Karen Ready

Tricycle readers are probably unaware of just how much the magazine’s copy editor, Karen Ready, has shaped their reading experience. Karen arrived in 1991 to work on the second issue and has been untangling awkward prose and cutting through confusing clauses with her red pen ever since. This will be her final issue. Of her years at Tricycle, Karen says that she has enjoyed “the chance to work with authors whose work I admire. Although I am not technically a Buddhist, I have been meditating for 50 years now and am deeply interested in what we’ve published, from practices to book reviews.” Her favorite article is one of the few she didn’t copy edit: Spalding Gray’s interview with the Dalai Lama, which appeared in our first issue.

Sunita Puri

Sunita Puri, MD, is a memoir and nonfiction writer, a palliative medicine physician, and an associate professor of Clinical Medicine at the UMass Chan Medical School. Whether she’s writing research-backed essays for journals like JAMA Internal Medicine or personal reflections on death for the New York Times and the New Yorker, Puri always grounds her work in human stories. In her book That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, she weaves together the end-of-life narratives of her patients with her own journey to understand life’s temporality. In “A Gift,” Puri navigates love and loss through the lens of impermanence.

Devin Berry

Devin Berry is a meditation teacher, youth advocate, and father from Oakland, California. Since beginning his Buddhist practice in 1999, Berry has undergone training with the East Bay Meditation Center, Spirit Rock, and Insight Meditation Society. Berry is passionate about the liberation of marginalized communities and has cofounded the Men of Color Deep Refuge Group at EBMC and Deep Time Liberation, an ancestral healing journey for Black Americans.

With his teaching rooted in buddhadharma and daily mindfulness, Berry’s practice focuses on putting metta (lovingkindness) and karuna (compassion) in action.

Rebecca Li

Rebecca Li, PhD, who reflects on her nonlinear path to dharma transmission in “Translating Silence,” is a Chan Buddhist teacher in the lineage of Master Sheng Yen. Since beginning her practice in 1995, she has trained with Master Sheng Yen, Dr. John Crook, and Simon Child. Li received dharma transmission from Simon Child in 2016, making her a third-generation dharma heir in the Dharma Drum Lineage of Chinese Chan. The following year, she founded Chan Dharma Community, dedicated to supporting practitioners in deepening their practice. She currently teaches meditation and dharma classes, gives public lectures, and leads retreats in North America and Europe.

Moonassi

The award-winning Korean artist Day-Hyun Kim’s spare black-and-white drawings with their anonymous, mask-like faces are a fitting complement to Noelle Oxenhandler’s Zen-inflected essay on appearances (“Show Me Your Face”). The artist, who uses the pseudonym Moonassi (moona essentially means “emptiness” in Korean; –ssi is an honorific), calls himself “a man of no identity”—not unlike Zen figures of old. Emptiness is at the core of Moonassi’s work, he emphasizes. And his enigmatic, expressionless figures—influenced by his study of ancient Eastern painting—have been said to suggest a buddha in deep meditation.

Noelle Oxenhandler

Though retired from teaching writing, Tricycle contributing editor Noelle Oxenhandler continues to enlighten us about life. In this issue the longtime Buddhist practitioner takes the classic Zen koan “Show me your face before you were born” as inspiration for a forthright look at aging, identity, and appearances. Oxenhandler’s poetry and insightful essays on topics like parenting, womanhood, and self-image have appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, O: The Oprah Magazine, and the New York Times, and she’s the author of three nonfiction books, including The Wishing Year: A House, a Man, My Soul, a memoir about desire.

Megan Sweas

How does a spiritual community deal with the death of its founder, especially one as universally loved as Thich Nhat Hanh? Journalist Megan Sweas has reported from India, Italy, Cuba, Kenya, and the United States on the intersection of religion and immigration crises, social justice, and the economy. But the crisis she focuses on in “After Thay” is more nuanced—and personal: how the residents of Plum Village, the community Thay (“teacher”) established in France, are modeling ways to carry on a great master’s essential teachings and at the same time evolve.

Benjamin Brose

Benjamin Brose’s academic focus at the University of Michigan is the impact of social, cultural, and political change on the development of religion in China in the late 9th century through the early 11th century, and the 20th century. While Brose has written about Chan monks, for Tricycle he explores the life of a very different sort of practitioner: Ananda Jennings, the first Western woman to do an intensive Chan retreat (“A New Kind of Missionary”). Jennings died in obscurity in 1971 and remains largely unknown in the West. But that may change with Brose’s tale, which includes her remarkable exchanges with a monk named Quishi.

