In a recent solo exhibition hosted at the Other Space gallery in Dharamsala, India, minutes from the residence of the Dalai Lama, Tibetan artist Tenzin Gyurmey delivered a complex and layered body of work that wove together Indian and Tibetan exile culture, taboos, forbidden activities, proverbs, and spiritual iconography. Titled “Behind the Two Mountains,” the show featured imagery ranging from the surreal—people with baboon butts as heads—to the provocative—dried meat hanging in front of a portrait of the Dalai Lama.

As the son of a respected tulku (reincarnated master) and thangka artist, Gyurmey grew up with social and religious pressures to behave in expected ways, but he was a bit of a rebellious misfit. The exhibition title refers to a place near his high school in Dharamsala, where he and others would hang out when doing naughty things like smoking and meeting foreign girlfriends. Some of his paintings are potentially risqué and controversial, and Gyurmey told me that others had criticized them without understanding his intentions or their meaning. “If you are creating something new, a sign that you are doing something is when people criticize you because you are provoking something,” he said. “It clashes with their long-held ideas and questions them.”

Gyurmey became interested in art at an early age, but opportunities to follow his artistic passions were limited. Feeling pressured to do well by his family, teachers, and peers, he initially planned to study genetic engineering in college, but karma intervened. Encouraged by his sister, he returned to his love of art and enrolled at the College of Art in Delhi. During his studies, he met his mentor and inspiration, Tibetan contemporary artist Tsherin Sherpa, and held his first art exhibit at Sherpa’s art gallery in Kathmandu. However, even as Gyurmey’s art started to receive attention and he was invited to show his work, his lack of financial resources and refugee status left him unable to travel for exhibitions. Not deterred by these challenges, Gyurmey has continued developing an artistic voice that is striking and mystifying, weaving together Tibetan and Indian symbols to create fantastical images.

Blessed features the artist in a room with his tulku father in the pose of the famous yogi Milarepa (who sang about the suffering of slaughtered animals), an image of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, and pieces of drying meat. Gyurmey explained he had fond memories of this “blessed” time during his childhood when they all lived in one room and could not separate sacred objects from worldly ones. Blessed confronts ideas about what is pure and impure, the joys and challenges of a family living in a cramped space, the ethics of meat consumption, and the contradictory gap between Buddhist teachings and their real-life implementation.

A Crime with Mother portrays Gyurmey’s inner conflict about when he was young and traveled with his mother to purchase forbidden buffalo meat out of state. The symbolism in this work—such as the portraits behind him of the Tibetan mythical figure Ashang Chogyel, taught to children to scare them into being good, and the Indian leader, avid vegetarian, and advocate of ahimsa (nonviolence) Mahatma Gandhi; handcuffed wrists; a half-skull face for himself; and a severed buffalo head on his mother—wrestle with the heavy weight of transgressing religious beliefs when confronting Buddhist and Hindu understandings of karma, interconnectivity, and eating animals. Plus, there’s the worldly fear of being arrested by the Indian police. Eating cow (or buff) meat in India is controversial and illegal in some places. As the cow is a sacred animal in Hinduism, such meat is banned in the Himachal Pradesh state, where Gyurmey lives.

Many Buddhists, including Tibetans, regard meat-eating as sacrilegious, impure, and cruel and make no hierarchical distinction between animals and humans. The English expression “sacred cow” also refers to a belief, custom, or convention accepted without questioning. In more ways than one, Gyurmey creatively tackles—directly and indirectly—the stories, influence, and power of the “sacred cows” in his culture and community.

A fusion of Indian and Tibetan themes is present in much of his work, and Gyurmey often pokes fun at the shaming of mixed-race and cross-cultural relationships.  I asked Gyurmey what he thought about a notion of a pure Tibetan-ness: “Identity is a very individual thing,” he told me. “All people have their own identities, what they have experienced, seen, and so on. Purity culture is like forcing people to come into one category, like this is Tibetan, this is Indian. They are forcing people to be in a homogeneous group and culture, but it is not.” He appreciates the natural richness, beauty, vitality, and aesthetic qualities of all the intercultural influences that make us unique individuals and human beings, especially in the global age of the internet and social media.

Some significant aspects of the cross-culture experiences expressed in his art are more subtle. Unable to afford pricey canvases, Gyurmey would paint on woven taupe-colored sacks, drochak-bhureh (barley sacks), used by the United States to deliver food to Tibetan refugees, transforming them into a poignant symbol of his journey as a Tibetan in exile and struggling artist. Gyurmey states on his website that:

To me, this material bears testament to the way the Tibetan diaspora has planted themselves in a new culture and undergone changes in their own culture. Through these works, I examine and celebrate the space we have created for ourselves as Tibetans in India.

Imaginatively illustrating the seemingly mundane life of a naughty Tibetan boy in exile, Gyurmey mixes interracial and ethnic relationships with Tibetan Buddhist iconography to create both uniquely Tibetan and globally relevant images that cross cultural and spiritual boundaries.

This article originally appeared on tricycle.org and has been edited for length.

The post Memories in Exile appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The spiritual path is in desperate need of rebranding. It is plagued by two massive problems. The first is the use of the word “spiritual”; the second is the use of the word “path.” In tandem, these could be the two worst things that ever happened to the spiritual path.

Let’s start with the notion of “spiritual.”

The term is placed not merely in contrast to the material, but often in opposition to it. “Spiritual” then invites a host of insidious and dismissive interpretations. It implies a dangerous transcendentalism: in order to be spiritual, you need to get away from the material. Spiritual is good, material is bad—and never the twain shall meet. With this wrong view, those of us embarking on the spiritual path are often setting out toward some version of heaven. The journey then devolves into escapism, and we get lost.

The Buddhist psychologist John Welwood noticed this trap years ago and coined the term spiritual bypassing to describe the avoidance tendencies we all have as spiritual practitioners. In more than forty years on the path, I’ve noticed that it’s not a matter of whether a meditator will be snared by this pathology, but rather when. It’s completely understandable. The material world sucks; get me out! Or more accurately: the real world sucks; take me to the unreal. But when we confuse renunciation with avoidance, all sorts of problems pop up.

Although we might say that the way out of samsara is renunciation—which is an integral component of the path—what exactly is it that we are renouncing? If we answer the world of conventional appearance, we’ve again gone astray. Samsara is not a place; it’s a state of mind. What we really want to renounce is our inappropriate relationship to matter, not the material world.

Likewise, we might say that the spiritual path is a journey to nirvana. But where exactly is that? Nirvana is not a place where we’ll arrive at some point in the distant future. Nirvana is also a state of mind. And it’s available right here and now.

So what really sucks? Our relationship to the material world. What do we really want to get out of? A samsaric state of mind. Tibetan Buddhist teacher Trungpa Rinpoche said, “There is no way out. The magic is to discover that there is a way in.” If we go deeply into matter, we will find spirit. If we go deeply into ourselves, we will find everything that we seek. Then we can realize that, ultimately, samsara is nirvana. This is real nonduality.

We turn to the spiritual path because we’re hurting. The First Noble Truth that suffering exists finally hits home, and we set out on the path to alleviate that suffering (the Third Noble Truth). But following a genuine path is not about feeling good (unless we’re talking about basic goodness). It’s about getting real. And getting real means embracing all of reality, including the material. This requires embracing and including your smelly body, your messy emotional life, and all the sticky things in between. It requires embracing all that you see—not just what we think of as “spiritual.”

“Waking up” is common parlance on the path, but it’s more about “waking down.” Instead of looking up to the heavens, do a face-plant onto the earth. Really feel the soil in your eyes and you’ll finally mix dirt with divinity. Matter and spirit are just two ends of the same spectrum of reality: matter is just gross (reified) spirit; spirit is just subtle (dereified) matter.

The notion of “path” adds insult to injury. A path to where? To enlightenment, awakening, and nonduality? But where exactly is that? Take a close look and you’ll discover that it’s a path to nowhere, or to now-here.

Set this magazine down. Take a few deep breaths. Now look up. That’s it! What you’re looking for is hiding in plain sight. That’s, ironically, why you don’t see it. It’s like trying to look at the inside of your eyelid; it’s so close, you can’t see it. When we think of enlightenment, most of us are looking for a Hollywood-level experience—a “spiritual event.” But it’s more like Oklahoma (I love Oklahoma)—something very ordinary. . . and material.

