When the author, radical feminist, and Black Buddhist Christian bell hooks died in late 2021, she was widely celebrated for just about everything in the mainstream press except for her spirituality. 

But hooks’s connection to religion is present throughout her entire breadth of work, which includes thirty books across a variety of genres as well as countless articles on feminism (and how it is for everyone), popular culture, education, recognizing the human rights of children, and more. This missing component of spiritual recognition was part of the motivation for bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist by Nadra Nittle, a journalist and education reporter at The 19th, an independent news outlet that covers gender, politics, and policy. 

The book was published by Fortress Press in November 2023. Tricycle recently spoke with Nittle about the book, hooks’s legacy in spiritual circles and beyond, and as well as book recommendations for Buddhist readers interested in learning more about hooks’s life and work. 

You’re the author of several books, including Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision: Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature. Can you tell me how this book came to be? Sure. I had written a book about Toni Morrison for Fortress Press, which is a Lutheran publisher. My books are for people who are not necessarily religious, but interested in how a figure they might not associate with a spiritual tradition approached spirituality in their work or personal lives. They serve as an introduction to people who have never read these authors before; some people read them as a companion piece to read with their books. 

The publisher wanted me to write another book and had suggested some men. But I thought bell hooks would be a good figure because she was a Buddhist Christian, and many people didn’t necessarily know that, even though she discussed it. It didn’t come up in a lot of her obituaries. Spirituality was foundational to her work. And she died shortly after the Toni Morrison book came out. 

You write about bell hooks visiting your school in the 1990s, when you were a teenager. Can you tell us your impressions of hooks and what has stayed with you? I wish I remembered it better; this was such a long time ago. I had not read any of her books, though I knew she was an important person and an important figure. I remember being pretty intimidated.

I remember the speech she gave, saying that she didn’t think her father had loved her, how she had been saying it for years, and her mother finally agreed with her. She was challenging the idea that all that Black families, in particular low-income families, needed was a man in their home and all of their problems would go away. You heard a lot about welfare queen moms in the 1990s; you still hear about them today, but especially in the nineties. President Bill Clinton had passed welfare reform, and single mothers, especially Black single mothers, were vilified. So for hooks to come out and say, “No, we don’t just need men in the home, they have to be loving men who are not going to perpetuate patriarchy,” was pretty radical. And this is something she discusses in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, and other pieces.

She sat with us at lunch, and I sat close to her. She was discussing movies—this part got cut from the book. There was a movie called Sankofa, about a Black American model who gets more in touch with her African roots, and it also discusses issues around enslavement. I remember one of my classmates getting into an argument with her. My classmate loved the movie, and hooks thought it had problems—obviously, she was very critical of popular culture. But she wasn’t like, “Oh, you’re just a little teenager, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was respectfully arguing with him and treated him as someone capable of having an argument. 

Yes, and one other thing about her visit, which I write about in the book. I didn’t witness this, but bell hooks told one of my friends that she was beautiful, and should consider not straightening her hair and wearing it natural. And she stopped straightening her hair, and she told everyone that bell hooks told her that she was beautiful. I’m not in touch with this person anymore, but hooks really left a positive impact on her. 

I enjoyed learning more about hooks’s cultural criticism in your book. Unfortunately, I only came to hooks later in life, so she’s always been a Buddhist Christian radical feminist to me. And to learn about her interview with Lil’ Kim and her willingness to speak out against Hillary Clinton, even Beyoncé—especially Beyoncé. [In a 2014 panel discussion at the New School called Are You Still A Slave: Liberating the Black Female Body, hooks said Beyoncé was “antifeminist” and a “terrorist” to young Black girls.] To go up against these figures and take a lot of criticism makes her fearless to me. You refer in the book to hooks’s “Buddhist Christian ethic.” Can you expand on what that means? That’s in reference to what she took from both Buddhism and Christianity: the idea that you weren’t spiritual or religious for the sake of being spiritual or religious, you did so for the benefit of other people, to engage in social action. There was love at the root of it, the love of one’s self and the love of other people. She used the late author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s definition of love, which he said was one’s commitment to one’s own spiritual growth or someone else’s spiritual growth. 

You brought up Beyoncé, so when she was criticizing Beyoncé, or criticizing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, she believed that she was doing so in love, in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh and other figures that she was influenced by, like Thomas Merton—people who had social action and liberation right at the heart of their spiritual tradition. 

In a 1992 interview with Tricycle’s founding editor, Helen Tworkov, hooks spoke about her hesitance in meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, whose social activism inspired her Buddhist practice. “As long as I keep a distance from that thread, I can keep him—and I can critique myself on this—as a kind of perfect teacher.” Did she ever meet Thich Nhat Hanh? Yes, she was afraid of meeting him because she didn’t want to be disappointed by him or have [him be] a big letdown. I write in the book about how when hooks first met Hanh, she was still so angry at a past partner who was abusive to her, and she blurted out the words “I’m so angry.” And Hanh told her to “compost” her anger, to turn it into something, for lack of a better term, positive, something that can be used for good instead of her just stewing in anger. And it seems that he handled her anger in a very wise way that she appreciated. 

What about hooks’s upbringing in the Christian church? It seems that she was drawn to social action and outreach from a young age. She was born in 1952 and grew up in Kentucky. She went to predominantly Black churches, where she found people who supported her speaking abilities by reading scriptures; she found people who encouraged her to use her “god voice.” That was in contrast to her home life, where she was more of a misfit and the family scapegoat. She had a difficult relationship with her father; it seemed they butted heads from an early age. She was considered strange or weird by her family members and told she was crazy, even for things like her reading habits. Her mother bought her books, and her family was supportive of her being a good student, but they were still worried if she was going to be a proper young woman who was attractive, found a mate, and was a homemaker—all of those things that she didn’t want to be. 

Her family life really contrasted with her church experience, which was a place of refuge for her. There was an elderly woman, a deacon in the church, who took an interest in hooks and supported her and was loving toward her; she’s the one who told her she had a “god voice.” And both of her maternal grandparents had unique experiences and ideas about spirituality. Her maternal grandmother was not a churchgoing person; she saw the church as being superficial and people caring more about what you wore and who you knew. She was spiritual, but more so when it came to nature—growing things, being self-sufficient, and living off the land. So that was a model for hooks. And her grandfather believed every object had a soul and that she needed to know the stories of all the things around her. He was considered by others to be a strange guy. He was also a pacifist—he never went to war, he refused to fight. hooks believed he was the one family member who truly loved her. 

And this was one of the reasons [why] she was opposed to the traditional, nuclear family, because she believed that it takes a village to raise a child. And if you did have a village, you were more likely to find people who rooted for you and nurtured you. hooks felt that her father was not loving; he was physically abusive to her, to her mother, and at times to her siblings. At one point, this started to affect hooks’s relationship with her mother, because her mother would sometimes act abusively toward her to get into her husband’s good graces. And I haven’t gotten into child liberation theology yet…

We did see a bit of that earlier when you recounted hooks telling your school friend that she was beautiful and to not straighten her hair and engaging in a respectful debate with your other classmate. And with her mother being abusive, that shows that it doesn’t have to be men acting patriarchal, it’s the system, right? Yes. I think the most radical part of bell hooks is her belief that women can enforce or perpetuate patriarchy. Often in popular culture, when we’re talking about the #MeToo movement, or sexism and misogyny in general, it’s framed as women not perpetuating any of these things. And she very much believed women are capable of perpetuating patriarchy and teaching their sons to be patriarchal. She also said women need to interrogate their ideas about women and gender. 

You write that one of the things that drew hooks to Buddhism was her confronting this image of a white Jesus at her Black church. Later in her life, she goes on a pilgrimage to Spain to see the Black Madonna at Montserrat as a way to reclaim the divine feminine for Black women. How did that trip impact her view on spirituality? As a child, hooks went to a church where they had a huge image of a white Jesus holding a globe, and at the bottom of the globe were all the people of color. She discussed how this image really had an impact on her brother who struggled to be a Christian, to be confronted with this image of a white Jesus, that he didn’t feel represented by, every Sunday. It doesn’t sound like she took that as hard as her brother did, but she longed for representations of divine feminine deities portrayed in all different colors, shapes, and sizes.

One of the reasons she became interested in Buddhism was [because] she saw Buddha portrayed in various colors, shapes, and sizes. One of her first encounters with Buddhism was through Buddhist nuns during the time she was a student at Stanford University. She met them, took an interest [in their message], and decided to pursue Buddhism. In terms of the divine feminine and Christianity, she was interested in the Virgin Mary and, specifically, the Black Madonna. She hadn’t grown up hearing about or seeing a Black Madonna, but eventually, she made a pilgrimage to Montserrat, Spain, to view this statue. 

It’s also important to mention that the Catholic Church has recently made an effort to start portraying Jesus, Mary, and other figures in different races and ethnicities, so that people feel represented. 

All About Love: New Visions, hooks’s book that was published in 2000, made a resurgence during the pandemic and even made the New York Times’ bestseller list for the first time, twenty years after its original publication. Why do you think it resonated so much with readers? In the US, we now have more single-headed households than partnered or married households. During the pandemic, especially during lockdown, people were isolated, and it made them think about their connections to other people, maybe in a way they hadn’t before. And people who were partnered or married had to deal with being around their partners for sustained periods, whereas before they were going out or going to work and didn’t have to see their partner or children as much. The pandemic forced some people to engage with their partners and children in ways they hadn’t prior to the pandemic. It makes sense people were interested in a book like All About Love during that time. Quotes from the book were being shared on TikTok and other forms of social media, so I think it was a perfect mix of social media, the pandemic, and younger generations being exposed to the book for the first time. And there are some influential people, like the filmmaker Sofia Coppola and the model Emily Ratajkowski, who began to cite the book as important in their lives and development. 