Charles Johnson

Best known for his novels and short stories, Charles Johnson is also a screenwriter, cartoonist, martial arts teacher, Zen practitioner, and last but not least, Tricycle contributing editor. His celebrated writing includes Middle Passage (the recipient of the National Book Award in 1990), The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and Taming the Ox: Buddhist Stories and Reflections on Politics, Race, Culture, and Spiritual Practice. Whether the subject is creative practice or Black life in America, his work is steeped in his studies of philosophy and Buddhism. For a taste of Dr. Johnson’s writing, read his rich retelling of the classic Zen tale “Is that So?,” here.

Rev. Dr. Kenneth K. Tanaka

Rev. Dr. Kenneth Tanaka got an early start on his Pure Land studies as a 13-year-old “Sunday school” attendee at Mountain View Buddhist Temple in Mountain View, California. He went on to become a Jodo Shinshu priest and scholar whose academic career spanned the US and Japan. After working for the Institute of Buddhist Studies, in Berkeley, California, Rev. Tanaka taught at Tokyo’s Musashino University for 20 years before retiring. His books include Ocean: An Introduction to Jodo Shinshu Buddhism in America and Amerika Bukkyo (American Buddhism). In this issue, Rev. Tanaka addresses what liberation, or shinjin, means in Shin Buddhism, breaking down popular misconceptions along the way.

Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins

Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins is an associate editor at Tricycle and a Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholar. Ranallo-Higgins earned his PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2019 under the guidance of Robert E. Buswell Jr. His main academic interests are doctrinal and textual studies, translation, and Won Buddhism, and his doctoral research explored the real-world challenges of Buddhism and its institutions. In this issue, Ranallo-Higgins recommends Buddhist places to visit in Seoul and interviews Princeton Emerita Professor Jacqueline Stone on Nichiren Buddhism.

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong is one of the most popular voices in comparative religion. Although she left religion for over a decade after a grueling experience as a Catholic nun, she returned to it as a writer with works like the best-selling book A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. She has addressed world leaders, advised policy makers, and is the founder of the global collective Charter for Compassion. In an excerpt from her most recent book, Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World, she investigates what myth offers us that science can’t and how it can help us take action for the sake of our world’s future here.

Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Daniel Goleman

A son of the late Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Tsoknyi Rinpoche is a Nepalese Tibetan Buddhist teacher, a tulku (reincarnate lama) of the Drukpa Kagyu and Nyingma traditions, and the holder of the Tsoknyi lineage. His books include Open Heart, Open Mind; How Mindfulness Works; and Fearless Simplicity. Daniel Goleman is a psychologist, bestselling author, and science journalist who has written on such topics as creativity, meditation, emotional intelligence, and the ecological crisis. Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, speaks with Rinpoche and Goleman about their work to unite traditional Tibetan practices with Western psychology and their upcoming book, Why We Meditate.

Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández is a journalist, memoirist, and cultural activist. She has reported on race, feminism, spirituality, and queer identity for the Atlantic, the New York Times, Slate, and other publications. Her book The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Her other works include A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir and Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. She is Associate Professor of Creative English Writing at Miami University in Ohio. Hernández interviews author Sandra Cisneros on Buddhism, sexuality, and her new book of poetry, Woman Without Shame.

Allison Aitken

Allison Aitken is an assistant professor of philosophy at Columbia University whose scholarly interests range from Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy to early modern European thought. Her forthcoming book, Introduction to Reality: Srigupta’s Tattvavataravrtti, focuses on the 3rd-century Indian Madhyamaka philosopher’s commentary and the first-ever translation of a related Tibetan text. In this issue, she addresses a timely topic—­anger­—in light of what Buddhist literature says about dealing with it. For more on anger, including why we find it so seductive, check out her conversation with Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen here.

Justin McDaniel

Justin McDaniel is a professor of religious studies and Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Professor of the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include Lao, Thai, Pali, and Sanskrit literature, Japanese Buddhist architecture, and ritual studies. His book Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words, on Buddhist monastic education in Laos and Thailand, won the Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. He has also received multiple awards for teaching, including being named one of the top ten most innovative professors in America by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2019. Find his article about how amulets function in Thailand here.