On the spiritual path, you can walk right past the ordinary on your way to the extraordinary, failing to see that enlightenment is truly extra-ordinary. This is why Zen master Suzuki Roshi said, “Enlightenment was my biggest disappointment.” For the glory-seeking ego, awakening is the ultimate letdown, a real downer—into reality.

Stand up with me and clear the space in front of you. Now take the most important step of your life. Step toward yourself. Where would you turn? Where would you go? This is the kind of path I’m talking about.

You don’t need to have any special experience to be free. You don’t have to go anywhere.

You don’t need to have any special experience to be free. You don’t have to go anywhere. Thinking that you do pulls you away from that which you truly seek. To set forth on a path, you need to assume the absence of what you’re seeking. To search for the truth, you need to deny that it’s already here. But the path is perceptual, not actual. Just recognize what is forever right in front of you. As it says repeatedly in The Tibetan Book of the Dead: “Recognition and liberation are simultaneous.”

Many of us on the spiritual path are driven to experience something other than what we’re experiencing right now. That’s not a desire for enlightenment. That’s a desire to escape. Pema Chödrön wrote The Wisdom of No Escape to counteract this motivation. If you’re looking for anything other, you’re on a dualistic path. Sengcan, the Third Zen Ancestor, said in the Faith Mind Poem: “Even to be attached to the idea of enlightenment is to go astray. Just let things be in their own way.”

Trungpa Rinpoche, in one of his seminal teachings, said, “We could say that the real world is that in which we experience pleasure and pain, good and bad. . . But if we are completely in touch with these dualistic feelings, that absolute experience of duality is itself the experience of nonduality.” Be one hundred percent present with whatever is happening—the good, the bad, and the ugly—and that’s it!

This implies that you never actually attain enlightenment—you simply cease to be deluded. How can you attain something you already have? Trying to get close only draws you away. As the Dzogchen master Longchenpa said, “If you want to experience natural mind, you can do it only by not wanting to.” At the highest reaches of the pathless path, trying to attain enlightenment, and even meditation itself, are subtle forms of distraction. They are a dis (“away”) and traction (“to draw”)—a “drawing away”
from reality.

So what should we do? Nothing. But do it really well.

So what should we do? Nothing. But do it really well. This is the art of meditation at the most refined level of “nondistracted” nonmeditation. Don’t draw apart, or dis-tract, from anything. Don’t let the feeling that you can attain awakening only through practice, or even meditation, distract you. And definitely don’t let the spiritual path distract you.

These absolute-level teachings transcend but include the relative truths of the path. They lead us to the end of the path, not as a final destination but as the realization that enlightenment is a false destination. And so, although we need the path provisionally, we also need to let it go. Zen teacher Norman Fischer said, “There is nowhere to go and no way to get there. We have been there all along.” Stop deferring your enlightenment. Stop rescheduling your appointment with reality.

The post The Two Biggest Problems with the Spiritual Path appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I came to Buddhism in this way: in 1985 I was staying at my sister’s house on Page Street, across from the San Francisco Zen Center. My sister and brother-in-law were members of the Zen community, and they often took me across the street to listen to dharma talks. They also had a shelf of books about Buddhism, which I read with great surprise, because a lot of it was familiar to me from Western philosophy, especially the existential tradition of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Karl Jaspers. Like Buddhists, these philosophers tried to liberate transcendence from theology and dogma.

More importantly, Buddhism’s openness to the transcendental felt familiar because of my love of the arts. William James long ago captured my sense of art’s spiritual purpose in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902):

Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them.

Over time my interest in Buddhism became warmer and more personal. First, it helped to change me morally; I came to understand some of the ways in which I was the cause of suffering for myself and others. It also helped to calm what was at the time a very alienated inner life, an agitated loneliness. It began to “settle my dust,” in Lao Tzu’s phrase. In short, Buddhism changed me for the better. I’m still changing, and I hope still for the better.

During this same period of my life, I was maturing as a writer of fiction, first, and then, beginning with my 2004 book The Middle Mind, as a social critic. Oddly, writing social criticism did not feel distant from Buddhism. I was interested in knowing what part of our collective unhappiness was caused by what Buddhism calls samsara, the causes and conditions into which we are born and through which we have no choice but to create what the Buddha called an “acquired self.” I became a watchful critic of American causes and conditions. A vigilant habit of mind took root. I took to heart what the signs at train stations and airports instruct: “If you see something, say something.”

I am now seeing something in American Buddhism. Historically, when Buddhism arrived in a given country, it appeared as a counterculture of values and meanings different from the values of the established culture. And yet, in most places, Buddhists had little choice but to reach an accommodation with economic and military powers already in place. As David Loy expressed this quandary in a powerful essay published in Tricycle in 2009, “Buddhism has historically tended to passively accept, and sometimes actively support, social arrangements that now seem unjust.”

North American Buddhism has for the last few decades been making its own accommodations with power, especially in relation to corporate capitalism’s version of a mindfulness practice based on neuroscience. Buddhism has again been used to sacralize power, or, as the people in marketing might explain, it has been used to “enhance the corporate brand.” As Loy further argues, “[Buddhism] is currently being used by some to justify the authority of those with political and economic power and the subordination of those who have neither.”

I think Loy points to a worthy question, namely, how can we in the Buddhist community function, as a community, in a way that best expresses our deepest shared values? I don’t think corporate Buddhism is interested in this question.
Buddhism may be the fastest-growing religious community in the US, but a part of the reason for this is that a version of mindfulness has been separated out from the whole of Buddhist teaching and practice and offered broadly as a form of stress reduction, especially in the corporate workspace. Thus, Amazon’s WorkingWell program, with its AmaZen meditation booths (or “despair closets”), where warehouse workers can go to “focus on their mental well-being.” Or Google’s Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which offers “a way to help people cope and navigate complexity and change in the workplace” by offering not only stress reduction but also the dubious notion of “emotional intelligence,” what the Harvard Business School has called a “must-have skill” for managers. At best, corporate Buddhism offers only what Karl Jaspers called a pseudo-virtue: “A luxury of fortunate circumstances in which I can afford to be good.”

But Buddhism has always offered itself as something going against “the stream of the world.” It has been about liberation from, not capitulation to, conventional reality. For us, that reality surely includes soulless jobs, a social system organized around money, and a vast shadow world dominated by corporate culture. Carl Jung described this culture as a “gloomy hole in the wall.” In contrast to this gloom, Buddhism encourages us to slow down and open up, open up to experiences outside of those offered by your boss or by neuroscience’s psychological materialism. It encourages us not only to reduce stress but also to recognize its causes. Thai Forest Master Ajahn Chah had a revealing simile for this situation.

It’s like falling from the top of a tree to come crashing down to the ground below. We have no idea how many branches we’ve passed on the way down.

Corporate mindfulness finds the sufferer and offers aid, but it has nothing to say about the cause of the suffering. If asked about the tree, it says only, “What tree?”

In emphatic contrast, Buddhism says, “Hey, noble one, you just fell from a tree, you hit every branch on the way down, and yet you’ll get up tomorrow morning and fall from the same damned tree unless you change, unless you wake up.”
Buddhism is not about neurological flesh machines that can be made to work more efficiently. For me, Buddhism’s unique quality is emotional—its happy gloom. No other religion is so certain that nothing can be fixed, certainly not the “world,” whatever that is. And no other religion is so insistent that the context for life is samsara, suffering and change.

But there are stranger things than this. Buddhism also suggests that suffering is our teacher. Without the dissatisfaction and ignorance that so easily make their way among us, there would be nothing to wake from, and thus no way to experience transcendence. But it’s hard to be grateful for such teachers when there are so many of them, beginning with the ancient triad of aging, sickness, and death. On top of that are piled familiar cruelties: dehumanizing work, poverty, racism, gender bigotry, colonialism, nationalism, militarism, authoritarianism of left and right, the slouching beast of environmental catastrophe, and, most recently, the fatalism of Vlad Putin’s nuclear extortion in Ukraine, because of which I cannot know in this moment if the sentence I’m writing will ever be read. And all of this is the eternal consequence of the three poisons—greed, anger, and delusion.

