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The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on Effective Altruism, Engaged Buddhism, and How to Build a Better World
by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei
Shambhala Publications, December 2023, 264 pp., $21.95, paper

The Buddhist and the Ethicist is the culmination of a five-year conversation between Peter Singer, a utilitarian ethicist and animal liberation advocate, and Shih Chao-Hwei, an engaged Buddhist nun, academic, and activist who champions gender equality and LGBTQ rights. Ethics is active—something to be done rather than a fixed opinion—and in this fascinating book, Singer and Chao-Hwei explore dynamic topics, including animal welfare, capital punishment, gender equality, and the foundations of both Buddhism and ethics.

The Lost Art of Silence: Reconnecting to the Power and Beauty of Quiet
by Sarah Anderson
Shambhala Publications, December 2023, 304 pp., $21.95, paper

Sarah Anderson, a painter and writer who opened the famed Travel Bookshop in London’s Notting Hill in 1979, provides a thorough meditation on silence: its essentialness and elusiveness, as well as the very human impulse to fill our worlds with “vacuous sound.” The book includes sections on religion and spirituality, the arts, and “darker” silence realms like war and prison. Woven through are histories and anecdotes from great thinkers, artists, contemplatives, and other silence enthusiasts who can inspire our own quest to find silence in the unlikeliest of places.

Buddhism and Loss: Navigating Grief, Adversity and Change
by Diane Esguerra
Mud Pie Books, 2023, 114 pp., $8.95, paper

The first noble truth reminds us that life contains suffering, and Diane Esguerra—a psychotherapist and Soka Gakkai practitioner—very skillfully writes about the many different ways loss comes into our lives, from the deaths of those closest to us, to our youth, to the funds in our bank account. Through Buddhist wisdom and contemporary case studies, Esguerra demonstrates how practice can help us through the losses we’ll inevitably experience, and how mindfully navigating loss can help us better appreciate all aspects of the human experience.

Scholar’s Corner

Buddhist Masculinities
edited by Mega Bryson and Kevin Buckelew
Columbia University Press, September 2023, 352 pp., $35.00, paper

Buddhist literature is full of idealized sacred and mundane physical perfections; often, those aesthetic ideals refer to men. Examining a wide range of Buddhist maleness—from narratives of morally superior monks and demon-taming tantric heroes to depictions of irresistible buddhas and bodhisattvas with sensuous bodies and jeweled smiles—Buddhist Masculinities expands on contemporary gender and intersectionality studies, merging a variety of methodological approaches. This much-needed transdisciplinary book pays critical attention to how ideas of masculinity have embodied, defined, and legitimized power and virtue in diverse Buddhist contexts. A must-read for practitioners and scholars alike.

WHAT WE’RE REREADING

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha
by Tara Brach

Now approaching its twentieth anniversary, this modern classic by Buddhist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach continues to find new audiences. “Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” Brach writes, offering readers a path to freedom and fulfillment through the eponymous practice. Utilizing a mix of psychology and Buddhism, the book aims to guide readers out of the strictures we create for ourselves with guided meditations and a discussion of the Jungian shadow self, the repository of our negative emotions.

–Philip Ryan, executive editor

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Queens—New York City’s most ethnically diverse borough and its largest in area—ranks second highest in religious diversity among all United States counties, according to the 2020 PRRI Census. Even narrowing it down to Buddhism, Queens’s population is particularly diverse, as the borough is home to some of the country’s largest populations of immigrants from Tibet, Korea, and China.

The architecture of Queens’s Buddhist sites also ranges widely, from small nondescript houses to detailed temples nestled between typical city buildings. Construction is less dense than most of the rest of New York City, which leaves space for meditation in stunning flower gardens and backyard barbecues to celebrate His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s birthday. Temples belonging to a variety of traditions serve families and visitors alike all across Queens.

1| New York Tibetan Service Center

The New York Tibetan Service Center (NYTSC) works hard to keep Tibetan youth connected to their heritage and to strengthen community among the large Tibetan refugee population in Elmhurst and the adjacent Jackson Heights. They provide free after-school and summer camp programs along with peer mentoring and parenting workshops specifically geared toward Tibetan and Himalayan immigrant families. You can help support NYTSC’s programming at cultural events they host throughout the year, such as a Losar festival, with an art market, traditional Himalayan food, and performances in Tibetan and English.