Ben Okri

Ben Okri is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and cultural activist. His writing uses “dream logic” to explore a multidimensional understanding of reality. Okri’s many works include An African Elegy, The Age of Magic, and the children’s book Every Leaf a Hallelujah. During Tricycle’s Buddhism and Ecology Summit in celebration of Earth Day 2022, he and novelist Ruth Ozeki discussed existential creativity and the role of the writer as a truth-teller of our time. “Writing in itself is an act of truth at its highest and at its best,” Okri says. “You’re dealing not only with the phenomenological world, the world of things and presences, but also with the level of the spirit.”

Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki is an author and Zen Buddhist priest. A longstanding Buddhist practitioner, Ozeki was ordained as a Soto Zen priest in 2010 and is currently affiliated with the Brooklyn Zen Center and the Everyday Zen Foundation. Her award-winning novels include My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, The Book of Form and Emptiness, and A Tale for the Time Being. In “Existential Creativity,” she joins author Ben Okri in a conversation on the writer’s responsibility to waken the collective. “How am I going to enact the bodhisattva vow?” Ozeki asks. “Delusions are numberless, I vow to end them. Fine. But how do I continue to get up every day and read the newspaper?”

Mark Unno

Mark Unno is a fourteenth-generation ordained Shin Buddhist priest and the Religious Studies Department head at the University of Oregon. He specializes in medieval Japanese Buddhism and is also interested in modern religious traditions in Japan and the relation between Buddhism and psychotherapy. In “The Awakening of Infinite Light,” Unno describes the essence of Jodo Shinshu, or Shin Buddhism, and how it’s both similar to other Buddhist traditions and unique. He writes, “Shin Buddhism arose specifically for those of us who live in the world of attachments and blind passions, so that the deepest realization of the dharma is made available to all of us.”

C. Pierce Salguero

A transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities, Pierce Salguero is a professor of Asian history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Abington College. He is a trained practitioner of traditional Thai medicine and holds a Ph.D. in the History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins. He recently published A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine. In his article, Salguero describes how a poisonous centipede in the rainforest around a Thai monastery illuminated that “it is precisely the integration of anatomical, physiological, energetic, emotional,
social, and spiritual levels that defines Buddhism’s approach to well-being.”

Teri Dillion

Teri Dillion was a Buddhist psychotherapist and writer from Santa Rosa, California. After graduating from Northern Arizona University, Dillion decided to travel the world and eventually found her way to Thailand, where she participated in her first meditation retreat. Dillion earned an MA in Contemplative Psychotherapy from Naropa University in 2008 and worked as a psychotherapist, addiction counselor, and meditation instructor. In 2016 Dillion was diagnosed with ALS. She passed away in late 2021, roughly one year after publishing her memoir, No Pressure, No Diamonds: Mining for Gifts in Illness and Loss, which you can read an excerpt from here.

Jeenah Moon

Jeenah Moon is a photojournalist based in New York City. Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, she has been a professional photographer since 2014. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Bloomberg, and Reuters, covering high-profile, pressing social issues—including the trial of Harvey Weinstein and the protests for racial justice following the murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd. Her other photojournalistic projects have included capturing daily life among marginalized urban communities. In this issue, she photographed Buddhist Studies scholar Donald Lopez.

Dan Zigmond

Dan Zigmond is a Zen priest and technologist based in the San Francisco area. His expertise and erudition are eclectic—when he is not working as the Director of Special Projects at Apple, he teaches at the San Francisco Zen Center, having been ordained in the lineage of Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi in the late 1990s. Zigmond has also written several books on Buddhism and lifestyle practices and is a Tricycle contributing editor. Find his review of two books—one by and one about the late Thich Nhat Hanh—here.

Chenxing Han

Chenxing Han is a Bay Area-based writer whose work explores the nuances of the Asian American identity. Holding an MA in Buddhist studies from the Graduate Theological Union, Han also studied chaplaincy at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California. Her first book, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (2021), challenged mainstream perceptions of what it means to be an American Buddhist by centering on the diverse experiences of Asian American Buddhist interviewees. Han interviews New York Times staff writer Jay Caspian Kang on writing, Buddhism, and Asian American identity.