So, yes, that’s the gloom for sure, but what’s the happy part? The happy bit is that although there are three poisons, there are also three jewels: the teacher (Buddha), the teaching (dharma), and the community of students (sangha), for all of which we should be duly grateful. But there is a caveat to the happiness provided by the jewels, because these two groups of three are not opposed to each other, as if it were a case of sin versus virtue, or good versus bad. They cannot exist in opposition because they are sunyata: “empty of self-existence.” Instead, they are mutually dependent. Without the poisons, there would be no jewels, and no need for a Buddha, his wisdom, or his community. This mix of happiness and gloom—maybe we should call it “happygloom”—is why in the Buddhist cosmology depicted in the Wheel of Life the human realm is the optimal realm for reaching liberation. The heavens of the gods are just too happy; the hell realms, too gloomy.

The Christian contemplative Thomas Merton believed religion is “sorrow, pouring itself out in love and trust.” In stark contrast, contemporary secular Buddhists argue that Buddhism is not a religion at all. It is a “science of mind,” and neuroscience is its gospel. But had the Buddha been asked if his teachings were religious or secular, he would likely have smiled and said nothing. Like the origin of the universe, the question is undecidable. After all, what is a religion? For existential theologian Paul Tillich, our true religion is “our ultimate concerns,” whether a god, science, money… or the discovery of our true nature. The better question, then, might be, “What isn’t a religion?”

It is true, however, that Buddhism shares important qualities with other more self-certain religions, two qualities in particular: transformation and transcendence. In a conventional sense, Buddhism is a religion because it is about transformation—becoming who we really are, discovering our buddhanature. This process is Buddhism’s own “amazing grace”: “I once was lost, but now I’m found.”

In an even more profound sense, Buddhism is religious because it teaches us to open up to the transcendent. In substantial part, we in the West are open to the Buddha’s openness because of our experiences in the natural world and in philosophy, art, music, and poetry, all of which the Concord Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson thought of as “native gold.” Walt Whitman’s famous lilac tree, “blooming perennial,” is native gold—“every leaf a miracle.”

Because of these culturally embedded spiritual traditions, Buddhism feels to us like something valuable that had been lost but that now has been returned to us through “re-collection,” an inward gathering of what had fallen into forgetfulness. It is not a “truth” that has been returned; it is a trustful sense of presence. Through what the modernist composer Olivier Messiaen called “la présence divine,” we learn that we are metaphysical creatures after all. We live our ordinary lives in a supernatural manner, although we are rarely aware of the fact.

At times, our metaphysics are mistaken, as with our sense that each of us has a unique self or ego, a vainglorious thinking substance that looks upon the external world as something it might make use of. But then there are love and beauty, neither of which can be explained neuro-mechanically or in any other way, and yet, even though we can’t say precisely what they are, it is not possible to imagine a fully human life without them. They provide a foundational metaphysics, a metaphysics we can stand on. And the arts provide one way to know that.

Karl Jaspers wrote: “I really love transcendence only as my love transfigures the world.” An image of this transfiguration can be found in Piet Mondrian’s painting The Flowering Apple Tree. The whole of creation flows through the trunk of the tree as if its being were at the intersection of multiple currents purling in the tree’s heartwood and then flowing up through branch, blossom, and fruit. The lumber industry can tell us about the fact of a tree and its commercial value, but Mondrian knows the tree’s magic. Knowing this doesn’t require irrational belief, it only requires caring enough to hear what F. Scott Fitzgerald called art’s “high white notes,” when the work transcends the secular purposes of the marketplace and becomes an expression of spirit’s essential freedom.

Or consider the world-breaking and world-making implicit in Vincent van Gogh’s still life of boots. Van Gogh bought boots at flea markets and walked around in them until they were just filthy enough, just as filthy as the world. Still life was originally a decorative genre suitable for the homes of Netherlands Burghers, the lowest of the pictorial genres. Van Gogh holds the still life genre up by its ankles and shakes the coins and stolen silverware out of its pockets, and then transforms it.

The viewer should not look at the painting with a mind that wonders about the “subject,” these less-than-ordinary boots, and then asks, “Why has he painted dirty boots?” Neither is the painting about the conventional pleasures of trompe l’oeil: “They look so real that I could put them on!” No one would ever want to put on such boots. Nor should the painting be looked at as a sentimental object of sociological indignation in the name of the poor. Rightly viewed, the painting transcends boots, pleasure, and art itself.

The boots abide in the here and now. We should let go of the need for the boots to carry some particular meaning that can be praised or blamed. The painting acknowledges the suffering of the people who must wear such boots, but it also honors what Kant called “the sublime,” the “boundlessness” of the boots. The painting is not technically masterful in a conventional sense; in fact, Van Gogh’s thick impasto—like something painted with a butter knife—is indifferent to technical excellence. Instead, in Baudelaire’s phrase, it “lulls infinity in finitude.”

He suggests that there are other worlds we might inhabit, worlds where what seemed squalid is made pure.

Van Gogh’s sense of the beyond provides powerful spiritual meaning. It is, in its own way, akin to Buddhist transmission rituals—an intimate inward grasping of the world that comes alive when given outward form.

But Van Gogh’s painting also has a very practical meaning. The painting doesn’t leave us in a radiant beyond; it returns us with renewed interest to the world we live in. It presents us with an intimation of a world that is better than the one we endure. It is an epiphany, certainly, but also a vision of what we want in the here and now, the sacred restored to the lives we actually live. Van Gogh urges us to stop living for the false happiness provided by transient things, by boots so dirty they seem to be rotting before our eyes. He suggests that there are other worlds we might inhabit, worlds where what seemed squalid is made pure.

Like the Buddha, Van Gogh asks us to join him in renewing the world.

The post Against the Stream appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It is unlikely that any English language haiku journal would agree to publish this winning poem. It lacks the earmarks of haiku as a form of literature derivative of Japanese poetry. The poet has chosen the haiku form to express her thoughts about life, but in terms of technique, she has thrown her lot in with Emily Dickinson rather than with Basho. This is haiku as American poetry.

The poem breaks some of the most widely observed conventions of the form. The first line offers an abstraction, rather than establishing a concrete image. The second makes broad generalizations about human life. Only in the third line do we find out what the poem is about. Even then, the season word is used metaphorically. There are no actual dragonflies.

When asked to comment on her inspiration, the poet wrote:

I remembered catching dragonflies as a child and marveling at their sleek, shiny bodies, which although somewhat bendable, were also strong as steel. A haiku formed in my mind as I thought about human life, which is also long (about 80 years on average) and narrow (increasingly disconnected from the rest of nature). Like a tiny metal dart that gets thrown, flying in a straight line for almost a century until we reach the end. A dart that gets to fly through an abyss of loneliness.

Her remarks account for the emotional power of the poem, but not for the paradox of its central image. For if a human life is long, a dragonfly is not. Its length seems long only in relation to its width. “A problem of shape,” she calls it. The life of a modern Homo sapiens is too long for its width, too narrow for its length.

What makes the poem not simply a good modern haiku but a masterpiece of short-form English language poetry is how succinctly it expresses one of our deepest frustrations as a species. In doubling the human life expectancy since the turn of the 19th century, we have stretched it thinner. We live longer on average, but the range of our experience as it relates to the natural world is narrower than ever before. The result is an “abyss of loneliness” we must fly through from one end of life to the other.

I wrote that there were no actual dragonflies in the poem. But that is not quite true. As in Dickinson’s poetry, the symbol is sometimes more real than the thing itself.

Dragonflies are elusive creatures. Difficult to follow as they veer unpredictably, they can flash out of nowhere and vanish just as easily, only to reappear where least expected. Dragonflies have been known to cross oceans in their migrations, and they have journeyed over vast expanses of geological time as well. The earliest fossils of dragonfly-like insects are 325 million years old.

And so, hidden in the poet’s use of the season word is a nod, not only to the evanescent beauty of these small creatures, but also to their vitality and extreme durability over time. If “the human life” really is like a dragonfly, the world may not be done with us quite yet.