I also discussed that we can see from dating sites like Match.com that people are looking for more substantial relationships, not just a pretty or handsome face. All About Love is a go-to book for people interested in going beyond the butterflies and rush of feelings at the beginning of a courtship; this book is really about a deeper connection. And she was really clear that she didn’t want to just focus on romantic relationships. A lot of people who like All About Love cited the fact that she writes friendship should be equal to any other relationship, and that friendship will be different (than romantic love) but should not be devalued. And that was a lesson hooks wished she had learned before entering into an abusive relationship where she found herself isolated. 

There’s a quote attributed to the Buddha about friendship being the whole of the spiritual path. And the other thing is the epidemic of loneliness that we sometimes overlook. And she was discussing that more than twenty years ago. Now, there’s more attention to the fact that it’s not just elderly people who suffer from loneliness; there are a lot of young people who are lonely and looking for connection. And that may be a reason why [so many] young people [are now appreciating] the book. 

Toward the end of All About Love, hooks writes that the book is a guide about love, but also death. And if we treat each interaction with someone as if it were our last, that would change how we interact with others; it would allow us to live more consciously. To me, that’s a very Buddhist sentiment. Are there any Christian parallels between living consciously or staying connected to loved ones who have died? As a text, the Bible focuses on the importance of your ancestors. But in contemporary Christianity, in the US, I think that ancestors are not focused on in the same way. hooks was interested in how Black American and West African spirituality mixed with mainstream Christianity, and how during enslavement, Black people had to hide their African spiritual traditions but found a way to still have yard shrines and altars, even if it was just having rocks or things placed in a certain kind of way. Or the pictures in their house arranged in a way that transcended enslavement and white supremacy in an attempt to separate Black people from all that. 

And hooks believed in the power of naming ancestors too. That’s the whole reason she chose a pseudonym after her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. I tried to honor hooks by naming her grandparents in the book.

Lineage is so important in Buddhism—who your teacher is and lineages that can be traced back to the time of the Buddha. It’s interesting to see the parallels with other religions. Can you recommend a few books for Buddhist readers who have never read hooks or who would like to revisit her more spiritual works? All About Love is one of the books where she most engages spirituality, be it Buddhism or Christianity. Her memoir, Bone Black, will allow you to see where she came from and why spirituality was important for her. [Bone Black also provides some framework for] the lessons and understanding [she received from] her Kentucky ancestors, who were not at all familiar with Buddhism [but who] paved her way to becoming a Buddhist; whether it was her grandfather being a pacifist and telling her that everything has a soul or her grandmother using quilting as a form of meditation, losing herself in the process and coming back to herself. And then, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. She’s urging Black women to not just have a patriarchal, fundamental approach to Christianity, but to expand our options, whether that’s through Buddhism, traditional African religion, Hinduism, or something else. 

I wanted to close with something hooks wrote in All About Love: “Sometimes, we invoke the dead by allowing wisdom they have shared to guide our present actions.” Since you have spent so much time with hooks’s writing, what do you think she would make of the world right now, especially with multiple conflicts going on? Her grandfather, who was one of her teachers, was a pacifist. Hanh and King were pacifists. So I think she would be horrified. 

About ten years ago, she was one of many writers and scholars who signed a letter in support of Palestine. I imagine she would be heartbroken by what’s happening there. And she cautioned people to be wary of the media and the messages in the media. She talked about the importance of making sure you have access to a wide range of information and aren’t just turning on the TV and absorbing whatever messages [come your way, which often] perpetuate what she coined as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” I think she would urge people to take in the news with caution and advocate for peace and liberation. 

⧫

This interview has been edited and adapted for length and clarity. 

The post The Spiritual Lives of bell hooks appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Mitra Bishop Roshi is the founder of Mountain Gate-Sanmonji, a Rinzai Zen temple nestled high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico where she offers a uniquely American approach to practice. 

Her own training was more traditional: starting in the mid-1970s, she studied at the Rochester Zen Center with Roshi Philip Kapleau, and later spent four years at Sogen-ji in Okayama, Japan, training with the Rinzai teacher Shodo Harada Roshi. She urges students to address their buried trauma—using psychotherapy, if necessary—to deepen their Zen practice. 

Mitra Roshi also leads nonsectarian retreats based on Zen principles for women veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress, called Regaining Balance. She explores all this in her new book, Deepening Zen: The Long Maturation.

How would you characterize your teaching style? I don’t teach classic Eastern Zen. I teach a really American format, which is not something that a lot of Zen centers in America do. They still stick to the straight and narrow. What I’ve learned through working with students and my own observations studying at Sogen-ji and Rochester has shaped my way of teaching in probably a more radical way than that of most Zen teachers in America.

What did you hope to achieve with your new book? It’s for the dharma, and to let people know that there’s not just one way to do Zen practice—that people’s histories and experiences have to be taken into account. There is no one-size-fits-all Zen practice. That’s how we were taught in the old days, and I’ve seen so many people crash and burn because they didn’t get a chance to work with things in a way that would have enhanced their practice, taken them deeper, and helped to transform their whole lives in a positive way. There have been so many instances of misbehavior among Western and Eastern teachers who have trained in that way. They have had the straight and narrow [approach], and so they have shoved their issues aside, putting them in a drawer somewhere. There were issues in their personalities that they never had a chance to work with and clean up, so to speak. That is probably the greatest fault of most American Zen today. The emphasis on “just this”—there are very few people who can handle that.

Zen practice is often associated with a distinctly masculine energy. As a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, do you bring a different, uniquely female perspective to the way you teach? Probably. Since I can’t transform into a male persona, I probably do. I understand trauma. I’ve had trauma—it took me a long time to work through it with a lot of psychotherapy—but I also was doing a lot of Zen practice at the same time. I recognize that trauma can impact your Zen practice. There are people who can’t do Zen practice effectively because they can’t remove themselves from dissociation. So that already was telling me something. 

Did you encounter that masculine approach in your own training? Rochester Zen Center was called “the boot camp of Zen.” And it was. Roshi Kapleau’s last teacher was Yasutani Roshi, who was from an old samurai family. It was all very dynamic and intense. Then I went to Sogen-ji, which was really different. You have this idea that with Japanese Zen you’re at the tip of a spear all the time. At Sogen-ji, while it was very strict, there was also a deep sense of compassion. I also saw over the time I was there that [the practice] is [more] flexible. 

There is no one-size-fits-all Zen practice.

In the book you often mention susok’kan (“extended breath”) practice. Could you describe that? It is the fundamental practice in Rinzai temples. We call it the “extended breath.” You are relaxed in your shoulders and belly, sinking deep within. You let yourself breathe out normally, and when you get to the point where you would automatically breathe back in, instead, you take it further out, focusing on your body. What it does is eliminate the possibility of thought. You cannot focus to that degree and also carry along other stuff. 

And as you go deeper— and I’ve added this aspect to it, because it’s important—you have a sense of openness to possibility, what Seung Sahn Sunim called “don’t-know Mind,” or Suzuki Roshi called “beginner’s mind.” It’s as if you’ve landed on some different planet that you’ve never heard of and you’re exploring what it is like to be there. There are no preexisting assumptions about it because it’s so different. For many people there’s a sense of yearning to return to “don’t-know what,” and you can put that sense of yearning to return also into that extended outbreath. It is extremely powerful and extremely effective for Zen practice, but this is where the whole thing about working with your history comes in. You cannot do it effectively if you are holding back in any way. And if you’ve been traumatized, you’re going to hold back. If you are dissociated, then it really is impossible. But it can be worked with, and this is what I’ve discovered both in my own practice early on and in working with students. I did a lot of psychotherapy all along the way, which helped a lot, and I gradually became aware of what was going on inside and was able to work with it. And, of course, the practice goes much deeper as a result of the work you do in psychotherapy.

Could you talk about the significance of kensho (seeing one’s true nature) versus what Torei Enji, the 18th-century Rinzai master, called “the Long Maturation”? Kensho is important. You can work on the Long Maturation from the get-go, but kensho helps you move toward it faster. It’s as though you’re finding your way up a mountain path in the pitch-black dark, and then there’s a flash of lightning, and suddenly you can see the path ahead. You have a much better sense of where you’re going and what you need to do. And that’s what kensho does. 

Most people who have kensho these days don’t have a very deep one. That’s why it’s so important not to stop there. A kensho will allow you to become more aware of your behavior, and then you have a choice. You can elbow it out of the picture, which is what traditional Zen practice will do, or you can choose to open to the bodily experience of that and explore it beyond words and release its hold on you. That is part of the Long Maturation. It’s becoming aware of our behavior patterns—all of them, not just the dysfunctional ones—and going down through the clouds to our true nature, which is unattached to anything. 

What led you to focus on serving women with trauma through Regaining Balance? My own history. Women veterans are at the bottom of the pecking order, and often out in the cold. There needs to be something that will help them. Our Regaining Balance retreats are pretty effective, because we’re teaching them ways to help themselves get grounded. Susok’kan is known to be very grounding, and there were other things that I did in my own trauma work that I felt were extremely helpful. We teach them the extended breath meditation. They do it twice a day for up to half an hour each time. They also go for a walk in the forest, which is also healing—to be in nature. 

And we teach them tools to help themselves de-stress. There’s a wonderful app called ArtRage. It’s aptly named and it’s quite excellent. You have a choice of background colors and textures, and different kinds of brushes, pens, pencils, palette knives, and so on. You use your finger to translate what’s going on in your body energetically to color in form. It’s not about making a pretty picture. It’s similar to journaling, which we also teach them. Handwriting descriptions of the energies in your body keeps you from getting hijacked by your amygdala [the part of the brain that regulates emotions]. And so you are able to begin to process some of those feelings without knowing what they are necessarily—they’re just uncomfortable. 

Our third tool is to go outdoors and focus in a particular direction—we do the cardinal directions—and you write down three words that describe something that you’re seeing within that view. You come back and turn those words into a sentence. Each sentence comes together to create a poem. Then we each contribute our sentences to a group poem. It teaches awareness, focus, and attention. 

