One of the questions we ask ourselves in evaluating articles is, in what way does this matter to our readers? What is at stake in the issues that a particular piece explores? Since we are a Buddhist publication, for many of our articles, the answer is obvious. The value of pieces on Buddhist teachings and practice, for instance, goes without saying. And narratives by practitioners do what good narrative writing is intended to do—act as a lens to better examine one’s world and one’s own life. But for the historical pieces based on scholarship, the answer may not be immediately clear, although such pieces are no less important in understanding our traditions. As an example, a topic we have been exploring for years is Buddhist modernism. As best I can recall, the first time the term appeared in Tricycle was in an interview with Jacqueline Stone, then a professor of Japanese studies at Princeton University. In it, Stone laid out Buddhist modernism’s origins:

Buddhist modernism began in the late nineteenth century, as Asian Buddhist leaders and Western converts … sought to present Buddhism as the answer to the so-called crisis of faith brought on by the alleged incompatibility of Christianity and the modern rational-scientific worldview. So certain elements were abstracted from the larger religious context and presented as constituting the core or essential teachings of Buddhism, and other elements—elements that always had been a vital part of the tradition—were marginalized.

Stone adds that “the point is not that Buddhist modernism is wrong. Actually, I think it is part of Buddhism’s continuous interpretive effort to frame itself in accordance with the demands of time and place.”

Not long after that, on Stone’s advice, Tricycle’s features editor, Andrew Cooper, interviewed the scholar Robert Sharf (Summer 2007), to take on a subject that in Stone’s interview was all but an aside. In fact, with other scholars like Donald S. Lopez Jr., Sharf was one of the first to open modern Buddhist studies as a legitimate field of research, notably with his 1995 paper “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience”; likewise, Lopez’s seminal Prisoners of Shangri-La (1998); A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West (2002); and his inaugural lecture at the University of Michigan, “The Making of Modern Buddhism” (2001), anticipate works that follow, among them, David McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism.

In this issue, Seth Segall’s review of McMahan’s new title, Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds, continues our exploration. Like all good works of scholarship, McMahan’s rests on the surface of a much deeper ocean, drawing from the research of those who preceded him and building upon it. Rethinking Meditation reflects a central concern of the author: while Buddhism is often presented as a means by which to deconstruct our world, it is itself constructed within ever-changing historical and cultural contexts. As we learned much earlier from the work of Sharf and Lopez, the Buddhism we practice today bears little resemblance to the Buddhism of even a few centuries ago. To quote Segall’s review, “McMahan demonstrates how every culture and historical era reinterprets and repurposes Buddhist practice to make it relevant to its place and time.”

We often dismiss ideas as, well, mere ideas. But Buddhist history for Buddhist practitioners, to cite an approach used by the late scholar and Tricycle contributor Rita Gross (Fall 2010), can reveal otherwise hidden assumptions, sectarian attachments, and personal biases. And isn’t shedding light on such blind spots a big part of why we practice Buddhism in the first place?

The post Mere Ideas? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Growing old is not all bad. A young friend recently complained that he was unable to shake off self-consciousness about how he looked and sounded. With some irony I told him that the great thing about getting older is that as you begin to fall apart, people stop looking at you altogether. Aside from joint pain and the occasional blow to one’s vanity, age can come as a great relief, affording unexpected privacy, even when in public. Now, despite my habits of cynicism and irascibility—my personality isn’t much more than a habit after all—I can grudgingly though gratefully acknowledge that I am content.

In the days that followed the exchange with my young friend, it was a special joy to reflect on the nature of my contentment—a sense of completeness: nothing need be added or, for that matter, subtracted. Nowadays, work, personal relations, and social life sail along pleasantly enough. Until, say, I get a call from the sort of friend who likes to dangle new and shiny things before my eyes. Before I know it my competitiveness is awakened, a resentment is born, and I feel a pressing desire to be seen again, if only just one more time. Worse, the pettiness of it all deals a blow harsher than anything age can muster. In a brief moment, I have become someone who is not content. How to come back?