♦

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

The post A Problem of Shape appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Years ago, during a long sojourn in India—at the strong suggestion of a Tibetan Buddhist friend, and with the blessing of one of my teachers—I moved my dharma practice to a traditional Indian charnel ground. For several days and nights, surrounded by decaying bodies, feces, blood, and bones, I kept company with countless beggars, several sadhus (Hindu religious ascetics), stray dogs, monkeys, and a handful of Tibetan Buddhists and Bon (the indigenous spiritual tradition of Tibet) practitioners, some of whom shared with me little boxes of chulen (essence pills designed to replace food and replenish energy) and stale dumplings.

I felt apprehensive and leery, reluctant to eat any food or pills offered to me and refusing assistance of any kind, even by those who wanted only to help me walk through the maze of dead bodies without falling. I found myself wanting to discard my dharma paraphernalia, take a long hot shower at a nice hotel, and run to the closest airport to fly back home.

I tried to identify the karmic effects that had propelled me to practice in such a filthy and scary space. Amidst all my fears, mental investigations, and physical discomforts (which made it almost impossible for me to focus on my formal dharma practice), I had the uncanny sense that I was being prepared for a different type of life than the one I had previously been living.

But when I eventually left India to attend to an urgent family matter back home, I quickly resumed the life I had left behind, sitting for practice at a beautiful local dharma center, meeting often with my kind lama (who for years had guided my practice in the United States), returning to my teaching post at the university, and helping with asylum claims at NGO offices in the Mexican border towns of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.

Everything, in other words, went back to normal. Or so I thought.

As time went by, I surprised myself by missing my Indian charnel ground, and I often reflected on all the lessons I might have learned there had it not been for the obstacles of my own fear and discomfort. Whenever I talked about my yearning to return to the Indian charnel ground in order to practice, my US lama would smile patiently. Sometimes he responded by saying, “Not good.” At other times he would say, “A charnel ground is any place where you find suffering. So dedicate your dharma practice to the beings that live in the charnel grounds you are inhabiting in the present moment.”

One evening during a visit to Ciudad Juárez, I met a woman named Mercedes at a small café, where she worked as a waitress. Mercedes told me that she had recently tried to cross the border several times without success, but that she was going to try again the following week.

When I told her that I would be returning to California the next day, she asked if I could mail a small box to her son, Emilio, who lived in California at a casa de curación (house of healing). Mercedes explained that Emilio was very sick, which is why she wanted to send an estampita (small image) of El Niño Fidencio, a Mexican miracle healer, as well as some remedios caseros (home remedies). She worried that if she mailed the box herself from Juárez, it might get stolen. I warned her that if my car was searched at the border, the box would probably be confiscated.

Still, Mercedes begged me to take the box to her son and, when I agreed, gave me a big hug and a kiss before saying a prayer to protect me from harm. Then she assured me repeatedly that El Niño Fidencio would look after me.

The following day I crossed the border—with Mercedes’s estampita and remedios in my backpack—without incident. Although I’d planned to FedEx the box to Mercedes’s son in San Diego, when I realized that his address was on my route home, I decided to deliver the gifts in person.

When I arrived at the casa de curación, the front door was open, and I could see three men watching television. To one side of the TV set was an altar crowded with pictures of what looked like family members and Catholic saints. Offerings in front of the pictures included several small glasses of water, a bottle of rum, cigars, and freshly cut flowers. When I told him that I’d come to deliver a box to Emilio, one of the men watching television welcomed me. This man introduced himself as Gonzalo, and when he noticed my interest in the altar, he explained that some of the pictures depicted ancestors belonging to himself, his wife, and the various men who lived with them. The other images were of different saints.

He asked if I was familiar with any of these saints.

“I think so,” I responded, and proceeded to list la Virgen de Guadalupe, San Judas, San Cipriano, San Diego, and San Santiago (all familiar to me from the altars of the Catholic churches I’d frequented as a child in my native country of Cuba). On a small table tucked away in a corner was a stand-alone picture of a skeletal female figure dressed as a bride and holding a scythe. Her image was surrounded by candles, dried flowers, dollar bills, bones, and other offerings.

Gonzalo smiled and said, “I imagine you do not know Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte, Our Lady of the Holy Death.”

“Actually, I do,” I said, feeling somewhat proud.

Gonzalo smiled and explained that La Santa Muerte was the patrona of the house. A little while later, Emilio, Mercedes’s son, came into the room, assisted by Gonzalo’s wife, Azucena, who was a curandera (traditional healer).

Emilio was a tall, frail young man who had some difficulty walking. He had many dark Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions visible on his arms and face. I gave him the box his mother had sent him, and he seemed elated when he saw the contents. He took out the picture of El Niño Fidencio, which came in its own little frame, and put the bag of remedios in his pocket. Azucena put the box away in the drawer of an old desk, on top of which there were even more pictures of Catholic saints and more glasses of water, along with freshly cut flowers, a few cans of beer, and many candles of different colors.

After carefully placing the picture of El Niño Fidencio next to San Diego, Emilio stayed leaning near the altar, as Azucena asked me all sorts of questions. But before I had a chance to answer any of them, she said, “This is a casa de curación, and I am a curandera. The men here have AIDS. I am telling you this because I can tell you can be trusted.”

She paused expectantly, but when I didn’t respond, she continued, “Some other time, I will tell you why you are here.”

I felt she was trying to elicit some reaction from me, though exactly what kind I couldn’t guess. Suddenly I found myself wanting to leave. I wanted to go home, but instead I stayed at la casa de curación for several hours that day, and I would return many more times during the course of the next year.

La casa de curación was home to six men from Mexico and Central America who had full-blown AIDS, as well as to Gonzalo and Azucena, who were both trained as certified nursing assistants. The home was supported by both private donations and donations from an NGO. The nearby medical center provided medical treatment for the men, although Gonzalo confided that these allopathic treatments were supplemented by many potions and Mexican foods, as well as by prayers, limpias (cleansings), and other rituals.

Before coming to the United States, Azucena had been trained as a curandera by her grandmother in Mexico, and Gonzalo had studied with several healers in his home country to become a yerbero (traditional herbalist). A sobador (traditional Mexican masseuse) visited the casa often to treat the residents as well as Gonzalo and Azucena. Native herbs were grown in the casa’s garden and also purchased from a nearby botánica (traditional botanical store) where incense, oils, herbs, candles, and other ritual items were also obtained. Azucena, unlike her husband, was documented, and would occasionally cross the U.S.-Mexico border to obtain remedios unavailable in the United States.

At Azucena’s request—and with Emilio’s consent—I began to visit la casa de curación once a week, staying for a couple of hours each time. During my visits, Emilio and I talked about his AIDS disease, his diabetes, and his severe kidney problems. He told me that he knew he was going to die soon and was preparing for his own death. Azucena encouraged him in these preparations and asked him to invoke La Santa Muerte more frequently.

Though I didn’t say so openly, I considered this skeletal saint (who at the time was increasingly associated with drug users and cartels) not worth invoking. Emilio tried to dissuade me from thinking negatively about his patrona, saying that La Santa Muerte was nonjudgmental and tried to help everyone—saints and sinners alike—without preference. For Emilio and Azucena, the saint’s supreme neutrality reflected the fact that Death treats everyone equally.

Eventually, Mercedes, Emilio’s mother, crossed into the United States to live near her son. I began to look forward to my visits to la casa de curación, where, in addition to participating in interesting conversations, I would also occasionally get a free massage from the sobador. Sometimes Azucena would interrupt my conversations with Emilio to serve us strong-tasting juices made with special herbs meant to cleanse our energy.

Emilio and I regularly talked about religion, La Santa Muerte, El Niño Fidencio, death, rebirth, and healing work. Emilio was especially interested in Buddhism, which he had first learned about while studying at San Diego State University, before he’d been diagnosed with AIDS. Several months went by in this way. But then Emilio began to get sicker. Gonzalo had to take him to the emergency room a couple of times.

After one of those hospital visits, Emilio asked me if there was a Buddhist practice or ritual that we could do together. I asked what he hoped to accomplish with such a ritual, assuming that he wanted some kind of help with his health. But he explained that he left everything to do with his health to El Niño Fidencio and La Santa Muerte.

“I want to learn about Buddhism because Buddhists are supposed to try to help others all the time, and I want to do that,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

“La Santa Muerte wants us to use all means to help ourselves and others. I can learn a new way from you,” he answered.

So I taught Emilio about tonglen, the “Giving and Taking” practice, which was my main dharma practice at the time. Soon after that, we began practicing together.