♦

Deepening Zen: The Long Maturation by Mitra Bishop Roshi is available now through Sumeru Books.

The post Deepening Zen through Poetry and Psychotherapy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

As the founder and senior teacher of the Israel Insight Society (Tovana), a leading organization teaching mindfulness, Vipassana, and dharma in Israel and beyond, Stephen Fulder has been called upon by numerous organizations over the past few week to deliver wisdom and insight during a time of great uncertainty. While his ecologically minded home village of over 1,000 inhabitants is usually teaming with young people, today that is not the case. Many, including Fulder’s own family, have fled to safer regions following the Hamas attack on Saturday, October 7th and subsequent Israeli retaliation that has left thousands dead.

With war at his doorstep and rage flaring across the political spectrum, Fulder is remarkably calm and composed. As a Buddhist author, teacher, and practitioner, he is involved with peace work in the Middle East. He was a founding member of MiddleWay, an organization that used to hold peace walks across the country. Fulder talked with Tricycle about the role of the Engaged Buddhist during times of political strife, how to generate compassion when it seems like the last thing the mind wants to do, and why some of the Buddha’s last words remain more relevant today than ever before. 

Are there Buddhist passages or sutras [Pali, suttas] you turn to in times of despair, confusion, and fear? I personally don’t turn to passages to shift my inner world because I move straight into practice, but I think some really important Buddhist texts can help all of us. I’ll mention one or two. 

One sutra is a discourse of the Buddha close to his death, when he told his monks, “be an island to yourself.” “Be an island to yourself” is a beautiful statement on autonomy despite the stormy seas. What’s important in that text is that [when the Buddha was asked], “OK, how do you do that,” he told his monks, “Go back to your basic truth.” When there’s a breath, there’s just breathing; when there is seeing, there’s just seeing; when there’s thinking, there’s just thinking; go back to some basics of our life experience. That truth will ground you in times of crisis and despair. 

A second group of sutras that might be relevant are the Angulimala Sutra and the story of Patacara. Both of those talk about a situation of extreme violence. In the case of Angulimala, he killed a large number of people, and in the case of Patacara, she lost all her family in sudden accidents. Both tell us in such a beautiful way that karma can shift radically, that there’s nothing fixed in stone, that there’s somewhere bigger than us that can take us in another direction, and we just need to be open to it. 

The third set of sutras remind us of nonduality like the Heart Sutra. They tell us, “What you feel as solid is also empty.” The Heart Sutra expresses the emptiness of form and feeling, and perception and samskaras (formations) as constructions in the mind and consciousness. It’s such a beautiful reminder that if we see what’s happening now as being transparent, empty, and passing, [we can shift into] a totally different perspective.

What do you see as an Engaged Buddhist’s role during times of war and crisis? All Buddhism is engaged. There isn’t such a thing as nonengaged Buddhism. It’s an oxymoron. Maybe we need to change the word Buddhism to Buddhist practice, or Buddhist-inspired practice. Then it has to be engaged, because it’s about our meeting with the world and in the world and our embodiment [of] the world, and what that means. I’ve done years of Engaged Buddhist work with Palestinians and Israelis, and I’ve often been asked, “What’s the point?” One point is to keep a small flame burning that shows another way of doing things, like a candle that brings a little light into total darkness. You don’t know where it will go, but that’s what you can do. 

But today, in this critical situation, where people are dying as we speak and there’s huge destruction and rage, Engaged Buddhism may need to be different. It might need to be a kind of first aid, bringing qualities of kindness, love, and care to replace fear. It may need deep listening. Or demonstrating that equanimity and steadiness are possible. 

How do we process anger without losing our goodwill, and without diminishing the imperative nature of the outrage? Sometimes, we need righteous anger against injustice and cruelty. It’s needed at times by people who have no other tools. But it’s our responsibility to replace righteous anger with more effective and helpful Buddhist tools. There are better ways of dealing with violence, oppression, and injustice. 

One way is more trust, our readiness to meet and see the other, putting ourselves in the other’s shoes. For example, people often report that they go on a demonstration, but are full of anger against the right wing and the far right who are creating so much destruction and fear. How can they be in a demonstration and call for change from a place of deep compassion and joy within? It can come from feeling the energy of being together with others, and acting from trust. This doesn’t mean that we assume that things are going to be better because we are demonstrating—it means we are ready to see things as they are. We wish to make a change here, but not on the basis of trying to control or fight the demons. It’s a different use of energy, of joy and kindness, but still a source of action.

Have you been working on generating compassion and helping others to generate compassion over the past week? I have to say something personal. When the invasion of Hamas first happened on Saturday morning, I heard about it quite early in the morning. When I realized there was so much killing going on for two days, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I had no interest in being in a public situation. My heart was heavy, a deep heaviness inside, a pain. All I could do was spend two days quietly beaming compassion. I needed this sense of quiet, holding in my heart the pain of others, and just letting it move into compassion. Sometimes, we need to make sure that we have space for this, that we give space to our compassion. It’s quite difficult to call up compassion in an automatic way in the middle of difficulty and crisis. After the first two days, I started to give lots of Zoom meetings. 

A second [point to consider] is not to try too hard to be abstract about compassion. Sometimes, it needs a very specific address. I remember a Mahatma Gandhi quote that says that if you’re not sure what to do, “think of the poorest and weakest person you have seen and ask if the step you are contemplating will be of any use to him.” If [general compassion feels too] abstract, go to someone specific. Often, it can be [for] ourselves. For example, if we don’t feel compassion in our hearts, we can feel compassion that we don’t feel compassionate. That’s also a source of compassion. Or if we hear blame and anger and rage, it can trigger sadness which moves to compassion. 

What are some Buddhist tools that we can use to create a more balanced and productive dialogue? For dialogue, firstly, I think you need to go into [the other person’s] shoes. Shantideva in the Bodhicharyavatara says it’s sacred to go into someone else’s shoes. The main tool here is listening, deep listening. The dialogue needs to really feel the other, giving respect to the other, a sense that the other is valuable, and a precious human being. Sometimes, dialogue is impossible. We can’t expect it to work all the time. Today, I met a woman in a local town. I felt pain in my heart when I heard [her call for violence]. I felt the impossibility of changing that view. I hadn’t the power to change that view. But I could do two things. I could express compassion to her. Secondly, I could ask some questions. I said, “This war in Gaza is the fourth or fifth time [this violence has] been going round. Every few years, it happens again. So if there is more violence and punishment and destruction and death, isn’t that [just] preparing the ground for the next one?” I also mentioned that there are children growing up now under the bombs [and seeing death], and they will grow up to be violent, because that’s the language that they learn. So I asked her, “What are the consequences of this view?” 

There’s a very nice sutra about that. The Buddha said, if someone has strong views and strong hate or anger, you can’t really talk to them or change anything. But never forget the power of equanimity. Your equanimity can help. And equanimity is one of the [tools] that you can bring into a dialogue, to show that it’s possible to stand, to be an island [onto yourself], [to] be steady, and [to] show another way. The other side [also] needs to feel safe. [To have a balanced dialogue you need to create a] safe space [through] friendliness and equanimity and kindness and a sense that we are equal. Then dialogue can start. One direction of dialogue that works is to share pain. Because sharing our personal pain and difficulty is, I would say, a deep place of honesty and listening, where something radically changes; you can’t really be an enemy anymore if you’re listening to each other’s pain.

As Buddhists, how do we combat violence? And are there any particular passages or sutras or anecdotes from the canons about Buddha’s penchant for nonviolence that you’d like to call on during times like these? From the Dhammapada: “For not by hatred do hatreds cease at any time in this place, they only cease with nonhatred, this truth is surely eternal.” I think that’s the core sentence, the core teaching here. It’s very simple and very direct. In a way, it’s what I said to that woman that I mentioned just now—that more violence doesn’t solve the problem. And any of the Buddha’s teachings that teach on causes and conditions would be in that realm [as well]. Because one of the problems is that if you’re acting from instant reactivity, it doesn’t give space to understand causes and conditions, pratītyasamutpāda, dependent arising, that things happen because of the conditions. The conditions create the result. What are the conditions that you’re creating now? This is not a question that’s asked by politicians very often. They’re just reacting and responding, often emotionally, sometimes increasing anxiety and fear. So anything that helps us to see causes and conditions here, pratītyasamutpāda, I consider to be very helpful.

What steps can everyone take to support their own personal healing and integration at this moment? Firstly, we really do need to forgive ourselves. If we feel anger and blame and primal emotions like that, we need to not blame ourselves, because we’re beings born in these bodies. Survival mind is very strong, and samsara is very strong. So do not take it personally but say, this is the nature of things. This is what’s arrived in my existence right now. 

Secondly, remember all the joy and well-being that we’ve experienced in our life, all the practice we’ve done in our life, which is needed now. We can remember: I’ve experienced joy in myself and my tissues and my breath and my being. And here it is, again, I’m going to go reconnect with the joy that I already know. 

And one final point, as much as we can connect with our ultimate nature, our buddhanature, we also connect with perfection. We are fundamentally perfect. Life hasn’t made a mistake; Dzogchen, the Natural Great Perfection, says it beautifully, that in the ultimate place, there aren’t mistakes. There is completion, perfection, if we look at things inclusively, in a nonpersonal way. The nature of existence is bigger than us, we need to allow life to take us, to have a life point of view instead of a personal point of view. That gives a lot of healing and support from a more nondual and ultimate place.

The post ‘Keep A Small Flame Burning’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Michael Easter is no stranger to discomfort. He explored the subject intimately in his first book, The Comfort Crisis, which detailed how the luxury and ease of modern amenities have shrunk both our comfort zones and capabilities. In his newest work, Scarcity Brain, Easter traveled from Iraq to the Amazon looking for clues about why we crave, including a week spent in a Benedictine monastery engaging in manual labor to get a better sense of how work, community, and reflection can stir us. 