In “The Big Picture,” the Buddhist scholar Anne Klein (Lama Rigzin Drolma) writes about Dzogchen, the tradition in which she teaches and practices. The word is commonly translated as “The Great Perfection,” although Klein prefers “The Great Completeness,” a translation I find far more relatable. The notion that I am perfect, or even a part of perfection, is pretty tough to digest, and apparently, I’m not alone. In this month’s episode of Tricycle Talks, Klein describes an exercise that she sometimes assigns her students: sitting face-to-face in pairs, they tell each other, “You are perfect.” It’s an awkward moment; like me, the students squirm at such a notion. Yet, as I remarked to Klein, completeness is another matter altogether; it’s precisely the wholeness I experience when I am content. And what I tend to forget is that whatever state I’m in, there is no need to “come back.” A moment of awareness—always available to us—reminds me that I am already there, already whole, already complete.

Self-deprecating humor aside, practice over the years, with its ups and downs, its moments of clarity and its long slogs through struggle, its joys and miseries, has made a difference. I am far less likely to brood over my imperfections, or even consider them as such; or kick myself for taking the bait the world is in fact always dangling before us. As an exaggerated sense of agency subsides, a sweet surrender takes hold, allowing me to relax into a life that, as Klein puts it, “is backlit by completeness.”

Yes, practice has made a difference. And, maybe, too, I’m just getting old.

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We typically associate modernism with the cultural West, and “Buddhist modernism” is no exception: traditional forms of the religion reached our shores, the story goes, and over time we worked to make them compatible with the realities of contemporary life. Yet the process of modernization has its roots in Asia. Grappling with the social, cultural, and economic pressures of colonialism and modernization, Asian Buddhist cultures not only developed strategies to defend against foreign incursions but also adapted Buddhism in highly creative and innovative ways. In Burma, for example, meditation was taken out of the monasteries and made widely accessible to lay men and women, ensuring its survival.

The process of adaptation is how Buddhism stays vital in the lives of those who practice it. So it is not surprising that from early on, some of Buddhism’s central tenets have been transformed to accommodate the demands of a quickly changing world. As the author and professor of religious studies David McMahan explains in this issue (“The Roots of Buddhist Modernism”):

The concept of dependent arising underwent a considerable transformation in Asia before it reached a global audience. It began as bad news: karmic bonds enmesh us in bondage, suffering, and continual rebirth. But the interdependence of all things begins to take on more positive meanings in East Asia, especially when combined with the idea that buddhanature permeates everything, including the natural world.

What began in Asia continued as Buddhism reached new lands. Eventually, what McMahan calls a “transnational Buddhism” developed, in which people globally “began working from a shared repertoire of ideas, which allowed new resonances and connections.”

There is perhaps no better embodiment of Buddhism’s modern expression than the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, whose centering of dependent arising—or to use his term, “interbeing”—influenced not only Zen schools in the West but also Buddhist traditions worldwide. Interdependence has been so pervasive in contemporary Buddhist discourse that it is fair to say that it is one of the ideas most closely associated with Buddhism in the popular imagination. Even outside Buddhist circles—particularly in the field of ecology—interdependence has found its way into common parlance.

In this and in so many other respects, it is difficult to overstate Thich Nhat Hanh’s influence. All the more reason that his loss is felt both inside and outside his Order of Interbeing, the school he founded and that has flourished beyond Vietnam’s borders. A figure so central to a school’s development is virtually impossible to replace, and in this issue, Megan Sweas looks at the future of his community in “After Thay.”

Thich Nhat Hanh opined that the future Buddha would “manifest in the form of ‘A Beloved Community,’” and members of the Order of Interbeing have taken him at his word, meticulously maintaining a horizontal, consensus-based model of decision-making in the sangha. “They must maintain a young tradition and stay true to Thay’s spirit by pushing at its bounds,” Megan Sweas writes, “all while no single person holds authority.”