We also had many discussions about ancestors and prophecies. Emilio shared various prophecies from his Mesoamerican culture, and I shared the Buddhist teachings about the Era of the Five Degenerations. We discussed our concern for the beings that Emilio called “restless ancestors” and that I called “beings caught between the bardos (in-between states) of death and rebirth.”

Mercedes, Azucena, Gonzalo, and one of the men living in la casa sometimes joined in these discussions. Although we disputed a few minor points, we all agreed on the need to cultivate compassion for all living beings, including animals. The residents of la casa also insisted on including their beloved plants on the list of things that deserve compassion, for they believed that plants are very much alive and aware.

We also talked about self-cherishing as the main source of suffering, and how tonglen practice can be helpful in reducing the tendency to cling to an “I.” The others related especially to my comments regarding the need to avoid thinking of things as “mine.” We all concurred that everything belongs to everybody—and, in the end, to nobody, as La Santa Muerte teaches.

Eventually, all the members of la casa de curación, Mercedes, and the sobador joined Emilio and me in the practice of tonglen.

Tonglen is considered a very powerful and difficult practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and it is recommended that we engage in this practice only after receiving careful instructions from an experienced tonglen practitioner.

We breathe in the suffering of all beings. We breathe in the suffering of other living beings and use that perception to destroy our self-cherishing mind, which is the source of all our own suffering. We also breathe out everything we cherish, including our body, possessions, merit, and happiness. We send them toward other living beings for their benefit.

Although it is recommended that we do this practice on a regular basis, it is said that it is particularly powerful to do tonglen when we are facing a serious problem, because we can use our pain to develop compassion as well as experience our suffering on behalf of all sentient beings. Some believe that tonglen practice can heal the practitioner from illnesses.

I initially introduced the image of black smoke to represent the suffering we were breathing in, but the others in the group resisted this idea, and Emilio asked if it would be all right to imagine some of the suffering coming in the form of smoke of different colors, including white, because suffering comes in many colors. Likewise, the group wanted to visualize the light of our exhalations in a variety of colors.

We practiced various forms of tonglen together once a week for about two months. Every week, through our breath, we took in suffering from ourselves, from all types of beings alive at the time, the restless dead, and the children yet to be born into these catastrophic times. Through our breath, we also sent offerings to all beings.

At the end of these practice sessions, Azucena and Emilio said prayers to
La Santa Muerte, thanking her for encouraging them to think about the well-being of everyone without exception and to keep the awareness that we were all equal because all of us are destined to die.

As Emilio’s health continued to deteriorate, he started to beg his mother to take him back to Mexico, where he said he wanted to die. Mercedes resisted, hoping that his doctors could arrange a kidney transplant that might extend his life. She also hoped that the treatments Emilio was receiving at the San Diego hospital and at la casa would prolong his time on this earth. But in the end, she relented and organized what she hoped would be a quick trip back home.

Azucena, Gonzalo, and I began to plan a ceremony to say goodbye to Emilio. Gonzalo hurriedly began to build two more altars to both honor Emilio and those he believed were now Emilio’s two most important spiritual patrons as he drew closer to death: La Santa Muerte and Buddha Amitabha, whose Pure Land Emilio seemed to have developed a strong attraction for after he heard me recite the Prayer to be Reborn in Dewachen (Amitabha’s Pure Land). Both altars faced west because it is said that La Santa Muerte always reminds her devotees that her true home is in the land of the dead, which is in the West, and because Gonzalo remembered Emilio mentioning that Amitabha was the Buddha of the Western Paradise.

At midnight, on a cold evening a week after the feast of the Days of the Dead, we held a goodbye ceremony for Emilio. It was attended by more than one hundred people, mostly relatives and friends of the residents of la casa de curación. Some were also devotees of El Niño Fidencio or La Santa Muerte. The ceremony was conducted by Azucena, who appeared to be in a trance, and by my Tibetan lama, who joined us for the occasion.

Throughout the night, I helped Emilio to stand up as well as kneel at different moments in the ceremony. Azucena invoked and prayed to La Santa Muerte on his behalf, and my lama recited the Prayer to be Reborn in Dewachen. At the end of the ceremony, Azucena burned incense, my lama bestowed blessings on all seen and unseen beings who were present that night, and Gonzalo passed around several trays of plantas sacramentales (sacramental plants), donated by the owner of the local botánica.

Clutching the picture of El Niño Fidencio that I had delivered to him on behalf of his mother, Emilio approached the altars and bowed several times, then placed dried flowers on La Santa Muerte’s altar and fresh flowers on Amitabha’s. He hugged me and handed me the box I had brought him. Inside were the picture of El Niño Fidencio, an image of La Santa Muerte, and some remedios.

Mercedes and Emilio left for Mexico the next day. Not long afterward, Mercedes called me to say that Emilio had died. As soon as I received the news, I called my lama so that he could perform Phowa (a Tibetan Buddhist practice of ejection of consciousness at the time of death). I also initiated a forty-nine-day ritual for the dead based on the Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead). Then I called Azucena to let her know about Emilio’s passing, which Mercedes said had been peaceful.

She whispered a brief prayer for our friend, then asked me, “Now do you know why you came to my house?”

I told her I did.

Inever returned physically to la casa de curación, but I remained in touch with Azucena and Gonzalo for a couple of years, until they, too, returned to Mexico, where they hoped Mercedes and her new husband would join them in helping people heal from illness and become friends with death before their own dying processes began. When I last talked to her, Azucena promised that she and Gonzalo would both keep me in their prayers to El Niño Fidencio and, especially, to La Santa Muerte.

In my mind, I often return to my Indian charnel ground days as well as to the times I spent at la casa de curación, where I began to learn to accept the inescapable—not try to evade it—and to work with whatever presents itself. These days, I am privileged to assist mostly (though not exclusively) dying Latinx men and women who may live in community group homes, squatter houses, shelters, cars, or even in the streets on both sides of the border. I visit and serve these people as a friend, a professional helper, a dharma practitioner, and, sometimes, simply as an old immigrant who, herself, is always on the lookout for boxes of spiritual inspiration and remedios.

Adapted from “In the Charnel Ground of a Dying Latinx Man,” an essay that appeared in the collection Refuge in the Storm: Buddhist Voices in Crisis Care, edited by Nathaniel Jishin Michon and published by Nbuddhism death crisis care lantinxorth Atlantic Books, copyright © 2023. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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The Kesaputtisutta, known in the West as the Kalama Sutta, is a teaching from the Anguttara Nikaya. Popularized through fake quotes and internet memes, it is often incorrectly interpreted as advocating radical skepticism and an individualized rational approach to religious doctrine and faith. However, no traditional commentary supports such an interpretation of this previously not-often-cited teaching, and even a cursory reading of the full text proves otherwise.

In this sutra, the people of Kesaputta (the Kalamas) are being visited by many teachers and mendicants and are confused by their conflicting doctrines and mutual disparagement. They ask the Buddha for advice, who cautions them against blindly following teachers, scripture, tradition—even their own logical conjecture—and instead urges them to practice the teachings and directly experience if they work or not. The words of the wise should be heeded, but not before they are tested.

The writers of the sutra close by directly addressing two foundations of the Buddhist faith: karma and reincarnation. For them, the pros outweigh the cons. Whether or not karma and reincarnation exist, if you follow the Buddha’s advice on discerning the correct teachings, you can rest assured that life will be better—both now and in a possible next life.

–Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins, associate editor

On one occasion, the Blessed One, on a wandering tour among the Kosalans with a large community of monks, arrived at Kesaputta, a town of the Kalamas. The Kalamas of Kesaputta heard it said, “Gotama the contemplative, the son of the Sakyans, having gone forth from the Sakyans, has arrived at Kesaputta. Master Gotama’s fine reputation has spread: He is indeed a Blessed One, worthy, and rightly self-awakened, consummate in knowledge and conduct, well-gone, a knower of the cosmos, an unexcelled trainer of those persons ready to be tamed, teacher of human and divine beings, awakened, blessed. He has made known—having realized it through direct knowledge—this world with its devas, maras, and brahmas, its generations with their contemplatives and brahmans, their rulers and common people; has explained the Dhamma admirable in the beginning, in the middle, in the end; has expounded the holy life both in its particulars and in its essence, entirely perfect, surpassingly pure. It is good to see such a worthy one.”