Scarcity Brain is about the way we are wired to accrue far more food, information, stuff, influence, and pleasure than we need. It explores how the concept of “evolutionary mismatch”—in which traits that were advantageous thousands of years ago are destructive in a world of abundance—impacts our lives on a granular level. 

The upshot of Easter’s willingness to dive deeply into discomfort is what it reveals about how humans have survived and thrived, and the way we’re hardwired to crave. As Easter noted when we spoke, this knowledge can be the first step toward interrupting the habit loops that can cause us to feel helpless in the face of manifold desires. Call it a modern take on the four noble truths—suffering is mitigated when craving diminishes.

You write, “Decades of research have found that many of our biggest problems—at both the personal and societal levels—come from our modern ability to easily fulfill our ancient desire for more.” How can taking the long view and recognizing our biological context positively impact our everyday actions? We have drives that used to serve us in the past but oftentimes no longer do. Or, rather, they push us into “too much.” Understanding why we tend to overeat, overbuy, or overscroll can lift some guilt—you’re not a bad or lazy person. Rather, you’re doing what our species has always done. But we’re now on a different playing field. 

I think becoming aware of the evolutionary origins of most cravings and excesses can alleviate guilt and start to help you understand the issue. Even just developing awareness of a behavior often changes it (a phenomenon known as “the Hawthorne effect”). In other words, once you learn how the machine works, you can better decide how, and if, you want to use the machine. I now understand why I fall into scarcity loops of, say, checking social media and reading emails. Realizing that this is just my brain playing an ancient game that doesn’t make sense, applied to the current context, lifts some guilt and helps me spend my time elsewhere. 

This ancient game evolved to keep us alive. For example, finding food falls into the scarcity loop. Hunting and gathering is a random rewards game that we had to play to survive in the past. A psychological researcher I spoke with explained that this likely explains why unpredictable rewards are still today more attention-getting to us than predictable rewards. 

Your book details the many arenas in which our rampant desire has become destructive, from drug abuse to our relationship with food to consumerism. What is the most concerning example of scarcity brain in contemporary society, and is there any reason to be hopeful? It depends on how you want to measure it and how you calculate it. For example, if you went with what most shortens lives, it would likely be food. If you went with sheer emotional destructiveness (i.e., impact rather than range), it might be drug addiction. Really, I don’t think anyone knows. 

So my answer is the worst rampant desire is the rampant desire that’s hurting you, the person reading this. Most people have some habit that impacts them negatively. Beginning to get to the root of that can change your experience of life and lead you to live it better.

What would you say to those who would argue that progress, innovation, and affluence have all arisen thanks to our voracious appetites? It’s totally true. I consider the problems I’m pointing out in my book “good problems.” I’d prefer to have to think about not eating too much rather than not getting enough. 

But whether a voracious appetite is good or bad depends on context. For an underweight person: good! For a morbidly obese person: bad! So I think, in a way, we’ve hit a point where many of our advances clash with our evolutionary drives in a way that can lead us into trouble. This goes back to the mismatch theory. Abundance is great, but it has led to its own set of problems. 

You write, “Permanent and lasting satisfaction lies in finding enough.” But we seem to keep moving the goalposts on what “enough” entails. If we are wired to always want more, how can we accurately determine what is enough? I don’t think we can. I think it will always be shifting based on our experience. The book mostly asks people to understand where we are now and to do the tough work that will help them find what enough is for them—which could be constantly changing across a life span. I wish I had exactitudes, but life doesn’t work like that. 

In the context of today, most of what improves humans isn’t easy. It’s usually somewhat challenging, at least in the short term. But it gives us long-term rewards. So the tough work is unpacking why you have a certain behavior in the first place, then taking action to change it. I don’t believe humans do anything that doesn’t benefit them somehow, but our tendency is to choose short-term rewards over long-term growth. And, in fact, choosing short-term rewards can often hurt us in the long run. So getting out of that cycle is challenging.

For me, “enough” is simply feeling more engaged and focused on longer-term goals I deem more meaningful. I think that many of the times where we crave more—excess food, another purchase, checking and rechecking social media or email—we’re simply finding a quick relief from something else like frustration or boredom.

I’m not saying to avoid buying, snacking, or using social media. But I do think overdoing them is often a symptom. Getting more engaged in something big and meaningful transitions our attention to longer-term rewards and makes us less likely to crave and consume in ways we regret. It’s taking a “gear not stuff” mindset and applying it across the board. For example, I’ve found when I’m most engaged in writing, my social media usage goes down, I don’t snack just to snack, and I don’t buy crap I don’t need.

You write, “We seem to believe our internal and external conditions will be perfect and that we’ll be able to finally ‘arrive’ and rest once we fulfill our next want. This is a delusion.” Do you see the practice of mindfulness as a potentially useful tool for recognizing this delusion and responding to scarcity brain? Yes! I think mindfulness can absolutely help people recognize the nature of the beast. I don’t think it’s the only path, but it’s a time-tested one, with new research confirming some benefits. I do think we’re in a phase of discourse and research where mindfulness has become a sort of “answer for everything.” I don’t think it’s going to work for every person, for a variety of reasons that may be cultural, social, or biological. People should try mindfulness and whatever else they think might help them in order to find something that works.

Your time at the Benedictine monastery revealed the link between contemplation and contentment. Aside from donning robes and taking monk vows ourselves, how can we tap into that quietude on a daily basis? This readership, I’d imagine, would do well with meditation. In addition, time in nature is helpful (that’s what helps me most). For others, it might be traditional prayer. Or helping others. Effectively, asking the question, “How can I get out of myself?”

Meditation asks us to do that by contemplating what the “self” even is. Time in nature shows us that we’re part of something much larger—it inspires awe and helps us build perspective by making us realize how small our selves really are. Helping others gets us out of our own selves and leads to deeper rewards and satisfaction than, say, buying something on Amazon. Really, my message is just find whatever way of getting out of yourself gives you benefits. Try it all. Know that trying isn’t always going to be easy. As you see what works, continue with what resonates with you.

What have you found to be the most effective tool for fixing the craving mindset in your own life? Taking on experiences that build perspective and help others. My work forces me to travel into austere environments. Those are very perspective-giving. I then try to translate those travels and ensuing research around what they mean in the “big picture” into something that I hope can help others. I get a lot of great messages from readers that remind me why I do the things I do, which helps me keep my eye on the right ball. My experiences have made me really appreciative of what I have.

The post This Is Your Brain on Scarcity appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A Tibetan refugee who moved to the United States in her 20s, Tashi Chodron has been a community leader for decades, bringing people together through her translation work and her career in the arts. Today, she is the Himalayan Programs and Communities Ambassador at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. Tricycle recently caught up with Chodron to learn more about her background and her work at the museum.

On her experience at the Rubin Museum

I’ve taught a lot of programs [at the Rubin]. I host a weekly mindfulness meditation every Thursday now in person and virtually during pandemic. Our mindfulness meditation podcast was nominated as one of the best meditation podcast for 2022. I founded Voices of Tibet, where we interviewed Tibetan elders to record their stories. I’m the Himalayan Programs and Communities Ambassador, so I lead all kinds of events around that.

I joke when I give a tour that I feel like part of the antique pieces of the gallery. It opened in 2004, and I joined in 2006. I was invited to lunch with Gene Smith, and realized when I got there that I was also having lunch with Donald Rubin. I told him I had just come from the one-month retreat with my teacher, His Holiness Penor Rinpoche, and two days later, I got a phone call asking if I’d like to work here as a museum guide. For a dharma practitioner, a lay practitioner, this is like living in hundreds of monasteries in one place. 

On her virtual work with kids 

[The program I lead is] called Awakening Wisdom Experiences: Sunday Children Meditation, and it started with my own nieces in San Francisco. When COVID-19 happened and everything shut down, school shut down, and everyone had to spend time together in one little house. So of course there’s so much chaos and problems. So I sent just a three-minute mindfulness meditation to my nieces, which really helped them. They’d send me videos of them meditating. Other dharma families wanted to participate, and so it started to spread from the West Coast to the East Coast. So I have about fifteen kids who I spend time with virtually every Sunday. They didn’t have any experience in public speaking and were so shy, and the meetings together really boosted their confidence. 

[Recording of a student:] Hello, my name is Sonam Choden. I live in Woodside, Queens, New York. Thank you, Rubin Museum, for this opportunity. I have been attending weekly Sunday meditation class by teacher Tashi Chodron. I attend many online classes during the pandemic. But my favorite online class is the meditation class. It is my favorite because our teacher makes it very fun and easy. We learned how to meditate with sound or without sound. I like meditating with sound. It makes me very calm and feels very peaceful. Also, I learned that Buddha is a male or female form, and we learned many mantras too. I like saying the Om Mani Padme Hung. It is the mantra of compassion. And I learned why it is important to dedicate the prayers for all beings’ benefit. I also learned in class that, just like myself, everyone is looking for happiness and nobody wants to suffer. So it is very important to be compassionate and pray for everybody’s good. Being able to see my close friends in the meditation class and meditate together was very healing. And meditation taught me to simply pause and look at my breath. And take a few deep breaths in and out.

This became part of the Healing Practices exhibition on the sixth floor at the Rubin. It was a collection of stories from Himalayan Americans. 

Teaching these kids really inspired me. The parents would tell me they didn’t have to be so disciplinary. The parents told me that when the kids fought, they’d remind each other, “What did teacher Tashi say?” It’s so good. 

On her Vajrayana Practice 

Vajrayana is very esoteric. But one of the key understandings is if you cannot help others, at least do no harm. Because now in the Western world, where everybody is taught to outdo others, to throw the other person under the desk, you don’t have to do that. Do your own job and do whatever you can to help others. Do no harm. When challenges do happen, my practice of impermanence actually helps me. It’s testing me. Maybe something you don’t want will happen, but don’t fight and argue. Just understand that this too shall pass. 