83-02A Broadway, Elmhurst
nytsc.org

2| Hanmaum Zen Center of New York

If you look closely between two houses on 32nd Avenue in Flushing, Queens, you’ll spot a pagoda-like building behind thin metal gates. The Hanmaum Zen Center is open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and the grassy grounds alone offer an oasis amid the busy city. The temple belongs to the global organization Hanmaum Seon Center, a branch of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, which has locations across the world.

145-20 Bayside Ave., Flushing
facebook.com/nyhanmaumpage

3| Sera Jey Buddhist Cultural Center 

The Sera Jey Buddhist Cultural Center—the US extension of Sera Jey Monastery in India—provides a long list of invaluable services to New York City’s Tibetan Buddhist community. You can visit them at the house they’ve been renting since 2012, where they host open events on holy days. If you live nearby, blessings and prayer services can be performed in private homes. Their mission includes interfaith dialogue and preservation of Tibetan language and culture, and their monks frequent Tibet House in Manhattan for ceremonies and other cultural occasions.

41-30 57th St., Woodside
serajey.org

4| Jung Myung Sa Buddhist Temple

In the decade before Jung Myung Sa Buddhist Temple was founded (in 1994), Queens’s Korean Buddhist immigrants had to travel hours north to the Catskill Mountains to practice. Now, the three-story temple provides a thriving community space for Korean Buddhists. Most of the temple’s current programming is in Korean, and they are currently working on expanding to include services in English. But even if you don’t speak Korean, the temple is worth walking by to view the lush garden surrounding the temple and the beautiful calligraphy sign that hangs above the front door.

162-11 Stanford Ave., Flushing
jungmyungsa.org/english

5| Chan Meditation Center

Originating as a small meditation group led by Master Sheng Yen, the Chan Meditation Center (CMC) moved to Elmhurst, Queens, in 1979. Since then, they’ve grown so much they’ve had to purchase three adjacent buildings to accommodate their sangha. The buildings serve as a small monastery for a handful of monks and nuns and as the headquarters of Dharma Drum Publications. CMC welcomes anybody interested in meditation and Buddhism to their meditation and chanting sessions, dharma talks, and t’ai chi classes. Though their main address is currently under construction, their temporary address is just up the street. You can find the full schedule of events on their website.

91-26 Corona Ave., Elmhurst
chancenter.org

6| United Sherpa Association

The United Sherpa Association is a central point of community outreach in Queens. Working out of two locations—a community center and a temple—they have set up a food bank for Nepali students, raised over $138,000 for Nepal earthquake relief efforts, distributed NYC ID cards with forms in Nepali and Tibetan to make them more accessible, and provided many other crucial community services. The association also hosts Himalayan cultural and religious festivals, presented as closely as possible to how they would be put on in remote villages. The United Sherpa Association is always working on something new, responding quickly to the Himalayan community’s needs as they arise. Be sure to check out their current efforts and events on their website or social media.

41-01 75th St., Elmhurst
sherpakyidug.org

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In 2016, poet Ross Gay set out to document a delight each day for a year. Shortly after he completed the resulting essay collection, The Book of Delights, his friend asked him if he planned to continue his practice. Recognizing delight’s potential endlessness, Gay decided to turn his yearlong exercise into a lifelong project.

Five years later, he began The Book of (More) Delights, demonstrating that the sources of delight are indeed limitless—and that they multiply when attended to and shared. For Gay, delight serves as evidence of our interconnectedness, and it is inextricable from the fact of our mortality. With characteristic humor and grace, he chronicles his everyday encounters with delight, from the fleeting sweetnesses of strangers to the startling beauty of the falsetto to the unexpected joys of aging.

In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and Insight Meditation Society cofounder and teacher Sharon Salzberg sat down with Gay to talk about the relationship between delight and impermanence, how he understands faith, and how delight has restructured how he pays attention.

James Shaheen (JS): The last time we spoke, you had just published a book on joy. How do you think about the difference between joy and delight?

Ross Gay (RG): I’m starting to feel like among the definitions for delight is something like the pleasant evidence of our connection. It’s occasional—a hummingbird lands very close to you, and you feel delight. But joy feels like it’s always there, and you can enter into it.

In a way, joy feels like the connection itself, and delight feels like the little bells—the little reminders that, oh yeah, there’s this fundamental connection here. So that’s how I think of it: delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting.

“Delight is more occasional; joy is more ever-present and waiting.”

