Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2023 i Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly

THE THREE TREASURES are the foundation of Buddhism: Buddha, the teacher; dharma, the teaching; sangha, the community. Taking refuge in the Three Treasures is the beginning, and the end, of the Buddhist path. The beginning, because from the first you’ll depend on them to guide your way; and the end, because your spiritual transformation will bring you to appreciation of and identification with the Three Treasures at their most profound level. The Three Treasures balance and support one another. Without the sangha there is no companionship, no encouragement, no support, and nothing to uphold the dharma; without the dharma there is no way of life and no understanding of life to hold the sangha together; and without the Buddha, who teaches the dharma and leads the sangha, there is no…

Buddhadharma: Tell us about Our Beloved Teachers. Vince Fakhoury Horn: Our Beloved Teachers is a community podcast series meant to explore the true nature of the teacher student relationship while preserving the oral history of Buddhism in the digital era. Each recording focuses on a student’s intimate memories and reflections of one of their dearly departed dharma teachers. We introduced the constraint of only sharing about teachers who have already passed away so that people can open up more fully about their recollections without as much concern or fear about how their teachers may have reacted, were they alive, and after hearing these reflections. Teachers are humans too! Where did the inspiration for this project come from? When I first began to get serious about Buddhist practice, I was enthralled…

Buddhadharma: Newar Buddhism is a lesser-known tradition. What is it, and who practices it? Samuel M. Grimes: Generally speaking, Newars are the indigenous ethnic group of Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley. Newar Buddhists practice the only form of Mahayana in which all ritual and liturgy is in Sanskrit. They preserve a version of Buddhism that some have labeled “Indian” since they are the ones who still practice the form of the religion that once existed in today’s India. Are there other factors that notably differentiate Newar Buddhism from other Mahayana traditions? Newar society is very stratified according to caste status, and Newar Buddhism is no exception. Newar Buddhism is the only form of the religion with specifically Buddhist castes. No one knows exactly when these castes were codified (vajracaryas and sakyas are…

Concentrate particularly on Guru Yoga, the entrance-way for blessings, and make it the very foundation of your practice. That is the essential point. —Adzom Drukpa in Lamplight On Your Path TEACHING is the heart of all three jewels—buddha, dharma, and sangha. Buddha teaches, the dharma is the teaching itself, and those to whom it is taught are sangha. Every part of this interaction involves relationship, most especially between teachers and students. The teachings take us to a reality that is vast as space and as intimate as our own heart. Our relationship with a teacher helps us access both. I write about this as someone extremely fortunate in my relationships with Buddhist teachers. I have had, and still have, close, lasting relationships with renowned Geluk, Nyingma, and Bon teachers from…

WHEN YOU MEET your future spouse at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas, your relationship and spiritual journeys are intertwined right from the start. Twenty years later, this remains our path, paved choice by choice. As friends, sangha, partners, and teacher-peers, we have learned that there is no “happily ever after” in samsara. We experience this as empowering, a consistent inspiration to follow the Buddha’s teachings to genuine happiness within, rather than conduct a fruitless search for it out there somewhere. The Vajrayana approach of discerning the teacher beneath the surface of all experience has accompanied us throughout. A vast and intricate topic, we find that Atisha, the Indian master seminal to Buddhism’s reintroduction to Tibet, gets to the crux of it when he describes the…

IN MARCH 1993, a group of twenty-two Western Buddhist teachers representing different lineages met with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, to discuss the transmission and adaptation of Buddhism to the West. One of their central topics was ethical teacher conduct. Participants reflected on differences between seeing the teacher as a living buddha and as a human spiritual friend, hierarchical and democratic models of authority, and Tibetan monastic versus American lay teacher trainings. This conversation was prompted by several high-profile cases of sexual abuse and ethical misconduct by Asian and American teachers over the years. In 1983, for instance, married Japanese Zen teacher Maezumi Roshi, founder of the Los Angeles Zen Center, apologized for having affairs with several female students and entered treatment for alcoholism. In 1989, it…

THE GURU IN MY MIND & HEART HUN LYE If there is anyone whom I naturally think of when I cultivate guru yoga or read about devotion to the guru as the path, I think of two teachers. When I first met Khenchen Konchog Gyaltshen Rinpoche more than thirty years ago, he said to me, “I don’t have students or disciples; these are my dharma friends and members of the center.” A reluctant teacher for a reluctant disciple, I thought. About six years later, Rinpoche had me deliver a letter to the head of our line age, His Holiness Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche. Although I don’t know if the letter had anything to do with me, that meeting turned out to be the start of my discipleship under His Holiness.…

THE FRENCH-BORN writer and photographer Matthieu Ricard earned a PhD in molecular genetics in 1972, and then walked away from his career to become a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan tradition. Today, Ricard is perhaps best known for his collaborations with neuroscientists studying the effects of meditation on the brain, and the results of some of these studies, which included him as a subject, have led to him being labeled as “the happiest person in the world.” Ricard’s memoir, Notebooks of a Wandering Monk (MIT Press), recently translated into English by Jesse Browner, beautifully illustrates the unconventional path that Ricard followed as a traveler in India, as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in France, and as a world-renowned Buddhist monk. The book begins with the author’s first meeting at…

WHEN I WAS TWENTY years old, in 1985, on a steamy summer afternoon, I visited a Buddhist center—a farmhouse to be more accurate—in rural Wisconsin. I stood waiting in the living room to see the lama, who also happened to be a professor. A lama-professor, I thought, must have an answer to my question. That question had dawned in my mind one evening while curled up in the stacks of the UW library, reading Robert Aiken’s Taking the Path of Zen. My eyes froze on one sentence: “In true Zen practice, our eyebrows are entangled with those of our ancestral teachers.” Our ancestral teachers? My eyebrows were at that moment entangled with so many other things, primarily with my college studies, boy problems, and books. But not with ancestral teachers.…

FOR A LONG TIME, I thought of samaya as the intimate bond of care in which students agree to entrust themselves entirely to a teacher, and the teacher agrees to act entirely in ways that benefit the student. This understanding did not come primarily from what is taught during and after empowerments, but from how I heard the term used in more vernacular Tibetan. The idea that two individuals could make this sort of commitment to one another seemed beautiful and inspiring to me. Then, some years ago, as I began serving as an ally to survivors of abuse by Vajrayana teachers and hearing their stories, it became clear that the notion of samaya has been one of the principal mechanisms of coercion in these cases of abuse. All the…

CHRIS JAY is a Senior Instructor with Siddhartha’s Intent, a worldwide network of Buddhist practitioners studying and practicing under the guidance of Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. CHRIS JAY: Well, I can certainly understand the experience that leads to your question. Once, Orgyen Topgyal Rinpoche commented to Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche that if Westerners continue chanting in Tibetan, the dharma will be dead in fifty years. If you want to chant in Tibetan, he said, then learn Tibetan well enough so you can read and converse in the language. There is something mind-numbing, isn’t there, about hours of chanting in a language that we don’t know. How many of us, myself included, have developed the ability to chant along while thinking about something else entirely? The purpose of chanting in a group is to…

What’s crucial is the willingness to surrender. That doesn’t have to be through a teacher, but it needs to happen somehow in the context of human relationships. There’s a saying, “It’s easy to be enlightened in a cave.” When our karmic triggers are not getting pushed, we can feel pretty enlightened a lot of the time, but as soon as we encounter another human being, we start running into our issues. So one of the most useful things about being in a formal relationship with a teacher is that they can call us on those triggers; they point out the patterns and agendas we carry and invite us to look at the ways we meet the world. We give a teacher permission to see us clearly and tell us what…