It is not an easy line to walk, but given their extraordinary commitment to the legacy of their teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh’s students are confident they’ll manage in his absence. The creativity and innovation that characterized their teacher, after all, is precisely what has allowed the Buddhist forms we practice today to survive the convulsions of modernity.

The post Walking a Fine Line appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

By the 19th century, a new Buddha had taken shape in the West—the rational, humanistic, even “scientific” Buddha we’ve come to call the “historical Buddha.” This Buddha, to borrow from the Buddhist scholar Bernard Faure, more closely resembled a “British gentleman” than the omniscient, often superhuman Buddha of the texts. In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, I chatted with Faure about his latest book, The Thousand and One Lives of the Buddha, in which he argues that this “historical Buddha” is every bit as much a myth as any of the Buddhas we find in the traditional literature. In fact, according to Faure, any attempt to strip the Buddha’s story down to a rational, chronologically driven biography deprives the tradition of the very mythic “juice” that has moved countless generations to adopt the way of life that the Buddha, in his many manifestations, espoused.

As in any religious tradition, it is through myth that meaning is conveyed. In this issue, Karen Armstrong writes that humans have felt compelled from the earliest times to “devise stories that enabled them to place their lives in a different setting and give them a conviction that—against all the depressing evidence to the contrary—life had some meaning and value.” This is not to dismiss the value of rational thought, or logos; it is only to argue that imaginative knowing, or mythos, is its essential complement. In her book Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World, Armstrong makes a strong case for the idea that despite its great value as a rationale for action, a welter of scientific data will not compel us to battle climate change; what will is the narrative we construct to explain why our planet is worth saving—or why our lives and our connection to Earth have meaning. In keeping with this sentiment, the climate psychologist and organizational strategist Renée Lertzman explains that “we have known for decades that information is not enough. It’s the emotional charge that comes with information that is key.” Stories—or mythic narratives—are what provide that charge.

For Buddhists, creative retellings of the Buddha’s life can have great value. In fact, Bernard Faure’s book celebrates the many stories that populate the tradition, from the earliest depictions of the Buddha to those we find in Japanese manga and in contemporary science fiction. I would add that the “historical Buddha” can have equal value, using contemporary narratives, including scientific ones, to tell a story that resonates with modern sensibilities. It’s helpful, though, to understand these narratives in their mythical dimension; they are stories developed to speak to the needs and concerns of our time.

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Sometimes the teachings come to us easily. The truth of impermanence, for instance, is something we can grasp with little effort, at least intellectually. Who can dispute that all things change? And at other times the teachings seem to defy common sense, to contradict the very logic of our experience: When I have been grievously wronged, who can say that I should not be angry? Or that anger cannot motivate me to take an action that is not only necessary but also just? Isn’t it fair to say that I am wired this way psychologically, even biologically, and that anger has its evolutionary purpose?

And yet according to Shantideva, the 8th-century Buddhist scholar and saint, this is precisely where we are wrong: Anger, he argues, is always and without exception rooted in ignorance and invariably harmful, to ourselves and others. Along with greed and delusion, it is one of the “three poisons” at the center of the bhavacakra, the wheel of samsara; and it is, as we discover in Allison Aitken’s “What’s Wrong with Anger?”, the very thing that keeps us from the peace we seek. “Shantideva would insist,” Aitken writes, “that whatever anger promises to do for us, compassion can do better.” In fact, she notes, for Shantideva, compassion is the antidote to anger.

I won’t pretend that anger is unfamiliar to me. Anyone who knows me would laugh at that idea. And I have to admit, I’m a bit torn here. From Aristotle to Hume, the western tradition has valorized our passions, as Aitken points out; and later theories of unconscious aggression and evolutionary biology would suggest that anger, like any of our unrulier passions, is hardwired. On the other hand, I can’t imagine that an 8th-century Indian, or for that matter, the original community that formed around the Buddha’s teachings, had any less attachment to anger or were any less afflicted by it. They dealt with what we deal with now, for our struggles with anger have less to do with our evolving theories about it than they do with the very fact of it. Who can be content who is angry? Shantideva, and here I find no difficulty agreeing with him, would have a simple answer: no one.