JS: In your practice of noticing delight, you write that you’re not being optimistic; you’re just paying attention. Do you think delight has shaped or restructured how you pay attention?

RG: Absolutely. I feel like just by doing this practice, I’ve built a kind of reservoir of things that now I know delight me. Instead of just, “Oh, that’s happening,” it’s like, “Oh yeah, this is another thing that I love.” I find myself arguing with the notion of delight as optimistic in part because in this practice, I don’t mean to diminish the fullness and complexity of life.

What I mean to do is attend very fully. And in attending very fully, I’m also attending to what is astonishingly beautiful. I’m not looking at the bright side of things; I’m just trying to look at everything.

JS: Right. Often what you’re fully attentive to is what we might otherwise take for granted, and in your work, the everyday becomes unfamiliar and new. You describe this as being “perpetually wonderstruck.” Can you say more about the relationship between wonder and delight? 

RG: It might be the case that while I’m doing this practice, I’m alert in a certain kind of way to what’s going to delight me. It’s starting with a question: I wonder. I wonder what’s going to delight me. And I wonder too if that experience of not knowing what’s going to delight you prepares the ground of not knowing. In a way, the vocation is to not know. Maybe there’s a first knowing, which is like, “Something’s probably going to delight me,” but the not knowing is like, “I don’t know what it is.” That practice of not being sure feels connected to wonder, which to me feels like a fundamental unknowing.

It’s an opening question: What do we love in common? What is beautiful? What is given to me? These are questions that can bring us closer to one another and help us acknowledge our connection, which then further makes that connection possible. They grow [the connection] that they witness.

JS: You’ve said that the most interesting thing about us as humans is that we die and we change. How do you see our mortality as an occasion for joy?

RG: There’s something really moving about walking down the street and seeing whoever is walking toward me and being like, “Oh, yeah, you too will die. We’re both going to be dead.” It’s an interesting ground to operate on, where there’s a shared fleetingness of things. If we can get a handle on that and be less afraid and more curious, it also seems to me to be another ground of sharing: to be witnesses of how fleeting this whole thing is. It offers a possibility for a different kind of generosity.

This also comes back to the fact that we are not one thing. We are many things, and in fact, we are many things in the process of becoming many more things. And that feels to me like a kind of faith—a kind of faith that also inclines me to feel tender toward someone when I can hold that, oh yeah, we’re changing. I don’t know what I’m going to be tomorrow or next week. But I also don’t know what anyone else or anything else is going to be tomorrow or next week. And although it’s a kind of groundlessness, it also feels like a potential for sweetness.

Sharon Salzberg: You write that delight can be occasioned by faith—faith in each other and our capacity for “radiant, unpredictable, sloppy, mycelial, transgressive care.” So how do you understand faith?

RG: This feels like a lesson for me regularly, and maybe it’s part of the practice of delight. To write a delight every day requires a kind of faith that there will be a delight every day, which I think comes from practice. The faith actually follows the practice—the practice has provided the evidence that you can have faith. Maybe faith and delight arrive together. They have a connection to one another.

In one essay in the book, my friend Kate’s cat gets lost. Every time I see a sign on a telephone pole that says “Lost Cat,” I’m like, “Oh, man, that’s a bummer. You’re never going to see your cat again.” In a way, I have faith in a certain kind of universe, and my faith in that universe compels me to contribute to that universe, which is to say that when I say, “Oh, bummer,” I’m not looking around for anyone’s cat. And if my friend’s cat gets lost, I’m not helping them out. I’ve been an asshole on account of that.

My friend Kate, on the other hand, has faith in this other kind of cat-rescuing universe. It’s a beautiful story, actually. Her cat got lost, she put up signs, and at dawn, when she went to the place where her cat got lost, which is behind a strip mall in a murky, swampy area, there were people out there calling her cat’s name. And she got her cat back.

That’s the kind of faith that she gave me. But I needed a reason to have that faith. Often, these things are given to us by other people. Someone has to teach you that when you put signs up, people will actually try to take care of you.

♦

Listen to the full conversation at tricycle.org/podcast.

The post Limitless Delights appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When did you become a Buddhist and why? I began practicing Buddhism in 1997 when I first visited Plum Village in France, because I found a teacher [Thich Nhat Hanh] that was incredibly clear and inspiring, a practice that really worked, and a community that was deeply healing. 