In terms of the elaborate shrine offerings and all that in Vajrayana Buddhism, you do it to accumulate merit, to accumulate good karma. And I’ve heard people say, “Oh, that’s so selfish to do that for your own good karma.” But it’s important to understand that when you do these good things, you become a better person because of the good karma. When you are happier, it’s a butterfly effect—your partner, your family, your neighbor—you make everyone happy. It’s not selfish. And merit is accumulated through two methods: one is through this generosity, like lighting butter lamps and offering candles and flowers and so forth, and another is doing one’s own practice. When you do these things, the end result that actually matters is that you are giving rise to the wisdom, the true nature, the kindness, the basic goodness that is in each of us. So you’re able to subdue and tame the three poisons—desire, which is clinging, anger, and then the root cause of all these emotions is ignorance. When you’re aware of your true nature, it helps tame these emotions and give rise to the wisdom and the true nature which is in each of us. 

On her root teacher

Back in Tibet, everything’s so far away from each other so everyone is in their own little world. But after everyone came into exile in India, it was like a melting pot where Tibetans from the East, West, Central—everybody’s together whether you’re practicing Nyingma or Sakya or Gelug or Kagyu. 

My father was very close to His Holiness Penor Rinpoche. HH Penor Rinpoche’s brother, back in Tibet, was one of the guerrillas, and my dad was one of those. My dad and him were like brothers—they say that those brothers are closer than blood brothers. They’re brothers in war. My father was one of the fortunate ones who made it alive and escaped into India. 

Before the Tibetans were sent to different cluster sites in India, they were all stationed in the refugee camp. That’s where my mom and dad met. And it was there that HH Penor Rinpoche said to my father, “Come to South India. If I have a cup of tea, you will have a cup of tea.” So my mother and father moved, and that’s where I was born and raised.

I often say I [was] born at the foot of Namdroling monastery, also called Golden Temple, founding by HH Penor Rinpoche. The monastery has four to five thousand monks and nuns. 

We were all really fortune at that camp to have been taught by HH Penor Rinpoche. As you know, in  Vadrayana, once you take someone as your teacher, then you cannot go against [them]. But Buddha said, you know, you don’t have to treat me as a teacher right away. You can examine a teacher for many years, and the teacher examines students for many years too. 

Having a real teacher is so important. Every school of Tibetan Buddhism, when you say “HH Penor Rinpoche,” they all know. He is known as one of the greatest master of the 20th century. He was often referred to as Mahabodhisatta. I mean, for us just to feed our own mouth is so difficult, and his Holiness has three or four thousand monks and nuns that he gives shelter and a dharma education. Very, very powerful. I’m fortunate to have that deep connection. 

On her childhood and finding Buddhism

I was sent to all these Catholic boarding schools growing up in India. My real studies of Tibetan Buddhism came when I started attending His Holiness’s summer retreats at the Palyul center in upstate New York. He started them in 1997, and my monk brother, who is the lineage holder of the lama dance, travels with HH Penor Rinpoche along with all the other monks. My brother told me HH Penor Rinpoche said that no matter what was happening in the other monastery, he would come lead this retreat for the next ten years. So my brother said come and you will receive all the transmissions from His Holiness. So, in 2000, I was able to take off work and come for the whole month. And that was it. It was the best thing I ever did. And Rinpoche speaks in Tibetan and is one of the greatest translators, so I get both! I was totally hooked. 

It’s sort of a one-month crash course. Every day there’s a teaching with about 150 students who have come from all over the world to receive these teachings. And hundreds of Himalayan people come on the weekends from Jackson Heights.  

Every year [after that], I was able to go. It was so compassionate. And then Holiness left in 2009. When he passed, there was this incredible rainbow over the monastery. It was amazing. There are videos—look it up. 

The post An Interview with Tashi Chodron, Himalayan Programs and Communities Ambassador at the Rubin Museum of Art appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Stephen Batchelor began making collages from found materials in 1995. Until recently, however, they were seen only by a few family members in Stephen’s home. This changed on May 20, 2023, when a small exhibition of eight collages opened at Galerie 727, in Montmorillon, France. The show, which included both old and recent work, was curated by Keith Donovan, Galerie 727’s director.

I attended the opening of the exhibition, and interviewed both Stephen and his brother, David Batchelor, in the gallery the following day. Surrounded by the collages, and in front of an audience of about twenty-five people, we discussed what it meant to Stephen to see his work in an art gallery setting for the first time. We also considered how David, an artist and writer who has focused on color for more than thirty years, viewed Stephen’s work as well as how their relationship as brothers—Stephen is two years older than David—may have impacted the work on the walls.

The following is an edited version of our public conversation. For more information about Stephen’s collages and his process, read Stephen’s article “Bringing Collages to Life.” 

Ronn Smith: This is the first time you are seeing your collages on white walls in a public space, Stephen. Looking at them in this environment, do you see the work differently?

Stephen Batchelor: I hang them on walls at home, where they are seen by Martine and family members, but they are intensely private pieces of work. I discovered at the opening of the exhibition last night that once the collages are shown publicly, they cease to be mine. It was both awkward and fascinating to watch people looking at the work, to see how complete strangers entered into a relationship with the collages. They do so in a way that is completely independent of any intention I might have had in making them. It is a “letting go” in Buddhist language, and in that way they take on a kind of completion. Until this show happened, they were still incomplete on some level.

RS: David, as someone who has devoted his professional life to color, what do you see when you look at Stephen’s collages?

David Batchelor: We all experience color, but we can’t fully commit it to language. Color always escapes our attempts to codify, describe, or explain it. It’s impossible to know color, but for me that is precisely what is so compelling about it.

What I see in Stephen’s collages is a willingness to let color drive the work. There’s a willingness to embrace color, to gain pleasure from color. We often subordinate color to symbolic, mathematical, expressionist, or philosophical notions about meaning. Stephen’s work is free of those tendencies, and I like that.

Take this work, for example. There are more than four colors in it, but the four color names we associate with those blocks are red, yellow, blue, white. I’m told they are the four primary colors of Buddhism, but I didn’t know that … and frankly I don’t care [laughs]. It interests me to know what motivated Stephen to make this work, but for me it’s about acknowledging and enjoying the sense that there is no one thing we can call red, yellow, blue, or even white. Color is multiple, always. When Stephen said they were the four primary colors of Buddhism, that’s subordinating color to something else. And for me, it doesn’t matter.

RS: Does that matter to you, Stephen?

SB: I’ve struggled with this. I don’t start as a collage maker, but as a Buddhist scholar and practitioner. When I create these works, I tend to read them through the matrix of ideas I already inhabit—those of Buddhist philosophy. But the start of this process had absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism. I was on a train from London to Devon in 1995, and I put the stuff in my pockets and bag out on the table. And suddenly I thought: this rubbish could become not rubbish, not stuff that I would otherwise throw away, disregard, reject. That was the primary trigger for beginning the process of organizing found material and making these collages.

I now see my collage work as a conversation between the imagination, which is working through the nonconceptual elements of found colored paper, cloth, plastics, and so on, and my own struggle to make sense of what Buddhism means. In that way, I see it as a dialectic. Every collage series I make is an accompaniment to a book I am writing. This doesn’t mean I’m writing a book and thinking: what color should I put there? No, they are completely separate processes. But in some way they support each other.

For me, the fourfold-ness of all of these works is not just about the four primary colors of Buddhism, but that the Buddhist philosophy and practice is very much founded on multiples of four. I like to think of this fourfold-ness in Buddhism as a kind of primary logic that helps us come to terms with being human in this world. In that regard, I see my books and these collages as trying to articulate something in common, but what that something is I can’t really say.

RS: Texture plays an important role in these collages. Could each of you talk about the texture of these works?

DB: Color is never fully independent of the material that carries it. All of the colors we deal with are embodied in materials, and those materials have their own qualities of weight, transparency, reflectiveness. That just adds another dimension to the experience of color.

SB: I need to acknowledge at this point that the focus on color is in fact inspired by David’s own work with color. I don’t know if I would have done these works if he had not been doing something of a very similar nature.

DB: You never said that before [laughs].

SB: But it’s true. Your interest in color stimulated a similar curiosity in my own mind, but I work exclusively with materials I find on the street—wherever people drop or throw it away. It’s not like something you find in an art supply store. In other words, it’s not a nice, pristine sheet of blue, red, or yellow paper. By working with found materials, I’m working with materials that to a large extent are damaged or distressed.

DB: In other words, they have already had a life.

SB: Exactly. They’ve had a life. They’ve done something.

DB: And that life shows up in the work somehow.

SB: That’s exactly how it works, David. Kids will eat a bar of chocolate, and then they’ll crunch up the little green wrapping paper and throw it away.

DB: Idiots.

SB: Not idiots. I’m very grateful for these people, or else I wouldn’t have any material. They chuck the wrapper, and a car might drive over it. So when I glue it to a flat surface, the complex wrinkles are still embedded in that piece of color. This is what makes that particular piece of color much more interesting than something I could have bought in a shop. The texture becomes incredibly important, but it also affects the way light reflects off the work.

DB: There’s a fabulous quotation by [French poet] Charles Baudelaire who said that modernity is “the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent.” I think it’s a beautiful summary of what was important for Baudelaire and contemporary artists to attend to—those fleeting, transient moments of everyday life that you might otherwise ignore, or just not see. Baudelaire then followed that by saying (and this is the bit everyone forgets): but that is the half of art, the other half is “the eternal and the immutable,” whatever that might mean. For Baudelaire, art must attend to the everyday, but it also has to attend to what I would say is its history, its longevity. Art is about the world we encounter directly, but it is also about every work that has ever been made. You have addressed the modernity of your work, Stephen, but it also is embedded in the tradition of collage that is at least one hundred years old.