They said to the Blessed One, “Lord, there are some brahmans and contemplatives who come to Kesaputta. They expound and glorify their own doctrines, but they deprecate the doctrines of others, revile them, show contempt for them, and disparage them. They leave us absolutely uncertain and in doubt: Which of these venerable brahmans and contemplatives are speaking the truth, and which are lying?”

“Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born.”

The Buddha said, “Of course you are uncertain. Of course you are in doubt. When there are reasons for doubt, uncertainty is born. So in this case, don’t go by reports, legends, traditions, scripture, logical conjecture, inference, analogies, agreement through pondering views, probability, or the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that certain qualities are unskillful, blameworthy, criticized by the wise, and, when adopted and carried out, lead to harm and suffering—then you should abandon them.

“When greed, aversion, or delusion arise in a person, does it arise for welfare or for harm?”

“For harm, lord.”

 “Overcome by greed, aversion, or delusion, he kills living beings, takes what is not given, goes after another person’s wife, tells lies, and induces others to do likewise, all of which is for long-term harm and suffering.”

“Yes, lord.”

“So, as I said: Don’t go by reports, legends, traditions, scripture, logical conjecture, inference, analogies, agreement through pondering views, probability, or the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that these qualities are unskillful, blameworthy, criticized by the wise, and, when adopted and carried out, lead to harm and suffering—then you should abandon them.

“Now, Kalamas, don’t go by reports, legends, traditions, scripture, logical conjecture, inference, analogies, agreement through pondering views, probability, or the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that these qualities are skillful, blameless, praised by the wise, and, when adopted and carried out, lead to welfare and happiness—then you should enter and remain in them.

“What do you think, Kalamas? When lack of greed, lack of aversion, or lack of delusion arises in a person, does it arise for welfare or for harm?”

“For welfare, lord.”

“And this ungreedy, unaversive, or undeluded person doesn’t kill living beings, take what is not given, go after another person’s wife, tell lies, or induce others to do likewise, all of which is for long-term welfare and happiness.”

“Yes, lord.”

“So, as I said: Don’t go by reports, legends, traditions, scripture, logical conjecture, inference, analogies, agreement through pondering views, probability, or the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that these qualities are skillful, blameless, praised by the wise, and, when adopted and carried out, lead to welfare and to happiness—then you should enter and remain in them.

“Now, Kalamas, one who is a disciple of the noble ones—thus devoid of greed and ill will, undeluded, alert, and resolute—keeps pervading all directions with an awareness imbued with goodwill, compassion, appreciation, and equanimity. Thus he keeps pervading above, below, and all around, everywhere, and in every respect the all-encompassing cosmos with an awareness imbued with goodwill, compassion, appreciation, and equanimity: abundant, expansive, immeasurable, free from hostility, free from ill will.

“Now, Kalamas, one who is a disciple of the noble ones—his mind thus free from hostility, free from ill will, undefiled, and pure—acquires four assurances in the here and now:

“‘If there is a world after death, if there is the fruit of actions rightly and wrongly done, then this is the basis by which, with the break-up of the body, after death, I will reappear in a good destination, the heavenly world.’ This is the first assurance he acquires.

“‘But if there is no world after death, if there is no fruit of actions rightly and wrongly done, then here in the present life I look after myself with ease—free from hostility, free from ill will, free from trouble.’ This is the second assurance he acquires.

“‘If evil is done through acting, still I have willed no evil for anyone. Having done no evil action, from where will suffering touch me?’ This is the third assurance he acquires.

“’But if no evil is done through acting, then I can assume myself pure in both respects.’ This is the fourth assurance he acquires.

“One who is a disciple of the noble ones—his mind thus free from hostility and ill will, undefiled, and pure—acquires these four assurances in the here and now.”

“Magnificent, lord! Magnificent! Just as if he were to place upright what was overturned, to reveal what was hidden, to show the way to one who was lost, or to carry a lamp into the dark so that those with eyes could see forms, in the same way, has the Blessed One—through many lines of reasoning—made the Dhamma clear. We go to the Blessed One for refuge, to the Dhamma, and to the Sangha of monks. May the Blessed One remember us as lay followers who have gone to him for refuge, from this day forward, for life.”

♦

Adapted from Kalama Sutta: To the Kalamas, translated by Thanissaro Bhikku

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The Tibetan Tengyur (bstan ‘gyur) is an encyclopedic collection of more than 3,500 Indian Buddhist texts, assembled in more than 200 volumes. It forms the second major part of the Tibetan Buddhist canon, and together with the Kangyur (bka’ ‘gyur), the collection of the discourses of the historical Buddha, constitutes the sum total of Indian Buddhist learning translated into Tibetan, the core and foundation of the Tibetan Buddhist intellectual world. The Tengyur, which means “translated treatises,” contains a varied collection of works, some commentarial, some independent. Among its contents are the great treatises of Indian Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, Madhyamaka and Yogacara; Tantric works; the Perfection of Wisdom (prajnaparamita) texts; commentaries on sutras; as well as works on logic, linguistics, poetry, and medicine.

Recent years have seen the beginning of initiatives to translate the whole of the Tengyur into English, though we are still many decades, possibly even a century, away from its completion. (The 84,000 project, which aims to translate the entire Tibetan Buddhist canon, expects to complete the translation of the Tengyur by 2110.)

However, readers of English can get an impression of the vastness and intellectual depth of the Tengyur now, through individual works that have already been translated, and also through a remarkable new project brought out by Wisdom Publications. This four-volume series of books, called Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, has just concluded with its final volume, Philosophical Topics. 

The series was conceived by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, who asked a group of Tibetan monastic scholars to produce a summary of the key scientific and philosophical contents of the Tibetan Buddhist canon. This Compendium Compilation Committee, chaired by Thamthog Rinpoche, abbot of Namgyal Monastery, produced a series of four Tibetan volumes, which have now been translated into English. With a total length of more than 2,000 pages, this is a formidable achievement. 

The first volume covers the physical sciences, with discussion of ancient Indian Buddhist theories of matter, time, and cosmology, as well as a substantial section on embryology, while the second volume is devoted to the Buddhist sciences of the mind, providing an overview of Buddhist psychology, the mind’s constituents, inferential reasoning, and meditational mind training. The final two volumes focus on philosophy. The third volume surveys the ancient Indian philosophical cosmos seen through Tibetan eyes, presenting an account of the Buddhist conceptions of the main schools of Classical Indian philosophy. These include the Nyaya and Vedanta, as well as “unorthodox” schools like the Jains and the ancient Indian materialists, followed by a thorough presentation of the key schools of Abhidharma and Mahayana philosophy. The final volume offers a  discussion of specific philosophical topics, such as the two truths and nonself,  and provides an impression of the lively philosophical debates these topics sparked in ancient India.

Translating this demanding and often technical material was not an easy task, and Wisdom Publications assembled an impressive set of experts under the general editorship of Thupten Jinpa, the Dalai Lama’s principal English translator. The first volume was translated by Ian Coghlan, who has recently published a fine translation of Buddhapalita’s commentary of Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way. The second was translated by Dechen Rochard (who also translated the fourth volume) and John Dunne. Rochard is a specialist on Madhyamaka and Candrakīrti, while Dunne is well-known for his work on Buddhist contemplative practice in dialogue with cognitive science. The third volume was translated by Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Hyoung Seok Ham. Lopez has recently translated a voluminous 18th-century Tibetan work on tenet systems (frameworks for understanding the nature of reality) for the Library of Tibetan Classics series; Ham is a distinguished Sanskritist and expert on the Classical Indian Mimamsa school. Volumes 2 and 3 also contain introductory contextual essays by Dunne and Lopez, respectively.

