Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2022 i Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly

Legend has it that when Avalokiteshvara, who had vowed to save all beings from samsara, reached out to everyone who needed help at once, her two arms shattered from the strain. Amitabha, seeing Avalokiteshvara’s plight, then provided her with a thousand arms to fulfill her vow. This issue’s cover captures a frame from the short film Choros; for a moment, we glimpse Terah Maher, the film’s subject, as a modern, thousandarmed bodhisattva. The film is the work of Michael Langan (pictured above), an experimental film director who frequently explores the manipulation of time.…

MYOKEI CAINE-BARRETT: As a Nichiren Buddhist, I rely on the teachings of the Buddha in the Lotus Sutra and also those of Nichiren Shonin, who rejected the distinction between buddhas and human beings. In “On Attaining Buddhahood,” he wrote, “When deluded, one is called an ordinary being; but when awakened, one is called a buddha. This is similar to a tarnished mirror that will shine like a jewel when polished. …Arouse deep faith and diligently polish your mirror day and night. How should you polish it? Only by chanting Namu-Myoho-Renge-Kyo.” The ten realms (hell and the realms of hungry ghosts, animals, asura, humans, heavenly beings, sravakas, pratyakebuddhas, bodhisattvas, and buddhas) are mutually possessed. That means that when one is in hell, the other nine realms are also present and can be…

SILA PARAMITA is the paramita of ethical conduct, of purification, of moral discipline. It is cleaning up your act, straightening out your behavior, so you can practice effectively. In the Judeo–Christian tradition, moral discipline is obedience to a God who requires you to be good and not bad and rewards and punishes accordingly. This idea, without humane interpretation, can create a feeling of coercion leading to guilt and all sorts of moral confusion, including attraction to the forbidden, and immorality perpetrated as rebellion. In contrast, sila paramita recognizes moral discipline as, on one hand, the goal of practice—to so harmonize with awakened reality that your conduct is naturally beautiful and compassionate—and, on the other hand, a practical necessity for going on with practice, because wrong conduct unsettles the mind and…

THOUGH WE MAY have the loftiest of goals, they will come to naught if we have no way of reaching them. We may sincerely wish to help others, to provide what is best for them, to lead all beings from suffering, and so forth, but we cannot accomplish these aims without a means, a path, to do so. When the Buddha explained the four noble truths in his first discourse, he ended by saying that to accomplish the end of suffering—for ourselves as well as others—we must follow the path (marga) that he had just laid out. The term he used for following and cultivating the path was bhavana, which literally means “to grow, to nourish, to develop,” just as a gardener does her vegetables and flowers. Such “cultivation” applies…

BUDDHADASA BHIKKHU (1906–1993), one of Thailand’s most revered monks of the twentieth century, wants us all to be problem solvers. In an edited series of his lectures recently published as Seeing with the Eye of Dhamma: The Comprehensive Teaching of Buddha dasa Bhikkhu (Shambhala), translated by Dhammavidu Bhikkhu and Santikaro Upasaka, he exposes the absurdity of thinking the solutions to suffering offered by the Buddha are “too goody-good,” too beyond our reach. Teaching that a life of mental cultivation is in fact for everyone, he delves into the training of the senses, treating them as the building blocks of the path that leads to ultimate “coolness,” or nibbana. “Life isn’t hot and anxious when we live rightly,” he says. And how do we know if we are living correctly? “Any…

JAN WILLIS is Professor of Religion Emerita at Wesleyan University as well as a visiting professor at Agnes Scott College. She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland, and the U.S. for five decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism almost as long. Her work has explored meditation, hagiography, women and Buddhism, and Buddhism and race; her most recent book is Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra. EJO MCMULLEN moved to Japan in his late teens and stayed into his twenties, teaching secondary school and eventually receiving ordination and training at Daijoji Monastery in Kanazawa. He is the abbot of Buddha Eye Temple in Eugene, Oregon, where he has served since its founding in 2004, and is also secretary of the Soto Zen Buddhism North America Office in Los Angeles.…

FROM THE TIME Siddhartha Gautama was a young child, he burned with the essential questions: What is the meaning of life? Who am I? What is everything about? As he grew up, his contemplation of these matters became all-consuming. As we know, in adulthood he renounced the life of ease and power he’d been born into and devoted himself to seeking wisdom. He received instruction in an array of spiritual traditions, from some of the most illustrious philosophers and meditation teachers of the time. A profoundly gifted student, he swiftly completed these various paths, and in some cases, he exceeded the teachers themselves. None of it, however, provided the kind of answers he was longing for. Siddhartha arrived at the conclusion that learning about meditation, no matter how sophisticated the…

WHEN I FIRST took up Buddhist practice, I didn’t know anything about the paramitas—the transcendences, the crossingsover, the perfections, whatever we want to call them. I didn’t know much about any of it, honestly, but I knew for sure that I wanted to transcend something. I wanted to cross over to some other side. Not that it was so bad where I was; it wasn’t. But spiritual practice held the promise of ending up someplace, well, perfect. I imagined that, standing on the other shore and looking back on where I’d started, I’d grin at how small my world had been, how little I’d really seen. In this issue, we look at six paramitas: generosity, moral discipline, endurance, effort, meditation, and wisdom—the list most often associated with the Mahayana path.…

WHEN I STARTED on the path of Buddhist practice, I was mainly interested in meditation. To my novice ears, other teachings sounded less relevant or interesting. I vaguely remember hearing in a dharma talk that the Buddha had emphasized the practice of generosity for lay folks such as myself. In the trilogy of meritorious deeds (puñña), he first and foremost taught generosity, or dana, which in Pali connotes both the act of giving and what is given. Only after the practitioner appreciated this teaching did the Buddha proceed to teach ethics (sila) and mental cultivation (bhavana); it was the latter I was jumping into, head (not heart) first. My first response to dana was skepticism. Wouldn’t any leader of a monastic order espouse generosity, if for no other purpose than…

Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism Columbia University Press, 2021 320 pages; $35 WHAT DOES IT MEAN to have a mind? What does it mean to have experiences? These sorts of questions have preoccupied Buddhist philosophers for millennia, and the answers have been the subject of centuries-long debates across traditions. But these sorts of debates are more than just philosophical exercises. Making sense of how and why we experience the world in the ways that we do is also a critical part of practice on the Buddhist path. Our minds shape our experiences. When I am in an irritated or agitated state of mind, I might experience the music coming from my neighbor’s apartment as intrusive and annoying. But when I am in a calm and relaxed state…

CALIFORNIA DHARMA CENTER 5059 Newport Ave, Suite 303, San Diego, CA 92107. (619) 797-5483, www.dharmacenter.com • Dharma Center of Trikaya Buddhism in San Diego exists to share the teachings of meditation and mindfulness and to assist in the Awakening of those who wish to free themselves of suffering. Our meditation hall and community of members provides a sanctuary where students at all levels can deepen and refine their connection to Light. DHARMA REALM BUDDHIST UNIVERSITY 4951 Bodhi Way, Ukiah, CA 95482. (707) 621-7000, info@drbu.edu, www.drbu.edu • Dharma Realm Buddhist University (DRBU) is an accredited university in northern California dedicated to liberal education in the broad Buddhist tradition. DZOKDEN 3436 Divisadero St, San Francisco, CA 94123. (415) 810-6168, office@dzokden.org, dzokden.org • Online and in-person classes on Kalachakra, Jonang Ngondro, Rimé philosophy,…