RS: How has your relationship as brothers informed what each of you are doing now? What kind of influence have you had on each other?

DB: We were brought up in a town outside of London. We are both very aware, I think, that our mother always directed us toward the visual arts. We were strongly encouraged to enjoy the visual arts in whatever way we wanted to. We had art books and magazines. When I was a young teenager, Stephen began taking photographs, and for several years photography was your principal interest. And then what happened?

SB: In England, when you turn 18, you have to pass A Level exams. I had been offered a place in a course on photography at the Regent Street Polytechnic, in London, but to get that place I had to pass two A Levels. I was taking French and art at the time. I did quite well in French but failed the A Level in art. If I hadn’t failed art, I would have gone to Regent Street Polytechnic and studied photography.

But because I failed the A Level, I had at least a year ahead of me with nothing to do. I told our mother that I was going to hitchhike around Europe, go to art museums and galleries, and educate myself in European culture before taking the A Level again. Of course that didn’t happen. After two or three months hitchhiking around Europe, I followed the very strong drift east, and in 1972, I ended up in Dharamsala, in the community around the Dalai Lama. From that point on, my life took on another direction, that of Buddhist scholarship, which has been my career.

DB: I passed my art A Levels, but I failed French. [laughter] It’s actually true. But the pleasure for me is the recognition of how volatile …

SB: Or contingent.

DB: … how contingent everything is as a result of one failed exam. You can never fully explain these moments logically, but they can shape your entire life.

SB: True.

DB: We were occasionally in touch during the fifteen years Stephen was away, but it wasn’t until he and Martine moved to Devon in 1985 that we began really to talk with each other. Instead of going off in different directions, it made me feel we had responded differently to the same set of anxieties, worries, dissatisfactions with England in the 1960s.

SB: Working as a full-time Buddhist in the West means that you’re more or less living in a relatively small bubble of people with similar interests. As David said, Martine and I were living in Devon and involved in a meditation center, but to some degree we were still marginal, working on the fringe. But my relationship with David allowed me to have a conversation outside the world in which I was embedded. It was through David, in particular, that I was able to conduct a conversation with the world of art and aesthetics not only through his own work but by meeting his friends and going to galleries in London.

That was very, very fruitful both personally and in what I think of as the main thrust of my writing work, that is, how do we bring East and West together? How do we bring a non-native religion like Buddhism into the discourse of modernity that we experience in this secular world? My engagement in art, particularly through David, provided a vehicle by which I could explore that particular dimension of my relationship with my own culture.

In some respects, I see this artwork as a way to allow Buddhist ideas to be freed of Buddhism.

It also helped me find a language—not just a spoken or written language, but an aesthetic language—in which I could express myself in terms of my interest in Buddhist ideas. I think Buddhism is quite rigid, a bit stuck in its aesthetics. I love Buddhist art, but I don’t see it really going anywhere anymore. I feel that if Buddhist ideas are to really engage our culture, they must do so through the arts, through film, theater, painting, whatever it might be. In some respects, I see this artwork as a way to allow Buddhist ideas to be freed of Buddhism, and to help us find another cultural discourse that can address the issues of our world today.

The post On Collages and Color appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Her lilting voice was powerful. The body may have been aging, and physical strength not what it once was, but the voice and the tack-sharp mind that it came from were constant. “You didn’t ask me about the Beloved Community. It’s important that we talk about that. It was what [Martin Luther King, Jr.] first dreamed of, and Thay picked up on the concept, and both worked so hard for this ideal.” 

I turned my camera back on, adjusted the tripod, and continued the one-on-one interview I had been granted by Sr. Chan Khong, the Vietnamese peace activist, cofounder of the Plum Village Buddhist Monastery in southwest France, and, for all practical purposes, the person who is filling the vacuum since the physical death of Thich Nhat Hanh. I was in awe, and in some disbelief, that I had been given this wonderful opportunity to sit and visit with such a revered spiritual figure at Magnolia Grove Monastery in Batesville, Mississippi.

Sr. Chan Khong was the first fully ordained monastic of Thich Nhat Hanh and one of the original emissaries of engaged Buddhism. And here I was, a photographer from Texas and a relative newcomer to Zen Buddhism, about to interview the person one of the monastic brothers at Magnolia Grove had described as a “rock star.” Tupelo, Mississippi, may have given the world Elvis Presley, but the more than 300 individuals who attended the “Learning True Love” retreat in Batesville were eagerly awaiting their own star, and we would not be disappointed.

Sr. Chan Khong afforded retreat attendees compassionate insights on confronting their grief, mindfully working through daily difficulties, and utilizing spiritual tools to love themselves and others more authentically. She was present and visible, or, in other words, engaged. Sr. Chan Khong rendered her energy to all of us. Two mantras she repeated continually during the retreat were “flower fresh, mountain solid.” This was her exhortation to each of us: stay fresh, stay solid, immovable, and rooted. There was a pathway out of our suffering if only we dared to work through it nobly and mindfully.

She also showed us her rock star status quite literally on the several occasions she serenaded us with beautiful songs and chants in Vietnamese, French, and English, each a parable, a teaching, an insight by which we could walk our own paths in a more genuine way. Her strong, vibrant, and accordant voice would fill the Rising Tide Meditation Hall and dining area; it was as if an angel were singing to us. She seemed her happiest when she was able to offer us a lesson through song, and each of us was more than receptive to her enthusiastic performances.

Marie Dean, a volunteer at the retreat, was visiting from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and reflected on the impact the singing and chanting had on her during the deep relaxation sessions led by Sr. Chan Khong. “I didn’t always know what words she sang, but I knew what she was singing about. She was singing about her love for me and the community. During the deep relaxation exercises, she helped me drop my defenses. I felt like an infant being sung to sleep by her mother.” Caroline Felker, who lives in a closer proximity to Magnolia Grove, in Oxford, Mississippi, and has made numerous trips to the monastery, offered the following: “What a blessing to be in her presence, with her lively songs and funny stories. I felt so honored.”

The monastics—especially the younger nuns, who see her as a mother—were equally excited to welcome Sr. Chan Khong. Sr. Harmony, who has called Magnolia Grove home for the past six years, told me: “For me, Sr. Chan Khong is like a cool, clear stream, flowing free wherever it goes. That stream makes fresh grass, and trees cool themselves there. She has loved and helped people with an empty and boundless heart.” Sr. Boi Nghiem, a dharma teacher at Magnolia Grove Monastery, said, “Sr. Chan Khong is the representation and expression of true love. Her love to offer happiness and lessen the suffering of others is a reminder for me to live each moment meaningfully.”

True love was indeed palpable during the retreat, the enormity of Sr. Chan’s visit to a Buddhist monastery in northern Mississippi not lost on anyone. Visiting from Birmingham, Alabama, Chris Davis extended the following: “Her presence was strongly felt whenever she entered the meditation or dining halls. She was fully engaged with any individual she was having a conversation with. At 85, [she showed] no signs of slowing down.”

Before her reminder to me to visit the concept of the Beloved Community, Sr. Chan Khong addressed my questions, ranging from mindfulness in the West, the idea of interbeing taught more broadly, to what made her smile looking back at her life of service. She also left a message to the younger generation coming up behind us.

Mindfulness is growing steadily but slowly in the West, and more specifically, in the United States. Since Thich Nhat Hanh established his monasteries here, what has that meant for the teachings, and are you happy with the spread of mindfulness? Mindfulness is an aspiration. It is something that can help each of us suffer less and, in turn, help others to suffer less. I am glad to see the monasteries that we established here in the US continuing the teaching of mindfulness. There are so many things that can distract us from simply just being. Especially here in the US, complications arise, demands are trying to be met, and the individual often doesn’t seem to have time to just sit and be. So what our monastics are doing here is important and can help not just the person, but the person’s family. If we commit to engaging in mindfulness, slowly we see that transformation is happening everywhere, like a beautiful garden.

The world is tired of suffering, and certainly tired of more war, conflict, and violence. How can the message of interbeing be taught more broadly to provide hope? Touching the earth is touching others and ourselves. Seeing that each person is connected. This is what Thay taught me and the first monastics in Vietnam. If we are able to look deeply at another person’s suffering, if we become aware of them through loving speech, generosity, and giving, we can call this “true love.” This allows us to see others as ourself, and we will nurture the desire to see them dwelling peacefully in the present moment. When we are not suffering, we can see clearly, with true desire to help others not suffer. We can help take care of their pain. This is why interbeing must be taught more widely. But it must be taught with the desire to end suffering and being able to see us in each and every aspect of life. 

Looking back at your journey through life, what has made you smile? What is one message you would like to give to others, especially youth? I have gained much joy from the interest in and spread of mindfulness, particularly from our earliest efforts. Not just here in the US and Canada, but also in Vietnam, France, and other parts of Asia. Mindfulness can help transform the person, which, in turn, can help transform the world. 

As I spoke last night, I mentioned ‘flower fresh, mountain solid.’ There is a beautiful nature, but also a strong nature, to living in the present moment. When I visit the monastics at our monasteries and see them holding steadfast to these teachings, it brings me great happiness. My message, as you say, to younger generations coming up is simple: Touch the earth! Touching the earth is a beautiful act of true love. Be aware of our planet and be aware of others, and in this way we can help to alleviate great pain.

May we turn to the concept and teaching of the Beloved Community? What is it, and why is it important? Our teacher [Thich Nhat Hanh] admired Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of a Beloved Community. We were doing this as monastics; however, he called it a monastic practice of mindfulness. It was the same. It was the dream where all live ethically, no quarreling, a brother and sisterhood and understanding of each other. When we are doing this together, practicing together, we have a spiritual home. We are aware of each other, where we are and how we are. It is a rule or a guideline to live together in harmony. There must be respect for one another so we can build an even greater community.