The fourth and final volume covers six central topics of Buddhist philosophy: the two truths, the no-self theory, ultimate reality according to Yogacara, emptiness in Madhyamaka, Buddhist epistemology and logic, and exclusion semantics, or apoha. (Exclusion semantics is a way of understanding a particular concept by eliminating everything that it isn’t.) With the exception of the theory of the two truths, which runs through the entirety of Indian Buddhist philosophy (described in greater detail in Sonam Thakchoe’s new magisterial The Two Truths in Indian Buddhism), the remaining five topics line up with the systems of tenets described in traditional Tibetan accounts: no-self with the Abhidharma, followed by Yogacara and Madhyamaka, and the final two topics with the school of Dinnaga and Dharmakirti. As these schools are treated in detail in volume 3 of the series, there is some overlap. We find discussions of the Yogacara theory of the three natures (trisvabhava) in both volumes 3 and 4; the same is true of the Svatantrika-Prasangika distinction, while matters of logic and inference are treated in much greater detail in volume 2. The interested reader will want to acquire all four volumes to ensure they do not miss relevant discussions elsewhere in the series.

Somewhat more concerning than the perhaps inevitable spread of discussions across separate volumes are the editors’ inconsistent translational choices. An unsystematic comparison of volumes 3 and 4 yields numerous examples: parikalpita-svabhava is rendered as “imaginary nature” in one volume and as “imputed nature” elsewhere; other cases include spyi (“generality” or “universal”), buddhi (“intellect” or “cognition”), akara (“image” or “aspect”), and so on. Why the publisher has not insisted that the translators harmonize their terminological choices at the outset of the project is unclear. Those familiar with the subject matter are unlikely to be confused by the examples of translational variation just mentioned; they are, after all, all reasonable English equivalents of the relevant Sanskrit and Tibetan terms. However, this volume is presumably intended for readers without prior acquaintance with the substantial Sanskrit and Tibetan technical vocabulary characterizing Indo-Tibetan philosophy. In an attempt to render dense, scholastic material, which frequently relies on precise definition of and differentiation between terms in English, a consistent choice of translations is essential. Tibetans themselves realized the importance of such terminological consistency when translating Sanskrit texts into Tibetan as early as the 9th century, and one would hope that a similar desire for translational coherence would also characterize contemporary endeavors, at least within the boundaries of a single project. 

What is the intended audience for this series of books? These volumes occupy an interesting middle position between introductory overviews and primary sources. On the one hand, they constitute synoptic compendia, which bring together discussions of specific topics from various sources under a single heading; on the other hand, they are firmly rooted in the Tibetan scholastic tradition, sharing its expository style and focus on copious quotations from primary sources. The intended readership is clearly not the complete novice in the field. Leaving the differences in translational choices to one side, by the time someone who has never heard of Dinnaga, Dharmakirti, or exclusion semantics gets to sentences like the following, readers will probably have reached for a more elementary exposition of Buddhist philosophy:

“Conversely, in the case of negative concomitance or the heterogeneous class, although this is limitless like the homologous class, there is a difference in that the term, being absent from all dissimilar or heterogeneous cases, can be ascertained in a general way not to apply to those.” [4:478]

Nor are the books meant as a substitute for reading the scholastic Buddhist treatises of ancient India or the Mahayana sutras. What these four volumes provide is an entrance into the thought-world of Tibetan philosophy, and the way it has made the Indian Buddhist tradition its own by systematizing, analyzing, and developing it. A reader who already has some familiarity with Abhidharma, Yogacara, and Madhyamaka, with the main problems these schools discuss, or with Buddhist theories of mind and meditation, will find an account of how the Tibetan tradition put these together as a single body of knowledge.

Indeed, it might be more accurate in this context to speak of the dominant stream of the Tibetan scholastic tradition. This reviewer would have been delighted to see more of the philosophical diversity of the Tibetan conceptions of the Indian sources represented in the series. Discussions of tathagatagarbha (buddhanature) theory and the philosophical complexities this entails are absent, for example. The status of epistemic instruments in Madhyamaka, a hotly debated issue in Tibetan scholasticism (for more on this, see the recent two-volume study by The Yakherds, Knowing Illusion, Oxford University Press, 2022), is presented exclusively from the perspective of Gelugpa orthodoxy. The focus of the series is of course the presentation of Indian Buddhist discussions, but nevertheless, one would hope that the reader does not go away with the impression that over the course of more than a thousand years in which Tibetans translated, studied, and analyzed Indian texts everybody in Tibet agreed on how these works were to be understood.

Despite minor flaws in translational coherence (which might be mitigated considerably if the publisher made available a searchable, cumulative version of the glossaries of the four volumes), this series constitutes a monumental achievement. It affords English-speaking readers a view of the contemporary Tibetan scholastic tradition from the inside, and allows them to see the conceptual and philosophical richness of Indian Buddhist literary culture through Tibetan eyes. Students of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, and of the Indian intellectual tradition more generally, have every reason to be grateful to the Tibetan scholars making up the Compendium Compilation Committee, as well as to the English translators for providing them with this fantastic resource.

♦

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The greater Mumbai area, home to more than 22 million people, is a world away from remote and serene Buddhist monasteries in the Himalayas. But Buddhism is alive in India’s most densely populated city and financial and film capital. Mumbai has the largest urban Buddhist population in India and makes up nearly 80 percent of the country’s total Buddhist population.

Most of the city’s Buddhists are followers of Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956), who led a movement that converted hundreds of thousands of Dalit (“untouchable”) Hindus to Buddhism to escape the horrors and discrimination of the caste system. Today, Ambedkar continues to be revered, and his image can be found just about everywhere you turn, including in smaller temples, which include statues of his likeness in addition to the Buddha’s. 

1| Fabindia 

Traditional clothing isn’t a prerequisite for visiting Indian houses of worship, but modesty is. For sixty years, Fabindia has worked with rural artisans to sell clothes, jewelry, furniture, and more. Kurtas, long-sleeve shirts, and loose pants provide good sun coverage and a cooler option than jeans or leggings, and you can find every color and pattern imaginable. Shorts are not temple-appropriate; women might consider adding a scarf, called a dupatta, or
stole, depending on the length,
for covering arms or the head if required. Fabindia has hundreds of stores in India, with several in Mumbai; we recommend the Fort location, close to the famous Gateway of India and Crawford Market.  

Jeroo Building, B Bharucha Road, Kala Ghoda, Fort
fabindia.com

2| Kanheri Caves

If you have only one full day for Buddhist sightseeing in Mumbai, spend it at this ancient complex. The 109 Buddhist caves carved into a basalt rock hill were constructed as early as the 3rd century BCE, and were in use as a center for Buddhist study and worship up to the 11th century. The massive Buddhas in themselves are magnificent; Kanheri is known for a unique eleven-headed Avalokiteshvara. The caves are situated within Sanjay Gandhi National Park, which offers additional sites and attractions, including hiking, a safari, Jain temple, waterfall, and lakes. The caves are about seven kilometers inside the park, and uphill; cars can be hired once inside the main park’s entrance. You can also hike up; just be aware of the wildlife threats, including leopards. Guard your snacks from resident monkeys, they are quick. 

Sanjay Gandhi National Park

3| B.R. Ambedkar Chaityabhoomi

Chaityabhoomi was the site of Ambedkar’s cremation in 1956, and his death anniversary, or Mahaparinirvan Din, brings millions of pilgrims every December 6. The main hall includes a statue of the Buddha; sitting below him is an Ambedkar bust adorned with flower garlands and illuminated by candles, and a monk nearby to offer blessings. The main entrance gate and pillar are replicas of the Sanchi Gate and Ashoka Pillar, and stalls leading to the temple sell Ambedkar literature, flowers for offerings, and a wide variety of Buddha and Ambedkar tchotchkes. Chaityabhoomi is on the waterfront, steps away from Dadar Chowpatty (beach) and Shivaji Park. 

2RGM+2HJ, D Mandir Road, Dadar West, Dadar

4| Global Vipassana Pagoda

The Global Vipassana Pagoda, on Mumbai’s northern outskirts, was a project S. N. Goenka (1924–2013) worked to complete toward the end of his life that honored his teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, as well as educating visitors about the Vipassana tradition. The gold-painted pagoda stands at 325 feet tall and contains Buddha relics. The complex includes a pillar-less dome that can accommodate 8,000 people (but only those who have completed a Goenka ten-day course can meditate there). A ten-minute anapanasati (mindfulness of breathing) course is offered continuously from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., and all visitors aged 10 and up can participate. Getting there is a trek that includes a ferry ride and magnificent views; take advantage of the vegetarian food options onsite.