Buddhism is nothing if not practical. Whether our afflictions are adventitious or hardwired and merely to be dealt with is of little consequence when we find ourselves in their throes. Anger is its own hell, and what Buddhist practice offers is a way out. Questions about anger’s ontological truth are, in other words, useless to me when I have access to a practice that breaks my attachment to it and alleviates the grinding unhappiness it occasions.

This may seem a bit of a dodge, but it isn’t. I find nothing more tediously painful than the self-righteousness of anger; nothing more distracting, nothing more damaging. As Shantideva wrote, “Any virtuous actions we have created over thousands of eons can be destroyed in one moment of anger.” The good news is that there is an antidote, however you understand anger’s roots, whether you locate those roots in ignorance or in the evolutionary depths of human history.

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In his novel Life and Fate, the 20th-century Soviet writer Vasily Grossman writes:

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

We might take a more forgiving attitude toward the fatalism of Grossman’s view of history by understanding the historical moment in which he wrote. As a war reporter, Grossman was an eyewitness to the battle of Stalingrad, the single bloodiest and most consequential battle of the Second World War. The backdrop of Life and Fate is the collision, at Stalingrad, of the 20th century’s two dominant authoritarian states, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Yet Grossman shines a light on small acts of kindness through it all: a Russian woman hands a captive German soldier a crust of bread; enemies who meet in chance encounters experience each other’s humanity. Even as he depicts the most brutal of human activities, Grossman recollects for us, without sentimentality, the seed of kindness that is an ineradicable feature of our deepest nature.

Like nearly everyone I know, I have been increasingly alarmed in recent years: the looming catastrophic consequences of climate change; the rise of authoritarianism at home and abroad; the rolling back of established rights and protections—these and other trends have at times felt overwhelming. I cannot compare the challenges the world presents to me with the horrific events to which Grossman was witness; I can, though, find guidance and inspiration in the capacity for goodness that he affirms.

I think spiritual practice and art can meet on this ground (see “Existential Creativity”). Although people have devised countless ways to make one another miserable, that is not the entirety of our story. We have also, in the midst of it all, established legacies that support us in awakening to and nurturing these seemingly fleeting and fragile moments of kindness—indeed, all that is good in us.

Buddhist tradition, for all its imperfections and shortcomings, is one such legacy. And for all my own imperfections and shortcomings, it is one I’ve come to treasure, perhaps never more so than when events in the world seem the most heart-crushing. Over the years, I’ve come to feel that we Buddhists have much to learn about how we might best translate our esteemed values into meaningful responsiveness to a world in crisis. As things in the world change, so will our responsiveness to them. And I know that we will have much disagreement about what this entails. I have learned, over and over again, that attentiveness to what Grossman calls a kernel of kindness—and what some Buddhists might call buddhanature—can help keep us grounded in good faith and can transform disputes into dialogues.

Our capacity for good is spoken for in the multiple streams of cultural heritage to which we are all in various ways heir. Buddhism is one, and for me it is a particularly rich one. But the capacity for good is not the possession of any one group or religion, let alone any individual. It belongs to all equally and without qualification. Mindfulness of that principle can, I think, serve to guide us as we move forward, no matter how the winds of the world may blow.

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For better or worse—and more often, worse—expectations are built into our practice. We will become more competent and ethical people, kinder and more compassionate; we’ll achieve a balance and will sail through our toughest days with poise and grace. And maybe we’ll even get enlightened. So it’s often an unpleasant shock when we discover that in some ways we haven’t changed much at all, or at least that those glitches we thought we’d worked through have simply lain dormant, ready to ambush us when we least expect it, exposing our imagined progress for mere conceit. We’re not where we thought we were on the path; worse, we’re not even who we thought we were.