Is your family Buddhist? I grew up in a Christian family and community. After I first went to Plum Village, my dad, a Christian minister, visited us for a Buddhist-Christian silent retreat. He then started regularly attending retreats and was inspired to cofound a local sangha that has been meeting weekly for over 25 years. He ordained into the Order of Interbeing and later became a lay dharma teacher just after I received the Dharma Lamp. So my dad has practiced wholeheartedly in both Christian and Buddhist traditions ever since I started practicing Buddhism. My mom, sister, and brother, and my nieces and nephews have all attended retreats or visited the monastery as well. 

What’s your favorite breakfast on retreat? I love oatmeal with fruit, seeds, and nuts. I also love the rice and bean congee with crispy onions and homemade pickles we would have in the monastery.

What’s your daily practice? I meditate for an hour in the mornings with my partner. Sometimes we will also practice chanting or read spiritual teachings. I also usually meditate at least one other time during the day with the online groups I lead or am a part of. 

Favorite aphorism? “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” –Buddha

What’s the longest you’ve gone without meditating? How do you get back on track? Probably just a few days. As a full-time dharma teacher, I offer meditation as part of my daily activities, so even if I skip regular meditation practice due to travel or illness, I can’t go more than a few days without offering it to others. I get back on track by noticing how the lack of meditation impacts my mind and body negatively, as I tend to lose perspective, speed up, and be less in touch with awe and wonder. This motivates me to return to regular practice. Having good spiritual friends who are dedicated practitioners is also a big support. 

Book on your nightstand? Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.

What do you like to do in your free time? Hike, swim in a natural body of water, read, go slowly, lie in a hammock, sit in front of a fire, connect with my partner, spend time with my dog, visit with friends, cook, garden, journal, make art.

What non-Buddhist do you look to for guidance? Dr. King, Howard Thurman, Resmaa Menakem, Vandana Shiva, Bear Heart, Dorothy Day, and pretty much any mystic of any tradition or time. 

What was your first job? Teaching English in Brazil when I was 16. 

Why did you want to teach a dharma talk on the Ecosattva Path for Tricycle? Because the dharma can offer us much-needed spiritual tools to help us navigate this very precarious time of societal unraveling due to the climate crisis.

What Buddhist book has most affected your practice? While traveling in India in 1997, I read Old Path, White Clouds, a beautiful account of the Buddha’s life by Thich Nhat Hanh. I soaked it up like a sponge, reading for hours in the land where the events recounted in the book had happened millennia earlier. I was moved by the Buddha’s calm, humor, and compassion, by how human he was and by how much he loved his students. Every word on the page awoke in me the wish to follow this path for myself and touch true liberation in my own heart and in the collective mind. When I have read it again since then, I have found it just as fresh and full of new insights.

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Three years ago in these pages, I offered a poetic translation of Garab Dorje’s Three Lines That Hit the Nail on the Head. The Tibetan in these three lines is extraordinarily terse and recondite. Nevertheless, they are among the most revered instructions in the Nyingma tradition. One way to understand them is that the first points to the nature of mind, the second to the essence of practice, and the third to how to live the practice. That is a lot of heavy lifting for three short lines. A vibrant English translation that does not rely on technical language is not easy. The translation I made is not meant to be a literal rendering, but one that evokes the pointing-out experience in the reader:

There! This is what you are.
There! Nothing else matters.
There! Now let it unfold.

A more literal translation of the same lines might read:

Recognize your own nature right now.
Cut down to one right now.
Cleave to trust in release right now.

At that time, hardly anybody was thinking about computerized translation of Tibetan texts. Then ChatGPT came along. A short time later, Google threw its hat into the ring with Bard. In March of this year, a friend asked ChatGPT if it was familiar with Classical Tibetan. Ever helpful, the GPT-4 version replied that it was and then began to extol its own abilities:

With the release of GPT-4, AI-powered translation has reached new heights. The large language model has been trained on an extensive dataset, including numerous classical texts in Tibetan, making it capable of understanding and translating the language with remarkable accuracy.

It went on to describe the supposed benefits of its translations: improved accuracy, faster results, and contextual understanding. As a test, my friend then asked for a translation of Garab Dorje’s text. Here is the result:

I am walking on the top.
Breaking on the first step.
Bound on the top of the pole.

Two months later, he repeated the request with this result:

In my own hands, I spread.
One after another, I count.
In the hands of liberation, I am cut off.