Global Vipassana Pagoda Road, Gorai Village, West Borivali
globalpagoda.org

5| Nipponzan Myohoji

This Nichiren Buddhist temple has the distinction of being Mumbai’s oldest—and possibly only—Japanese Buddhist place of worship. The temple’s founder, Nichidatsu Fujii (1885–1985), traveled to India in the ’30s to fulfill Nichiren’s prophecy to bring the Lotus Sutra to India. Today, visitors can chant the daimoku in the temple, which includes a large marble Buddha and vibrant paintings depicting scenes from the Buddha’s life. Resident monk Bhikshu T. Morita continues the vision of the order’s founder by working to construct a new peace pagoda and running a nonsectarian school for local children. 

2R28+79P, Dr. Annie Besant Road, opp. Poddar Hospital, B Wing, Worli
nipponzanmyohojimumbai.com

6| Rajgruha (Ambedkar Museum)

Ambedkar’s former mansion is an opportunity to pay homage and to learn more about his life. Ambedkar is said to have constructed the residence to house his personal library, which, at 50,000 books, was one of the largest in the world at the time (a portion of his collection now lives at Mumbai’s Siddharth College Library). Rajgruha is an important site to many Ambedkarite Buddhists, and the ground-floor museum contains other significant personal items from his life. 

Dadar East, 129, Khare Ghat Marg, Hindu Colony

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When you have deeply contemplated the patterns of your own life and made a commitment to self-care, your vision will naturally expand to include the suffering of others. You can say with real conviction, “I am not the only one. My parents, my loved ones and friends, cannot go through a single day without experiencing pain and regret, fear and longing. The same is true of every being all over the world.” Look around you with caring eyes, and you will see the countless ways that people suffer, how they sacrifice their present joy in hope of future happiness. Instead of turning away, trace out these patterns in the lives of those you know. Take your time: let it be real. Then imagine the same patterns at work in every corner of the world, from the beginning of human history.

♦

Excerpted from Gesture of Great Love: Light of Liberation by Tarthang Tulku (Dharma Publishing, 2022).

The post Caring Eyes appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Challenging the ideas about the European discovery of Buddhism and its influence in the construction of Protestant Buddhism, Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India presents a compelling narrative of the reinvention of modern Indian Buddhism in colonial and postcolonial India.

Drawing from “unarchived histories,” Douglas Ober examines the marginalized, disenfranchised, and forgotten institutions and persons that played an instrumental role in shaping the trajectory of Buddhism in medieval/early modern and, especially, colonial India. He begins by questioning the prevalent idea of the decline of Buddhism in the 13th century. Ober argues for the presence of Buddhism and its memory in the minds of Hindu Brahman elites, who continued to remember a story of struggle, competition, and conquest over the Buddhists in premodern India.

This was evident to a vast network of native scholars/assistants who worked alongside the colonial surveyors and civil servants of the East India company. These assistants often talked to locals to gather information about sites, texts, or images, and their investigations revealed the bias against Buddhism and the appropriation of Buddhist spaces within Hinduism. Ober forcefully argues that the idea of the European discovery of Buddhism resulted from the deliberate silencing of native scholars, reflecting “colonial arrogance, bigotry, and racial prejudice.”This began to change in the second half of the 19th century, when English-educated Indians began to produce new scholarship on Buddhism. In addition to collecting manuscripts and archaeological/art historical data, scholars presented Buddhism as a scientific, rational, and scriptural religion that opposed the evils of Brahmanism, i.e., the caste system and Vedic ritualism. In contrast, scholars such as Sarat Chandra Das traveled to Tibet, studied there, and collected hundreds of manuscripts, and challenged the predominant representation of the Buddha as a social reformer or the sangha as a promoter of gender equality. Later, scholars attempted to identify “crypto-Buddhists” in the early 20th century among the marginal lower castes, tribals, and untouchables. What is evident through the discussion of these examples is the entangling of colonial institutions, European and native scholars, and their dialogues, which resulted in a sustained interest in recovering the Buddhist past.

Ober also covers monk-scholars, who developed their understanding of Buddhism through monastic training in Sri Lanka or Burma, rather than the scholarship of the time. The focus on these agents at the grassroot level highlights their important role in reimagining Buddhist sacred sites such as Sarnath and Kushinagar. Ober also draws our attention to the crucial role of the Theosophical Society in the development of scholarly practitioner global networks. The Theosophical Society’s preference for Buddhism and engagement with Buddhists from different parts of Asia led to the emergence of a number of Buddhist associations, which focused largely on social and religious reforms through scriptural Buddhism, in contrast to Dharmapala’s Mahabodhi Society and its goal of reviving Buddhism’s past glory. All of these associations were part of a broader global Buddhist network in which they exchanged information and resources across national, regional, cultural, and geographical boundaries.

At the end of the 19th century, the anti-Brahmanical representation of Buddhism began to be replaced with a new interpretation that saw Buddhism more as an offspring of Hinduism. This new formulation, Ober writes, was “inextricably tied to the birth of the modern nation and intellectual assimilation of the Indic religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism.” (Growing up in India, I was always taught that both these traditions were heterodox sects of Hinduism and not separate religions.) Ober provides a contextual study of sociopolitics through which this understanding caught the imagination of nationalist leaders and Hindu thinkers in the first half of the 20th century and became the popular understanding. A new conception of inclusive Hinduism that equated “Hindu-ness” with “Indian-ness,” and defined it as “a combination of territorial, racial, religious, and cultural characteristics,” emerged as a result of the works of organizations, including the Hindu Mahasabha. The philanthropist J. K. Birla’s patronage for the construction of a number of Buddhist viharas and temples, modeled on Hindu revivalist architecture, was aimed at asserting India’s claim as the Buddhist homeland and Buddhism being part of a singular Hindu tradition. This claim helped tone down the anti-Brahmanical rhetoric and framed the revival of Buddhism as a recovery of India’s great past.

Buddhism’s return to the national forefront was not a monolithic but a multipronged phenomenon.

Buddhism’s return to the national forefront was not a monolithic but a multipronged phenomenon. Several leaders such as B. R. Ambedkar (a Dalit) and monk activists such as Bhikkhu Bodhananda (a Bengali Brahman) continued to make strong arguments for the egalitarian, anti-caste, anti-Hindu nature of Buddhism. Despite being aware of the claims of the “Hindu-Buddha,” and a proximate relationship between the Hindu and Buddhist organizations, Ambedkar argued for a clear separation between a Buddhist and a Hindu identity. This separation was also emphasized by Marxist scholars, who found close connections between Buddhist and Marxist doctrines. Rahul Sankrityayan presented Buddhism as “a religion of reason, human pragmatism, and atheistic humanism,” while Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi highlighted the process of collective decision-making and lack of private property in the sangha as features common to Buddhist and Marxist thought. Ober correctly asserts that these articulations were a result of global networks that shaped their scholarship as well as activism in the independence movements in colonial India.

Ober also interrogates how Buddhist symbols, sites, and relics were intricately tied to the nation-building exercise and used as instruments of foreign policy. The adoption of Buddhist Dharmachakra and the Lion seal of Sarnath as national symbols was predicated on Nehru’s understanding of Buddhism as “a modern religion of reason” that did not require any institutional commitment. Even though he participated in multiple relic tours and Buddhist functions, Nehru saw Buddhism as a “cosmopolitan modernizing force with pan-Asian appeal” that could be utilized as an instrument of foreign policy to represent India as the guiding force of the past and present. Nehru consciously chose relic-centered diplomacy as a tool in the Buddhist border regions to present India as a legitimate state and in neighboring Buddhist countries as the homeland of Buddhism.

Ober’s exhaustive survey assembles Buddhism’s disparate histories from different regions of modern India and contextualizes the formation of its multiple stands. He effectively dismantles the idea of European discovery of Buddhism and challenges the overemphasis on the contribution of Dharmapala and Ambedkar’s scholarship. Each of the indigenous curators Ober profiles was linked to the global networks of monks, scholars, intellectuals, political leaders, industrialists, and the colonial state, demonstrating the interplay between East and West, local and global, native and colonial, and national and universal. The ambitious scope of Ober’s work justifies his multisited and multilingual methodology, and reliance on translations and secondary literature. While Ober engages with previous works that focus on the role of colonial actors and selective native scholars, his effort is elevated by engaging with the voices of marginalized people and overlooked associations in the rebirth of Buddhism.

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