In this issue’s “How Meditation Failed Me,” psychotherapist and author Mark Epstein discovers just this. As a child he’d been largely successful concealing a stammer, learning various strategies for making it to the end of a sentence smoothly. But preparing to read for the audio version of one of his books, he finds that the old ghosts have returned. He’s stuck, unable to utter the first word. “As an author,” he writes, “and especially as a Buddhist psychiatrist, I wished to appear relaxed, open, flexible, friendly, competent, and smart.” Tongue-tied, he exhausts all the old strategies, including meditation, to no avail. “It’s as if,” he laments, “I were back in the second grade.”

Practice is a path, not a formula. Nothing can prepare us for what we haven’t experienced, and in each moment we must learn anew. Practice can, though, bring about a spiritual fitness that makes it likelier that we’ll find our way. “Being open to any given moment is more important than knowing what to do,” a Tibetan teacher recently said to his students. “Sometimes what you know can be your problem.”

For Epstein, a mind full of notions of who he was, or should be—or how he thought he ought to appear—stood in the way of the words that eventually flowed.

Daily life is full of such obstacles, yet for the practitioner, however painful, they can be opportunities for insight and growth. It’s another matter altogether, though, when what we’re ultimately practicing for comes to pass. In her thirties and full of life, Teri Dillion learned one spring day that she had ALS, a degenerative disease that causes progressive paralysis and ends in death within a few years of diagnosis. On the advice of her teacher, she decides to double down on her practice—until day two: “Something in me knew that my belief in earnest striving had been irrevocably punctured,” Dillion writes. “Pushing for realization now seemed useless. In some respects, I suspected my journey of waking up had only begun.”

Like Epstein, Dillion exhausts regimens both spiritual and physical to no avail. Maybe, she concludes, recovery isn’t the right goal for her anymore. “Not that I didn’t deserve it,” she muses, “but maybe I deserved the lessons that come from surrender and grace even more.” (See “Making Our Own Jewels.”)

I can’t count the number of articles we’ve run—or the teachings I’ve heard—on letting go. And I think for maybe a month Frozen’s theme song took up residence in my mind like an earworm, which is ironically apt: anyone who has suffered such a visitation knows that “letting go” is out of the question; it occurs to you that letting go isn’t something you do. It’s at times like this that complete defeat is the best teaching: stripping us of exaggerated notions of agency, it can invite humility, an acceptance of our own very human frailty. For Mark Epstein, the poignant humor of his condition brought with it the sort of recognition and self-acceptance that was in part the fruit of his practice. For Teri Dillion, the stakes much higher, it was opening to her lot that allowed her to embrace with some joy what life she had left. “Despite the people who claimed they would rather die than experience my fate,” she writes, “my life still had value. It was still, to me, a life worth living.”

The post A Life Worth Living appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Shannon Watts, a housewife and mother of five, had no intention of becoming a national figure. Yet shortly after the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting in 2012, in which 20 children and 6 adults were murdered, her life changed. The next day, no longer content to sit on the sidelines, Watts, writing from her home in a suburb of Indianapolis, sent out an urgent call to action to her seventy-five Facebook followers. Word spread quickly, and soon after, a movement was born: Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. With over six million supporters led almost entirely by women, what began with a social media post is now the largest and most effective anti-gun violence movement in the country, with unlikely legislative victories over the National Rifle Association (NRA) in states as red as Arkansas. In that state, Moms Demand Action, flexing its newfound electoral muscle, also sent two of its supporters to the state house.

It hasn’t been all smooth sailing, of course, but perhaps what is most impressive about Watts, a former marketing professional, is her dogged persistence against formidable odds. “Failure is feedback,” she says, and her organization likes to describe its setbacks as “losing forward.”