True creativity depends on more than randomized choices.

In order to avoid repetition in its responses, ChatGPT makes random choices from a small set of selected words. This random element means it will return different translations each time a text is submitted. The results can vary considerably, more than most human translations would. Unlike humans, the chatbot does not learn anything from these repeated attempts. It has no memory, and as it says of itself:

As an AI language model, I am unable to learn from individual conversations in real-time. My training and knowledge are based on the dataset I was last trained on, which has a cutoff date in September 2021. This means that I cannot adapt or improve my translations based on this conversation or any other interactions.

Google’s newly updated Bard provides the following rendering, which isn’t much better:

I offer myself.
I tie myself to a single thread.
I release myself to freedom.

Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to translate the Tibetan text in the style of Ken McLeod:

I am wondering, what is this?
A thought arises, what is that?
A feeling arises, what is it?
I look closely, and it dissolves.

This response reveals that the AI machines based on LLM (large language models) make guesses that are more emulations than translations per se.

Garab Dorje’s Three Lines may not be a fair test, as this text is enigmatic—even in the Tibetan. What about some pith instructions that are in clear and straightforward Tibetan? For this, I turned to Niguma, another Indian mystic. Here is a translation of two verses from Like an Illusion by Nicole Riggs:

Whirling in the ocean of samsara
Are the myriad thoughts of love and hate.
Once you know they have no nature,
Then everywhere is the land of gold, my child.

If on all things, like an illusion,
One meditates, like an illusion,
True Buddhahood, like an illusion,
Will come to pass, due to devotion.

In The Magic of Vajrayana, I translated the same two verses this way:

Like and dislike are the mind’s disease,
Certain to drown you in samsara’s seas.
Know that there is nothing here at all,
And then, my child, everything is gold.

Experience arises like magic.
If you practice like magic
You awaken like magic
Through the power of faith.

ChatGPT’s translation was:

Circling the center of the ocean,
This gathering of the six kinds of suffering,
Without any true existence, I contemplate.
All-pervading golden realm, may it be so.

As for the phenomena of cyclic existence,
Meditate on them as illusory,
Manifesting as the enlightened ones,
May they arise from the power of devotion and aspiration.

Then I asked it to translate the same two verses in the style of Bob Dylan. The first two attempts were a bit bizarre. On its third attempt, ChatGPT came up with:

In the cycle of the ocean’s vast embrace,
A world of chaos, doubt, and tangled grace,
No self to find, I contemplate the scene,
A golden realm, where all things intertwine.

The teachings of illusion that we see,
In depths of dreams, we practice, wander free,
Enlightened through illusion, we arise,
With humble hearts, compassion fills the skies.

When I asked it to translate Niguma’s verses in my own style, it came up with lofty gibberish that had little, if anything, to do with the text. I was crushed! For a moment, I wondered if I should redo my translation. No, I decided. I translate for human beings, not machines.

Google’s Bard made a good effort in the first verse and then went completely off the rails:

The round of samsara, which is marked by birth, old age, sickness, and death,
Is a dream-like illusion that has no inherent existence.
When this is realized, all is empty.

Through the practice of the Dharma of Amitabha Buddha,
If one recites his name with devotion,
One will be born in his Pure Land,
And be freed from the cycle of birth and death.

Translations, even human translators, vary considerably. Even so, when it comes to translation, these bots are unreliable and unpredictable. They have been trained on texts that have already been translated, and they emulate the models they have been fed. The randomizing element can lead them in a direction that has nothing to do with the subject matter at hand, and there is no mechanism to bring them back.

This little experiment, when combined with what else I have learned about these large language models, leads me to the following tentative conclusions: First, accuracy depends on the quantity and quality of the data on which it has been trained. Second, these machines will inevitably perpetuate the word choices and styles of the past, as well as established preferences, perspectives, and assumptions. And third, given the rate at which these machines are evolving in other areas, I expect readable anodyne translations to arrive sooner rather than later.

However, I wouldn’t look for any true creativity or insights here. True creativity depends on more than randomized choices, while insights require an awareness that can express directly what is experienced, not regurgitate what has been assimilated.

My own approach to translation is to evoke in the reader direct insights and feelings that are similar or comparable to those that readers of the original might have experienced. To make this possible, the English needs to engage the reader on its own merits. If the reader feels that he or she is reading a translation, I have failed.

