Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly Winter 2021

RALPH H. CRAIG III is a PhD candidate in religious studies at Stanford University. His research into South Asian Buddhism examines ritual studies, Buddhist literature and history, and comparative religions. He has studied Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism for more than twenty years; his book-in-progress, Wildest Dreams, is a religious biography of Tina Turner, one of the best-known faces of that tradition. PEMA KHANDRO is a teacher and scholar of Buddhist philosophy, as well as a lineage holder in the Nyingma and Kagyu traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. She founded the nonprofit organization Ngakpa International and its three projects, the Buddhist Studies Institute, Dakini Mountain, and the Yogic Medicine Institute. She is completing a doctorate specializing in Tibetan Buddhism at the University of Virginia. CHENXING HAN is the author of Be the Refuge: Raising the…

MOST MORNINGS, I sit with a cup of coffee and read a portion of a Buddhist sutra before doing my practice. The first two I ever read this way were the Lotus Sutra and the Diamond Sutra, both of which are chock full of profound doctrine and vivid, engaging narrative storytelling. Undoubtedly, much of this narrative material—which may seem over-the-top or far-fetched, with characters that at times appear superhuman—falls into the genre of hagiography. As Buddhists in the modern world, we should examine how we relate to that. Hagiography means different things, depending on the context. In its primary, academic usage, a hagiography is a literary works that venerates the life of a holy being by giving an account of their life and deeds. For example, The Life of Milarepa,…

Sean Feit Oakes teaches at Spirit Rock, where he is also digital editor, and at East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland SEAN FEIT OAKES: First, to really understand what’s happening, get close to the feeling. This is the task the Buddha gave for the first noble truth: “dissatisfaction is to be understood.” Start with naming it: “doubt,” “wanting,” or whatever label feels like it gets to the heart of the emotion. Getting close to the feeling might reveal a story or view that is unconsciously held. If so, spell it out—“My obligations prevent me from deepening on the path,” or “Wealth is incompatible with liberation.” Whatever comes, feel any suffering or stress that’s there with compassion and understanding. Views like these are mostly learned from culture and are persistent, but they…

YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD this famous gong’an (Jpn., koan), based on an exchange between a monk and Chan master Zhaozhou: The monk asked, “Does a dog have buddhanature?” Zhaozhou responded, “Wu [No]!” It’s a puzzling exchange. All beings have buddhanature, so why did Zhaozhou say no? Why would the monk even ask such a question? Where is my buddhanature? Why is it that I cannot manifest it? The genius of the premodern Chan masters was in their realization that the existential wonderment underlying such questions could be leveraged as a method of practice. That practice is called huatou. THE MEANING There are two critical aspects of huatou practice. The first can be found in the meaning of the word itself. Huatou (pronounced: huatow) literally means the source (tou) of spoken words…

Take the uncertainty of not knowing where you come from at birth and where you will go after death and transfer it to [Zhaozhou’s] word “no,” so this mind of birth and death is incapacitated. If this entangled mind is incapacitated, then the mind that is uncertain about birth and death can be extinguished. Thoroughly fuse yourself with this earnestness to extinguish it and inability to do so. When causes and conditions arrive, suddenly—pah!—you will be able to resolve what the scriptures call the extinguishing of the mind of birth and death, the halting of the unwholesome mind, the cutting down of the dense forest of the mind, the washing away of the defiled and turbid mind. …When discriminations do not arise, vast luminosity becomes self-evident—such is the principle…. Rely…

THERE ARE TIMES when we have to make a choice, either to change a situation—put up a boundary, build walls, create an exit, whatever it might take to no longer be in that hardship—or to endure it. Those times, when our agency is still so available and when we can change our circumstances, are for another day’s writing. This is about the other times, the times when we must endure the hardships, when we don’t have the choice or opportunity or freedom to change how things are. This is for when the only thing to do is work with our own minds. This is for when we cannot get out. We should know that it happens like this in a life; things get hard, and then they get harder, and…