“I think that’s the story of activism,” Watts told Sharon Salzberg and me in a recent episode of our co-hosted podcast, Life As It Is. “It’s drips on a rock. It’s never giving up. And it’s learning from when you lose so that you can win the battle the next time.” (See “Drips on a Rock.”)

As extraordinary as Watts is as the founder and leader of an organization that now boasts more members than the NRA itself, none of this would have been possible without the grass roots. And that’s not lost on her. “When I opened my laptop nine years ago, I could never have imagined how many people would selflessly give up their time and talents to join me in this fight,” Watts recently told me. “I am continuously inspired by gun violence survivors and our volunteers, who work tirelessly to save the lives of people they will likely never meet. They do it all amid the demands of work, caregiving, and the pandemic. Our progress is sometimes measured in leaps and bounds, other times in more incremental steps, but it is all leading to a revolution in the way we think about gun safety in America.”

Watts is a leader who has been able to galvanize and give expression to a group’s shared aspirations. But this is balanced and complemented by her ability to do the unglamorous work of a skilled organizer: attending to personal relationships; supporting co-workers; hanging in there to iron out differences; and building consensus. And while Watts draws inspiration from the millions who have joined her and the positive reception she has received in the media, as a student of Buddhism she also draws strength from her meditation practice. “I think meditation is such a great tool, not just for restoring your mind but also for making sure you stay grounded. And when you do receive death threats, or trolls online, or losses . . . see those things happening almost as you see your thoughts . . . knowing they’re temporary . . . they’re impermanent . . . and will go away.”

At a time when we face so many seemingly insurmountable challenges, it’s easy to give up. Yet Watts never does. On that day in 2012 when news of the school shooting broke, she was folding laundry. She knew nothing of activism, nothing of organizing, nothing of gun violence. Yet her anger and sadness drove her to act in a way that has resonated with millions and that has no doubt saved lives. From her meditation practice to her activism, gains are slow and cumulative—“drips on a rock,” as she says. And so much of our practice is this way. What begins as a modest effort to connect with ourselves and others ripples out in unexpected ways, and, we hope, in ever-widening circles.

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I recently had a long and animated conversation with several friends about politics. It’s the kind of discussion I usually enjoy—a small gathering of thoughtful, knowledgeable friends chatting about things we care deeply about. Yet as much as I enjoyed this conversation, there was something about it that left me uneasy. It also occurred to me that this was a familiar feeling, one I’d rarely given much thought to.

When I considered it afterward, something another friend once said came to mind. Although we tend to believe that we arrive at the endpoints of our thinking by putting together an array of facts, ideas, experiences, and so forth, it may more often be the case that things move in just the opposite direction. We start with what we already think is true and work backward from there, lining up our perceptions with what we thought to be true in the first place. That explained the familiar unease, the sense of being stuck. Working backward from the views we already hold, we come away unchanged. There is something stale in that.

In putting together this issue, I came up against this tendency in myself more than once. For example, I am by temper often pessimistic and sometimes even complacent in my gloom. In particular, when it comes to the overriding issue of climate change and looming ecological doom, I veer toward hopelessness, and I am skeptical of those I view as optimists. But reading Paul Hawken’s new book, Regeneration, forced me to rethink my attitude. Hawken writes, for instance, that “climate science now indicates that global warming would begin to recede after we achieve zero carbon emissions,” which ran counter to my understanding that the climate will warm well beyond that point. I don’t mean that Paul Hawken is offering an optimistic view to challenge my pessimism. Rather, his grasp of and ability to articulate the complexities and possibilities we face shook me out of my simplistic thinking, framed within the limiting spectrum of pessimism and optimism. Get rid of that and there is room to breathe and think, and, most importantly, to act.