To prevent the reader from being caught up in thinking about the meaning, the English must read almost like poetry, evoking the meaning directly. Wherever possible, I use words that can be traced back to Old and Middle English. They almost always have more power and energy than the philosophical or scholastic forms that are often used.

In translating pith instructions such as the examples here, I keep the grammar simple and direct. When I am successful, tears come to the reader’s eyes, he or she slips into the experience being described, and flashes of insight arise on their own—exactly what happens when one reads such instructions in the original Tibetan.

Given how these AI engines operate, they necessarily tend to provide translations that are, if they make any sense at all, barely reworded clichés. It is a truism that every cliché contains a kernel of truth. That kernel may lead people to feel that the AI engine actually understands the text. A little further digging quickly elicits randomized responses that lack depth, insight, or relevance. These engines have no way to step out of the consensus of meaning they have acquired from the data they have been fed. They cannot touch the meaning of the text itself.

Do these engines change the game for Tibetan translation? Not yet. For the time being, if you want translations that are accurate, sing, evoke meaning, and leave you stopped in your tracks, better to look elsewhere.

The post A Game Changer for Classical Tibetan Translation? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Hawaii’s first Japanese immigrants came to Kauai in the late 19th century to labor in the sugarcane fields. In a new environment and under harsh conditions, they found ways to keep alive their traditions and cultural life. In the Lawai Valley, in a place long considered sacred by Native Hawaiians, they created a most extraordinary example of this.

Beginning in 1904, Japanese workers built along a high, steep hillside a miniature version of the 750-mile Shikoku Pilgrimage, associated with the Buddhist saint Kukai (774–835), honorifically known as Kobo Daishi. The Shikoku Pilgrimage comprises 88 temples, and its course symbolizes the journey to complete enlightenment. The path snaking up the Lawai hillside has 88 small shrines, stone images—often hybrid, sometimes playful—of buddhas and bodhisattvas. One can traverse the path in as little as half an hour, but one might well feel drawn to take time to stop along the way to admire the shrines and perhaps offer a bow or quick chant as well.

Over the years, as workers moved away, the site fell into disrepair. But beginning in 1991, under the leadership of a diminutive dynamo named Lynn Muramoto, and with the work of hundreds of volunteers, the Lawai International Center has refurbished the site and provided it with a renewed vision as a place of contemplation and healing open to all.

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Skeletons, whether lying down in a cemetery, hanging over the branch of a tree, standing, walking, dancing, or in a pair, always represent impermanence and death in Himalayan art. This goes back to the Pali canon’s meditations on the stages of corpse decomposition. The skeleton is the ultimate decomposition; there’s really nothing left, unless you grind up the bones.

The dancing skeletons, which we see here, are properly named in Sanskrit: Shri Shmashana Adhipati, or “Revered Lords of the Cemetery.” The term Chitipati, or “Lord of the funeral pyre,” is also commonly used nowadays, but this word does not exist in any of the ritual texts or the root tantras.

The Shri Shmashana Adhipati comes from a text called The Secret Mind Wheel Tantra, part of the Chakrasamvara cycle of tantras. There are three ways to view these figures. The first is as meditational deities. In this practice, they are actually protector deities and sometimes wealth deities. The second is as dancing figures, which we will discuss more below. The third area is cemetery scenes. In depictions of these scenes, it’s naturally very common to have one or two or more skeletons. These skeletons represent impermanence and signal that the cemetery is a frightening place where you have to be even more aware, more conscious, because it may be full of zombies and all sorts of terrible things.

There is a Shmashana Adhipati dance in the Sakya tradition (one of the major schools of Tibetan Buddhism), but it was developed only about 250 years ago. It doesn’t go back 900 years, as the practice from The Secret Mind Wheel Tantra does. Other traditions might have adopted some form of skeleton dance as well.

You would normally see images like these in the protector chapel of a monastery or a temple. They would be community commissions for the traditions that have Shri Shmashana Adhipati as one of their main protectors. For an individual devotee of this practice, you would likely have a small painting done, or a small clay figure or small sculpture.

The dancing skeletons we see here, in a painting dating to roughly the 19th century, are meant to be frightening. Each dancer—one male, one female—holds a fused spine staff and a skull cup full of blood. The female can also hold a sheaf of barley or rice in her right hand, signifying abundance, and in her left hand, she has a golden vase, representing wealth. The skulls they wear represent the five aggregates and the five wisdoms, meaning complete Buddhahood. That makes them wisdom deities rather than worldly deities. The landscape where they exist is not one you’ll see out your window. It’s not part of samsara. They are emanations. This is an interesting subject: Which deities are alive and which are emanations?