Sr. Chan Khong leading a releasing grief session

Releasing grief session

Sr. Harmony

Bell pagoda

♦

Photographer | Window to the World – The Photography of Jerome Cabeen | Beaumont

Follow Jerome Cabeen on Instagram: @jeromecabeenphotography

The post A Mother Visits Mississippi appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I was a high school student at the time of Thailand’s 2014 coup d’état. I turned 18 on September 10, 2014, and as I considered the sources of my society’s problems, I saw forced conscripted military service as one of them, violating the freedom and rights of Thai people. Thus, I published a statement that I would not serve in the military.

Since July 10, 2022, I have been ordained as a monk, studying and practicing Buddhism with a strong faith in the teachings of the Buddha. Without coercion to the service, I wish to continue studying and practicing Buddhism as much as I desire. However, I do not want to use the privilege of being a monk to escape military service or give the impression that I am running away and using the temple as a shield, which would contradict my statement from almost nine years ago.

Therefore, I have decided to disrobe and return to household life, willingly struggling in the legal process to uphold my beliefs and guide my Thai society toward a path of peace, nonviolence, and no military conscription.

However, before disrobing, I must complete some unfinished tasks. I need to pass the Pali examination and will be retaking one subject on April 15–16, which I devoted time to study for. After that, I will ask for some preparation time before disrobing, which I plan to do before the end of April. During this very short period, I want to maintain myself as a Buddhist monk and ask for the kindness of everyone to give me a chance to cultivate the peaceful serenity that suits a monk who follows the noble life.

Tricycle sent Netiwit several questions about his life and plans. His answers are below.

What was your childhood like? Where did you grow up, and what was your experience with Buddhism as a young person? I grew up in a middle-class family in Samut Prakarn Province, near Bangkok. Despite my parents’ divorce when I was 6 years old and the financial insecurity we faced following the 1997 Tom Yum King crisis, my family was diverse in terms of beliefs and interests. My grandmother, whom I lived with between the ages of 10 and 16, was a vegetarian and a Mahayana Buddhist who ran her own vegetarian shop. As a child, I was rebellious and skeptical of many beliefs, including those of my family. I felt that I needed to find my own meaning and purpose in life. My father, who was interested in politics, helped shape my interest in the subject, and I eventually discovered Buddhism and the political history of my country. 

I found Sulak Sivaraksa’s writings to be especially compelling and became involved with his magazine, Pacharayasala, which means “Great Teacher,” and which had been in existence for over forty years. I developed a strong interest in the connection between spirituality and political awareness, which led me to pursue a path of morality, idealism, and critical thinking. As the youngest editor of Sulak’s magazine, I have gained valuable experience and insights into Buddhism, politics, and the importance of critical thinking. 

Tell us about your time as a monk. What led you to be a monk, and what have you been studying? Before becoming a monk, I was already critical of mainstream education. As a student in high school, I witnessed oppression, such as strict rules about hairstyles, and I became vocal about it. My objection to the enforcement of “traditional” hairstyles comes from the Kalama Sutta, where the Buddha teaches that we don’t need to believe something just because it is tradition. Some friends and I founded the student group called TERA (Thailand Education Revolution Alliance) to collect petitions across the country to change the rule. We even debated about it on a popular news show and gained national attention. Later on, I cofounded The Education for Liberation of Siam, which focused more broadly on creating education that aims to liberate student minds and be critical of authoritarianism in society, not just school rules. After finishing my high school education, I took a gap year to study at Deer Park Institute in Bir, India. During this time, I learned English, and also about practitioners of Vajrayana and the suffering of Tibetans in exile. It was also during this time that the 2014 coup happened in Thailand, disrupting our hopes for change. 

The military regime imposed strict rules and brainwashed people to admire the military, and I witnessed this firsthand when I returned from India. I became involved in opposing the Junta while studying at Chulalongkorn University, known as the bastion of conservatism. My friends and I demanded the student union act on behalf of the students to fight for democratic change. During this time, I also learned about the Hong Kong Protest and became friends with Joshua Wong, whom I highly admired as a devout Christian fighting for social justice. We tried to create an international translation activism before the Milk Tea Alliance became popular. I voiced the need to change the culture in my university, and we succeeded in many ways, but sometimes we faced setbacks. However, I won the administrative court case and later became the president of the student union. Recently, the university punished me when I invited the leader of the student protest to speak at a freshman orientation. As a result, I lost my position once again. 

The many struggles I faced often made me feel sad and lost. In September of 2014, on my 18th birthday, a few months after the coup, I declared myself a conscientious objector because I knew that I would have to face military service in the future, which is this year (2023). I understand that this might be one of the hardest things in my life, so I am preparing myself and finding more peace and encouragement in my heart. I always believe that if politics or society could change, individuals also have to change. We must cultivate virtue and find more peace and less want in our hearts. I consider Buddhism my native religion, and I have always read about it. But now, as a monk, I can study and practice it more deeply. I should mention that Joshua Wong, my friend and ally in social justice, has inspired me with his faith to seek more meaning and purpose in my life.

What are the laws around military service? Are monks not exempt from service? Do the Buddhist authorities not protest? In Thailand, it is stated in the constitution that every male must serve in the military for two years. However, in reality, there are various ways to avoid military service due to the poor conditions, humiliations, degradations, and even deaths from bullying that occur in military camps. For instance, some students in high school can apply for the Territorial Defense Student program, which requires attending military training once a week for three years and staying in camps for five to seven days per year. However, this program requires purchasing its uniforms and enduring military indoctrination, making it similar to serving in the military. I empathize with poor and ordinary students who do not have the financial means to join the Territorial Defense Student program and therefore have to serve in the military.

Additionally, it is heartbreaking to see videos of monks having to draw a card from a box—if they receive a black card, they are exempt; a red card means they have to serve in the military for two years. Many monks appear heartbroken and cry in these situations. However, there is a way for monks to apply to avoid military service if they have completed certain degrees of moral education within the monk system. If they remain in the monkhood until 30 years old, they will also be allowed to not serve in the military. I have this privilege myself, but I have decided not to use it. Instead, I believe that every person in Thailand, regardless of their financial status or social status, should have the right to live according to their own beliefs and values, such as nonviolence. I have made the decision to refuse military service and will go to trial and will face the penalties.

What is the danger you face if you do not comply with the authorities? Refusing military service comes with significant risks. Firstly, I would be considered to have violated Thai law, which would lead to me losing my monk status. I do not want to put my temple under any pressure from the state due to my actions. Additionally, I would face consequences for my unlawful actions, including potential jail time of up to three years. While I am unsure how the court would rule in my case, I am willing to face the truth and the consequences of my decision.

Is there anything else we should know about your situation and Thai militarism? Thailand’s history is deeply intertwined with militarism, with a long history of military coups and a powerful military-industrial complex that permeates all aspects of society. The conscription process is particularly troubling, as it is riddled with corruption, allowing the rich to avoid service while the poor are forced to go and often face harsh conditions. As an advocate for nonviolence, I have seen firsthand the devastating effects of militarization in my country. This is why I believe that the abolition of conscription is crucial to ensure that every individual is granted the dignity and respect they deserve. By taking a stand against mandatory military service, I hope to inspire others to challenge the status quo and work toward creating a more compassionate and just society. My situation is not unique: many young people in Thailand are faced with the same dilemma of having to choose between serving in the military and maintaining their beliefs and dignity. 

As a Buddhist, I believe that my actions are in line with the principle of abhayadana, the “gift of fearlessness,” which means giving others the confidence and security they need to live without fear. By refusing to comply with mandatory military service, I am offering an alternative vision of a more compassionate society. Though this decision carries risks and potential consequences, I believe that the pursuit of justice and peace is worth it. I hope that my actions will inspire others to question the militaristic culture in Thailand, and around the world, and to seek nonviolent solutions to conflicts. Together, we can create a better future for all.

The post The Monk and the Military  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

David Nichtern is, by most metrics, a very successful person. As a longtime practitioner in the Shambhala lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, he has been empowered as a senior teacher and has served as the director of Karme Choling Meditation Center in Vermont and the Dharmadhatu Meditation Center in Los Angeles. As a musician, he won four Emmy awards, has been nominated for a Grammy twice, founded Dharma Moon and 5 Points Records, and has worked with Stevie Wonder, Jerry Garcia, Lana Del Rey, Maria Muldaur, and Paul Simon, to name a few.

In a new book, Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck (Wisdom, October 8, 2019), he offers his advice from both sides of his life on how to figure out what one wants to do and how to get there. Tricycle spoke with Nichtern about the book and his conviction that we do not need to separate our spiritual pursuits and our career goals.

You titled your book Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck, three topics that aren’t often talked about in the same breath. What inspired you to write a book about this? This book is the culmination of my actual life as a practitioner, a creative, an entrepreneur, and a businessperson, and it challenges the long-accepted divide between spiritual life and the way we operate in the world, in which our livelihood and issues of money are seen as soiled. On the one hand, people will say that a yoga class should be free, and on the other hand, people have the notion that topics like ethics should be reserved for church on Sunday. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” But all of those elements exist together in people’s actual lives. The people in the spiritual communities and the secular communities are the same people.

The third piece, after spirituality and making a living, is creativity, which speaks to our individual life journeys, or what I call the life puzzle. Every person comes to a point where they need to express themselves as a unique individual. Some people might think that goes against Buddhist teachings on non-self or non-ego, but that’s a total misunderstanding of the definition of anatman (Skt., no-self). We do exist individually, but we don’t exist absolutely individually.

A fundamental Buddhist teaching is that the path to end suffering involves letting go of desire, but this book teaches people how to pursue their goals. Where does your work fit within the renunciant traditions? It’s important to be extremely precise about the root of suffering. The origin of suffering is not desire, but attachment, fixation, or objectification of the desire. And the operation where you cling to your projections and solidify them is what is being renounced. There is a hidden question here: Is it possible to have a career, a livelihood, or a relationship that does not become fuel for clinging, and therefore create further suffering?