Another way of understanding our tendency to remain stuck is attachment to view, and Jim Forest’s memories of life with Thich Nhat Hanh offered another opportunity to challenge my own assumptions. While Thich Nhat Hanh is now best known for his teachings on mindfulness, peace, and interbeing, maybe less known or appreciated is his full-throated critique of ideologies of all sorts, including Buddhist ones. Jim recounts as an illustration the explanation given by Nhat Hanh of the injunction to “kill the Buddha”—Linji Yixuan’s antidote to a complacent attachment to even the teachings. Although nonattachment to view is a consistent theme in Buddhism, it is perhaps not surprising that a teacher who witnessed so much violence and misery caused by ideological conflict would place such emphasis on that. So much, in fact, that when he formed a new order, the first three precepts focused not on the familiar injunctions to refrain from killing, stealing, or indulging the senses, but rather on not falling into the traps of ideological attachments of any kind.

Like many others I’m in touch with, I’ve been thinking about what Buddhism has to bring to the table for living in our polarized world. It could be Buddhism’s history of affirming what it regards as our most deeply held values while at the same time calling into question our attachment to their formulations. When I consider this, my gloomy complacency loses some of its appeal. I come away a bit lighter—and even optimistic.

The post Getting Unstuck appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A few years ago I watched The 50 Year Argument, Martin Scorcese’s 2014 documentary marking the 50th anniversary of the estimable New York Review of Books. It was evident that those at the Review were not only comfortable with but also proud of this characterization, and rightly so. It is the job of periodicals to create among their readerships a cultural commons where divergent ideas, perspectives, and attitudes can be engaged and thereby enriched.

This past year, and especially during our preparation of this 30th-anniversary issue, the title of that documentary and all it signifies have been much on my mind. Of course, Tricycle and the NYRB differ in mission and character, yet we, too, seek to be a forum for spirited exchange among a far-flung community. For us, this is a spiritual task very much in keeping with Buddhist history and values. As features editor Andrew Cooper wrote some years ago, “Dialogue can shine a light on implicit assumptions that shape how we see ourselves and others, and life is made richer for this. Our horizons expand, our vision is made fresh, our sympathies are deepened.” (“Dialogue Across Difference,” Summer 2017)

As a specifically nonsectarian Buddhist publication, Tricycle is one contemporary participant in the tradition’s 2,500-year conversation. In these pages nearly a decade and a half ago, scholar of Buddhism Robert Sharf commented:

One way of looking at Buddhism is as a conversation . . . about what it is to be a human being: why we suffer, how we can resolve our suffering, what works, what doesn’t. . . . Whichever [issue] you choose to look at, you are not going to find a single Buddhist position. There have always been different positions, and these would be debated and argued. But all parties to the debate were presumed to share a common religious culture—a more or less shared world of texts, ideas, practices—without which there could be no real conversation. (“Losing Our Religion,” Summer 2007)

Periodicals, whether literary or religious, have a particular role to play in the transmission of our most prized cultural traditions. They are for highlighting and sharpening a give-and-take and jostling of views in their communities of concern. A certain amount of the rough-and-tumble is something to be affirmed and valued. It is through such exchanges that our traditions change and remain living traditions. And this is not new, as evidenced by the playfully fierce exchange between two monks in Stephen Mitchell’s “There’s Someone Who Isn’t Busy.” “Dharma combat” is meant to demonstrate, as Mitchell writes, an advanced student’s understanding of the truth. Yet, as we discover, the truth itself is elusive, not to be pinned down, and the repartee remains open-ended: Just when you think it’s complete, as Mitchell observes, “there’s always room for one more.” Everything changes, and the conversation continues.

“In the sangha,” novelist and Zen priest Ruth Ozeki says, “as we move around, make offerings and do prostrations, we’re collectively performing. We’re inhabiting the Buddha-body as a community and expressing it endlessly through the rituals and language passed down over time. It’s constantly being changed. It’s constantly being enlivened and reimagined.”

I’d like to think that this is also an apt description of the conversation we’ve been having over the last three decades. In accord with, yet not confined to, each historical moment, iterative yet evolving, such conversation can be a practice in itself, forever challenging us to reimagine, keep alive, and share the precious teachings that we’ve been fortunate enough to receive.

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