The skeleton is the ultimate decomposition.

Maybe the only unique thing about this particular depiction is that one figure stands on a conch shell and the other on a cowry shell, which are believed to have protective properties. They stand on a sun disk, representing the thought of enlightenment, and they’re completely surrounded by flames of pristine awareness.

They both wear hair ribbons, even though they don’t have any hair, and this is an artistic convention, to add visual interest to the composition. These hair ribbons may have developed out of the dance mentioned above rather than being part of the iconography. All of these decorative ribbons may be a case of art imitating life, because we don’t have those in the original images of Shri Shmashana Adhipati. They appear only in more modern images.

As far as the oldest images go, we can go back to the 13th or 14th century, but we will not find the skeleton deities as central figures. They will appear as secondary figures within a larger composition along with other protectors, because it was not a major practice. Skeleton figures generally appeared in the lower corners of paintings back then, since the practice was more a minor protection practice that required initiation and a twenty-one-day retreat.

These figures were pulled to the fore at some point later. And the open landscape behind them, with floating figure paintings, appears only in the modern era, say the last few hundred years or so, beginning in the 17th century.

There is a tremendous amount of artistic variation in the iconography of the two dancing skeletons. The artist has a fair amount of flexibility to place the arms and legs in different positions. The male should be dancing on his right leg, and the female on the left, which is the case here, but beyond that there is a lot of interesting artistic invention and variation, if you look at a number of these images.

They’re not as static as a lot of forms that we’re used to, as with Avalokiteshvara or Kalachakra. There’s an acceptance in these depictions for the artists to be creative. There’s a certain freedom that comes out and makes for very entertaining images.

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Although written texts are venerated by all major spiritual traditions, literacy itself may be at the bottom of our current ecological crisis. Beginning roughly 5,500 years ago, the movement from oral to written culture led human beings to adopt increasingly abstract, disembodied ways of thinking that reinforced their feelings of separation from nature.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw the problem clearly in 1974. In Myth and Meaning, he observed that the difference between societies with writing and those without written language was that the former wrote almost entirely about themselves, while the latter, so-called “primitive” people, had a vast oral lore about plants and animals, landscape and weather, and all other aspects of the natural world.

Preliterate cultures were not anthropocentric. In fact, the earliest cave art—from Lascaux to Chauvet—is almost entirely devoid of human forms. The first “sutras” were not texts at all, but the closely observed, lovingly rendered shapes of mammoths and woolly rhinos, lions, bison, and bears. 

The best-of-season haiku for Winter 2023 invites us to reenter a world in which wisdom, though bypassing the inherently anthropocentric filter of written language, is once more rooted in our direct, sensual experience of the world around us. At home in his native Stockholm, the poet watches snowflakes falling ceaselessly outside his window. The very silence of that falling seems to demand that he enter more deeply into communion with them, listening with the eye rather than the ear.

In some schools of Buddhism, a sutra is seen as more than a sacred text. For instance, the Lotus Sutra is regarded by Nichiren Buddhists as “the Entity of the Mystic Law.” Those who chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the title of that sutra, unite with a universal life force that animates all things from within. Even the weather.

The poet could have described his snowflakes in terms of writing, given that he compares them to a sutra. But he makes a special point of not doing that. The snowflakes are reciting the sutra. More than that, they are the sutra. 

It is a remarkably simple poem. As the snowflakes fall, covering the city on a winter day, the poet imagines them ceaselessly reciting the sutra of themselves. Or maybe he doesn’t imagine that. Maybe he witnesses it—and, in so doing, unites with the Snowflakes of the Mystic Law.

It is worth noting the poet’s artistry in the second line of the haiku: “it keeps reciting itself.” The season word suggests a feeling of delicate, soundless beauty. And yet, taken as a whole, the poem conveys a feeling of tremendous cumulative power. The “snowflake sutra” is a storm.  

♦

The Tricycle Haiku Challenge asks readers to submit original works inspired by a season word. Moderator Clark Strand selects the top poems to be published in Tricycle with his commentary. To see past winners and submit your haiku, visit tricycle.org/haiku. To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

The post The Snowflake Sutra appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.