In the renunciant path, they say, no, you can’t do it. For certain people, that is the appropriate path. It was the right path for Pema Chödrön, who was a household practitioner and decided to become a nun. It’s an honorable tradition within the Buddhist world, and the monastics and the nuns are centrally located historically. But so are the householder yogis and the patrons, who are part of the larger society.

Related: Death, Sex, Enlightenment & Money

In today’s society, we have little to no role for renunciation. We don’t have the type of framework that was once common in India and Tibet. People who don’t work are called hippies or bums. So we have to move toward creating a relationship to livelihood that doesn’t create further suffering. 

One of the practices you offer in the book is metta meditation, which you apply to the business advice to not negotiate against yourself. How do those fit together for you? When you start a job, for instance, you negotiate an agreement to work at that place. Now, if you have low self-esteem, you probably didn’t create the optimal circumstance to be appreciated and respected for what your capabilities are. Negotiating against yourself, in the broader sense, is a matter of not being kind to yourself, not appreciating yourself. And on the flip side, you don’t have to be an arrogant psychopath either. It’s a middle way kind of situation.

Working a job or being involved in the business world is an extraordinary learning opportunity and a very underrated spiritual training ground. You spend eight hours a day at work, but only 20 minutes to an hour a day practicing on the cushion. But those eight hours are also a practice. You’re practicing being kind to yourself, having compassion for others, being insightful, developing good work habits, teamwork, leadership, and so on. 

You also write about self-deception. How do you suggest we find the balance between self-compassion and self-criticism in our careers? The short answer is: it’s no different from anywhere else where you spend time and create relationships. The underlying principles are the same because there’s only one person, which is you. Those principles are mindfulness, awareness, compassion, consideration for others and for oneself, a sense of adventure and enjoyment, and appreciation for life itself. None of that is excluded from the sense of personal journey that each of us are undergoing. 

I’ve watched spiritual communities develop for 50 years, and up until recently, this part of people’s lives has been a huge missing link. People go get money so they can go off on their retreats, as if the job itself were unholy. I was taught that the job is part of the sacred environment.

The term McMindfulness is often used to criticize people for using spiritual practices without an ethical framework. How is your project different from mindfulness as a way to relieve stress so that employees can work harder? That’s a good question. Sometimes what is being taught is what I would call pre-mindfulness, which is relaxation—like using a body scan to improve sleep. I don’t see any big harm in that; it’s better than taking an Ambien, for sure. But it’s pre-meditation. Mindfulness involves both relaxation and becoming more aware of what’s going on by focusing the mind and observing non-judgmentally. If you teach somebody how to do that practice, you may not be taking them all the way to full realization, but you’re helping them to work with their minds, to become more stable and focused, and to relieve stress, which is certainly a form of suffering.

You’re suggesting that the boss at the office could usurp that practice: “Great. Now that you’re focused, work harder, work more efficiently.” And I’ve said before that mindfulness alone could make somebody a better assassin. I have some meditation students who are coming from the corporate world, and the thing I tell them is that there is a second stage—the B-side of the mindfulness record—and that is related to discovery, ethics, and compassion. 

I start every student with mindfulness, and so would any classical monastic Buddhist—the Karmapa [the head of the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism], for example. After developing focus and stability, there’s a second step, which is making friends with yourself and understanding yourself and the world better. Then the third process, which I call transformation, involves shifting your habits to make them more beneficial for other people. And those practices actually apply very well to leadership and teamwork.

What role does creativity play in this schema? Creativity is important to me because I’m a musician. That’s how I’ve made my living. My whole adult life I have had to make things up and get you to pay me for it. Otherwise, I can’t pay my rent. What I do is completely subjective in a way. It comes from nowhere; no one can explain where creativity comes from. Yet, whether or not you call yourself a creative, every human being is creative all the time.

Even though from a Buddhist point of view our sense of individuality might be distorted, our sense of being an individual, creative force in the universe is not distorted. Each flower, each tree, each insect has its own individuality. This is a tremendous part of whether people are happy or not.

Related: Why Right Livelihood Isn’t Just About Your Day Job

I make a distinction between your offering—poetry, music, art—and your livelihood. They can be the same thing, but that is a huge choice. The day you say, this is what I want as my livelihood, there’s another conversation to be had that can be very helpful. I know a lot of people who say, I’m doing this, but I’d really rather be doing that, and a lot of what they need to learn is simply business skills: how to make contacts, how to negotiate deals, understanding royalties and intellectual property, and so forth.

A lot of the advice you offer seems to have nothing to do with spirituality. For example, you write about the importance of understanding intellectual property. Why did you include those sections? The whole thrust of the book is saying, find your vision, and once you do, then begin to bring it down to earth. This is the principle of joining heaven and earth, a classical paradigm in Asian thought. Heaven is the progenitor or the primordial—the pure realm of mind or consciousness in Buddhist terms. Earth is the realm of relative reality, which is subject to impermanence. If people have too much heaven, they have vision but don’t know what to do with it. If they’re too mired in the earth, they have no vision, no direction, no kind of ultimate sense of what they’re doing.

So, you’re right. A lot of what I discuss in the book is earthly wisdom. But many spiritual people have bypassed earthly wisdom at their own risk. Let’s say your cabinet is falling off, and you see that you need a Phillips head screwdriver. If you have the right tool and understand that tool, you’d be able to fix your cabinet. Otherwise you have somebody who’s supposedly enlightened but they’re standing there with a flathead screw and a Phillips head screwdriver. To me, that is not an enlightened person.

It reminds me of when you see a spiritual center with terrible graphic design. Or a funky website that makes it hard to get information or register, or when you get there, stuff is not working. I firmly believe that there’s a way to integrate these things that’s positive for everybody.

 A lot of people harbor stress and shame around issues of money. Did that factor into your decision to write the book? Sure. Stress and shame are spiritual problems. Those are not financial problems. There’s nothing inherent that I can see about proper livelihood that needs to be stressful or shameful. But those are obstacles. When someone bypasses that by saying I’m spiritually enlightened, but I’m stressed out and shamed about livelihood or money, what I hear is that’s the next area that really needs to be illuminated. That doesn’t mean becoming a greedy, stuffed pig. It means being a healthy person.

This interview was originally published on October 8, 2019.

The post David Nichtern Wants to Make You Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Born in Danang, Vietnam, Brother Phap Dung escaped his home country with his family at the age of nine, and became a refugee in the US. The family settled in the Los Angeles area, where Phap Dung grew up and later studied architecture at the University of Southern California. After working in the architecture industry, Phap Dung felt compelled to “change his career,” renounce his worldly possessions, and pursue monastic life. So, after leaving the US for France, Phap Dung became ordained as a monk in 1998 under his teacher, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh.

Today, Phap Dung is a senior teacher at Plum Village, and, when he’s not teaching mindfulness classes, he devotes himself to ecological activism. As a part of Tricycle’s upcoming Buddhism and Ecology Summit, Phap Dung will speak on a panel about sustaining emotional wellbeing in a time of crisis. Watch “Connection, Community, and Compassion: Resources for our Emotional Wellbeing” on Wednesday, April 20 at 1 p.m. EDT and find more events here.

***

Where did you grow up? I was born in Danang, Vietnam and at the age of nine escaped Vietnam with my family to America after the war. Our refugee family eventually resettled in the Los Angeles area, where I mostly grew up and started my career as an architect before leaving to France to become a monk.

When did you become a Buddhist and why? I became a Buddhist monk or, another way to frame it, changed my career at the age of 29 after working for about four years in the architecture industry. My family is Buddhist and I grew up going to the temples on Sundays like Christian people do for Sunday church service.

What’s your daily practice? I wake up at 5 a.m., light a candle, and brew some hot tea to drink before attending the morning sitting meditation and service. I then practice qigong before eating breakfast. Next, I usually offer classes, attend meetings, or do manual physical work depending on the day of the week. I would then practice walking meditation with my community before lunch. After a nap, my afternoon is another block of similar activities as the morning, followed by afternoon sitting and chanting service. After a light dinner, the evening is for studying and enriching our hearts before retiring to sleep.

How did you practice change during the pandemic? I traveled less and began to teach more online because our monastery hosted less or no retreats with in-person participants. I had more time to enrich myself with study in a variety of areas.

What was your longest retreat? In our tradition, our community hosts a three-month Rains Retreat every winter, where we stay in one place to practice and study. Other seasons, we either offer week-long or weekend retreats at the monastery or when we travel to other countries.

Best part about retreat? We can offer our experiences and learn from one another about our personal and collective suffering. We can then find ways to heal, care for, and thrive from this collective spiritual energy generated during a retreat.

Hardest part about retreat? It’s not so hard to enjoy a retreat in nature and with people with the same intention—to transform and better themselves and thus the world with their practice.

What’s the longest you’ve gone without meditating? How do you get back on track? Personally, how I see meditation is that there’s practice, and then there is the practice of non-practice, which is crucial for me and for the life force to flow and for true healing and transformation to take place on a deeper level.

Book on your night stand? Understanding Our Mind by Thich Nhat Hanh, which is the 50 verses on the Buddhist psychology of transformation.

What do you like to do in your free time? To hike into the mountains, find a secluded place, hang a hammock, and enjoy the embrace of Mother Nature and warmth of Father Sun.

Who is your teacher? Master Thich Nhat Hanh ordained me as a monk in 1998.

What non-Buddhist inspires you? Victor Frankl, Father Richard Rohr, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Sir Roger Penrose.

Coffee or tea? Tea

Favorite subject in school? Math and art history

What was your first job? Selling roses for the holidays on street corners as a teenager.

What would you do if you weren’t a Buddhist teacher? An architect working for social change.

The post Meet Meditation Teacher and Environmental Activist Brother Phap Dung appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.