Susan Moon

Lay dharma teacher Susan Moon has practiced in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi since 1976. She is the author of several books, including The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi and This Is Getting Old: Zen Thoughts on Aging with Humor and Dignity. In an excerpt from her latest book, Alive Until You’re Dead, Moon struggles with the ways we think about death. “Death is outside of time,” Moon writes. “It takes the person who dies out of time, and it took us, the living, out of time, too, for a while that was neither long nor short.”

PAMELA GAYLE WHITE

Pamela Gayle White is a contributing editor to Tricycle. As a dharma teacher and translator, she has taught in Europe and North America and continues to translate Tibetan teachings for Bodhi Path, a global organization of centers founded by the 14th Shamarpa. She completed her training as a chaplain in Philadelphia and central Virginia, where she now resides with her dog, Philomène. In “Where the Buddhist Chaplains Are,” White looks at the challenges and rewards of being a Buddhist chaplain in America. “The ability to remain open and present is the mark of good chaplains everywhere, but for Buddhists it’s a calling card,” she writes.

TRENT WALKER

Trent Walker is a lecturer on religious studies at Stanford University. He specializes in Southeast Asian Buddhism, including ritual, manuscript, and translation cultures in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. Walker earned his PhD in Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and also served as research director of the Khmer Manuscript Heritage Project, an initiative of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center to digitize over 10,000 manuscripts in Cambodia. In his article “Dharma Songs to Stir and Settle,” he explores dharma songs, little known in the West but “an integral facet of Buddhist life among Khmers in Cambodia and in diaspora communities.”

SHOHAKU OKUMURA

Shōhaku Okumura Roshi was born in Osaka, Japan in 1948 and ordained as a Zen teacher in 1970. Currently he is the abbot of Sanshinji (Three Minds Temple) in Bloomington, Indiana. He is also the founder and guiding teacher of the Sanshin Zen Community, founded in 1996. As a scholar, he focuses on making the vast and largely untranslated Zen canon accessible to Western audiences. In this issue, he discusses the poetry of Eihei Dogen, whose lyrical work was relatively unknown even in Japan. Its recent rediscovery “opened a new horizon in the world of Japanese literature,” Okumura writes.

Suzannah Showler

Suzannah Showler is a writer, cultural critic, and poet. As a longtime vinyasa yoga practitioner, she enjoys taking occasional breaks from her work to do headstands and handstands, and when she writes she uses an internet blocker called “Freedom.” Her most recent book is Most Dramatic Ever, a cultural appraisal of the reality TV show The Bachelor. Showler’s essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed Reader, The Walrus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. In this issue, she reviews cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s latest graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength.

Matthew Richardson

British artist Matthew Richardson creates collages from curios, postcards, and knickknacks that he has collected over time to keep his work novel and surprising. His art explores how stories and meaning emerge and evolve. Richardson has produced works for the British Library and Britain’s Poetry Society, and he illustrated the tales of magical realist writer Gabriel García Márquez for Penguin Books. For this issue’s Tricycle Haiku Challenge, he composed a new work that mirrors the 5-7-5 syllabic structure of the poetic form.

Vanessa Zuisei Goddard

Buddhist teachings are at the heart of Tricycle’s mission, which is why in 2018 we introduced to the magazine a dedicated Teachings section that has continued to grow ever since. In this issue, writer and lay Zen teacher Vanessa Zuisei Goddard joined our team to steer the section as its editor. For 23 years, Goddard, who was born in Mexico, lived as a monastic at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York. During that time, she fulfilled various editorial roles and served as creative director and director of operations for Dharma Communications, the monastery’s outreach arm overseeing its websites, journals, books, and various print materials.

Chico Imrie

Chico Imrie was born in London to a family of globetrotting artists. After going to art school in New York City, he worked in fashion, carpentry, horse farming, leatherwork, and bootmaking, and spent time with Amish communities. Eventually he returned to painting and showing his artwork in New York City. His painting Bruce, in “Freedom From Illusion,” belongs to what he calls “the color project.” Imrie paints with ground pigment in bee honey base, which—when applied to archival paper—seems to beam color right into the viewer’s eyes. He practiced a Zen Buddhist calming technique before painting the circles entirely by hand, with no guide. Imrie values collaboration and connection and welcomes conversation about his work.