquette, but the inner attitudes of one’s adopted dharma country. Usually, however, this approach merely accentuates one’s low self-esteem and lack of confidence. To walk the path with confidence, we need to accept and befriend ourselves, to feel at ease in our own skin.
Most Buddhist teachers have encountered the tendency of Western practitioners to take themselves and the dharma very seriously. Perhaps it is a leftover from the students’ traditional religious backgrounds, but there is sometimes a humorless quality to the intensity and focus on achievement. Solemnity and earnestness often prevail in Western dharma circles.
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Inside Art, with Kay Larson

Monday, February 7, 2011 at 11:44AM
Grain of Emptiness
An exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art
In its timely wisdom, the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan is asking interesting questions about the soft landing being achieved as the Buddha sets a gentle foot in Western culture. The traditional imprint of his teachings, as we know, is an emptiness (a footprint) given form by the stone that contains and defines it. Grain of Emptiness, the first exhibition of internationally renowned contemporary artists at a museum usually vibrating with brilliant thangkas, plays with that image. What is the form, what is the emptiness, in the transmission of the buddhadharma into the minds and lives of artists?
All but one of these five—Sanford Biggers, Theaster Gates, Atta Kim, Wolfgang Laib, and Charmion von Wiegand—say they don’t adhere to formal Buddhist practices. (Von Wiegand, the only one no longer alive, studied with a Tibetan teacher and did regard herself as a practicing Buddhist.) Yet most of them speak of a wordless affinity, a heartfelt longing—something “always believed in,” as black Chicago-born Theaster Gates says to writer Mary Jane Jacob in the catalogue. None of them uses traditional Buddhist art forms. All of them sense the subtle heart of emptiness in “the inner world of things,” to use Atta Kim’s phrase.
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The Worst Place in the World

Monday, February 7, 2011 at 11:41AM
By Roberta Werdinger
In May of 1995, I found myself standing with my father, a Polish Jew who had lost his entire birth family in the Holocaust, at the threshold of the worst place in the world. We had travelled to northern Austria, along with thousands of others, for the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, a place he knew only too well. A chartered bus had let us off in what once was a quarry. Prisoners—starving, brutalized, and freezing—had been made to carry rocks up this path, the very path we were walking. If they failed, they were made to run to the camp fence and summarily shot.
At the top of the quarry path, an old man wearing a prisoner’s uniform that was half a century old wept openly as prayers for the dead were recited in Hebrew. We looked into a barracks where Jewish prisoners had been crammed into bunk beds—two to a narrow mattress. We walked through an exhibit of Nazi camp records with lists of prisoners classified as Jewish, Gypsy, homosexual, criminal, or prisoner-of-war. We passed fresh flowers that had been placed on barbed wire as memorials to the dead.
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Ask the Teachers

Monday, February 7, 2011 at 11:39AM
Question: I am a Zen Buddhist practitioner, and I live many states away from the order with which I practice, so most of the time I practice alone, even though there is a large community of Tibetan Buddhists and teachers nearby. I feel an affinity with Zen Buddhism, and I wonder about that attachment. Am I missing something by not opening myself to the teachings of those where I live?
Narayan Liebenson Grady: I don’t think it’s a question of missing something, unless you feel it would be beneficial to have a community to practice with that’s geographically closer so you are not so alone. I see this more as an affinity based on one’s karma, and the inclination to practice in one tradition over another to be an alignment with a particular vocabulary, set of rituals, and atmosphere. Often it is our connection to a teacher that draws us into a particular tradition.
Your affinity with the Zen tradition may not be an attachment, but rather a family feeling that should be respected. When we go to certain centers we feel at home, and if this feeling is strong, it feels like our long lost home. This helps us find home within ourselves. When we go to other centers and traditions, we may appreciate and respect what we see happening there, but we may not feel as comfortable and at ease.
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Zazen That Amounts to Nothing  

Monday, February 7, 2011 at 11:36AM
True zazen is not for the sake of seeing positive results, says Kosho Uchiyama.
You can’t practice true zazen if your practice is for the sake of seeing positive results. There are many who say, “I once practiced zazen and felt clear-headed and I want to experience that feeling again,” or, “After my first Zen retreat, the landscape completely changed—everything sparkled. However, I’ve never experienced a similar feeling since then.”
True zazen is not about problems revolving around your little self. Whether you feel good or bad, you just sit, throwing out discriminating thoughts about the little self. That is the zazen of jijuuyuu zanmai, or “samadhi of the self,” taught by Zen master Dogen.
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Book Briefs

Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 1:47PM
The Caves of Dunhuang (Dunhuang Academy and London Editions 2010) by Fan Jinshi is a rare glimpse into one of the great artistic achievements of human history. With spectacular photographs that reveal the caves’ murals and sculptures in magnificent detail, this is a book to get lost in. The art and architecture of the Dunhuang caves, which were excavated by hand between the fourth and the fourteenth centuries, contains a dazzling array of styles and subject matter, from Daoist-inspired early Chan topics to multi-armed tantric deities dancing in sexual union. The author, a Chinese scholar who has been leading research at Dunhuang for decades, packs the book with short essays describing the history, architecture, sculpture, styles and content of the murals, and includes also a chapter on conservation and on the library cave, which was discovered sealed in 1900 and yielded tens of thousands of texts that changed the way we understand Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism.
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The Upside of Money Troubles

Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 1:39PM
Carolyn Rose Gimian reminds us that our difficulties with money are valuable opportunities for working with our mind and strengthening our practice.
Working with money is a challenging and somewhat inescapable practice. Do you have enough to live on? Do you need more to buy a new (fill in the blank)? Should you give some money to charity? We all grapple with such questions in everyday life, whether we’re living a frugal existence or a lavish one. Relating with money is also a powerful source of emotional upheavals. Money or lack thereof can quickly put you in touch with desire, aggression, envy, jealousy, anxiety and fear—and many other juicy feelings.
In the seventies, Chögyam Trungpa coined the phrase “Lords of Materialism” to describe the acquisitive attitude that rules the modern world. In a society like ours, where materialism is indeed often king, we may link our happiness to our ability to buy the things we want. If we can’t afford an iPad, we feel depressed. If we can buy the biggest HDTV in our apartment building, we feel proud. A struggling medical student dreams of what she’ll buy when she’s a successful doctor. If you’re already fairly affluent, you dream of what you’ll buy when you’re more successful. If you’re very successful, you worry about losing what you have. In that situation, friendly overtures make you suspicious that people want something from you. If someone asks you for a loan, or puts a hand out on the street, you may be sympathetic, but you’re just as likely to be put off. Your best friend gets a promotion. Secretly, you’re envious. Why wasn’t it you? In essence, these are all money problems.
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Practicing Financial Awareness

Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 1:33PM
Laura Jomon Martin suggests ways to identify our habitual patterns and attitudes around money and to foster a more generous outlook.
There is neither virtue in what is meager; nor evil in what is bountiful. Regardless of wealth or poverty, when the mind of greed arises people lose their beautiful minds. The buddha mind is the mind that knows what is sufficient.
—Eihei Dogen
Lay Buddhist practice affords us a wide latitude in which to practice and learn what is sufficient. In householder life, we can cut our expenses to the bone and throw all our belongings in a river, or we can live in some other extreme, spending money for things and experiences that cause more problems in our lives or the lives of others. Regardless of how we express our lives financially, observing our behavior with money reveals how we approach everything—shining a light on our assumptions, habits, relationships.
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Happiness in Every Breath

Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 1:31PM
When we stop feeding our cravings, says Thich Nhat Hanh, we discover that we already have everything we need to be happy.
The human mind is always searching for possessions and never feels fulfilled. This causes impure actions ever to increase. Bodhisattvas, however, always remember the principle of having few desires. They live a simple life in peace in order to practice the Way and consider the realization of perfect understanding as their only career.
                                       —The Sutra on the Eight Realizations of the Great Beings
The Buddha said that craving is like holding a torch against the wind; the fire will burn you. When someone is thirsty and drinks only salty water, the more he drinks, the thirstier he becomes. If we run after money, for example, we think that a certain amount of money will make us happy. But once we have that amount, it’s not enough; we think we need more. There are people who have a lot of money, but they are not happy at all. The Buddha said that the object of our craving is like a bone without flesh. A dog can chew and chew on that bone and never feel satisfied.
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