That feeling of being in the right place at the right time; of doing exactly the thing that you’re meant to do—isn’t this what so many of us crave but few of us are fortunate enough to claim? It’s that rare sense of feeling blessed by and in the life we’re living, and this is precisely how Monla Khedrup Rinpoche (also known as Khedrupchen Rinpoche) describes his own life and calling. Recognized at an early age as the fifth reincarnation of Kyabgon Khedrupchen Jigme Kundrol, a renowned Bhutanese scholar, practitioner, and one of the main students of Jigme Lingpa (a highly revered and realized 18th-century Buddhist teacher), he is tasked not only with teaching the dharma but also with ensuring the continuation of the Longchen Nyingthig tradition from the Nyingma lineage.

“I’ve always considered it an honor to serve sentient beings and the dharma,” Khedrupchen Rinpoche says. “And it’s not just about being a reincarnate teacher. What’s more important is that I can study, experience, and practice the teachings alongside all the other monks in order to help the dharma flourish.”

Born in 1990 in Bhutan, Khedrupchen Rinpoche is said to have begun recounting memories of his previous life when he was only 3. A few years later, he was formally recognized as a tulku (reincarnated lama), and at 13 began rigorous monastic training. At 16, he entered Ngagyur Nyingma College, a branch of the renowned Mindrolling Monastery in India, and completed a nine-year course on advanced Buddhist studies, graduating with an acharya degree, the equivalent of an M.A. He taught at the college for three years before returning to Bhutan, where he founded the Khedrup Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the dissemination of the buddhadharma and the continuation of the Longchen Nyingthig lineage. Each year, at his students’ request, Khedrupchen Rinpoche travels the world to teach at various centers, monasteries, and universities.

“When I was young, I thought being a rinpoche would be easy,” Khedrupchen Rinpoche tells me with a laugh. “But it’s actually very difficult. People have absolute trust in you as a teacher, and that’s a big responsibility. You have to be very careful with that trust so your students don’t lose it, because it’s actually not just trust in you but also trust in the dharma. And through trusting the dharma, they trust themselves.”

“Just as your students trust you, you have to trust your students.”

This responsibility is one that Khedrupchen Rinpoche carries out wholeheartedly through his multifaceted teaching. In addition to guiding the many monks and students under his care, he’s also involved in a number of social-action projects. The Khedrup Foundation manages and finances two monasteries, a yogi retreat center, and a handful of charitable projects like the Monmo Tashi Khyidren Initiative, a program that provides basic amenities like warm clothes and health care to the monks ofSangchen Ogyen Tsuklag Monastery. In addition to being the founder and president of the Khedrup Foundation, Khedrupchen Rinpoche is the founder of Siddhartha’s Wisdom Club—a youth program centered on Buddhist values and teachings, with an emphasis on mindfulness—and of the Ami-Deva Association, a meditation program for the elderly. 

When I ask Khedrupchen Rinpoche how he can ensure the continuation of the lineage and, more practically, how he’ll know who will come after him, he speaks first about the present. “The dharma is flourishing everywhere,” he says. “There are so many amazing teachers and amazing technology—so many things are possible that weren’t possible before. Scientists are paying attention to the teachings, and people are becoming more interested in studying and practicing. So I’m confident that the dharma will continue in the future. The combined good merit of all sentient beings is important for this to happen.” 

Then he circles back to the key ingredient of the teacher-student relationship: trust. “Just as your students trust you, you have to trust your students,” he says, smiling broadly. “For example, if you wholeheartedly offer one hundred people all of your teachings, I’m confident that at least a handful will practice diligently and carry the lineage forward.”  

Visit khedrupfoundation.org for more information.

The post Meet a Teacher: Khedrupchen Rinpoche appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There is a Buddhist prayer that speaks of a human life as “the ocean of existence with its surging waves of birth, aging, illness, and death.” The last three are also the “signs” Siddhartha Gautama saw before he left his comfortable palace life and, spurred by a fourth sign—the sight of a wandering mendicant—went searching for liberation. For Venerable Jissai Prince-Cherry, a Zen Buddhist priest, it was three of these “waves”—the birth of her son, a painful illness, and a heartbreaking death—that firmly set her on the path to freedom.

“Once my son was born,” she said, “I realized I didn’t feel about my career in the Air Force the way I had before. The day would come when I would have to leave him for a military assignment, and I thought, I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”

In 1994, a year after finishing military service, Jissai needed minor surgery. As she lay at home recovering, she realized how miserable she was. Despite having a good job, a wonderful family, and all the money they needed, something was “off” that she couldn’t pinpoint. So she took it as a sign—a modern-day version of the fourth sign the Buddha encountered—when three talk shows she happened to be watching on TV featured segments on meditation. She went to her local public library, picked up a book and, convinced this was what she was seeking, started practicing secular meditation.

“I identified as Christian, but wasn’t practicing,” she said. “I had no reason to reject the Buddhist books in the library. I was looking for a reason to dismiss them, so I decided to read the most Buddhist-looking book I could find.”

That book was What the Buddha Taught, by Walpola Rahula. And, to her amazement, she found reflected in those pages her innermost truths. She checked out another book, and it, too, confirmed what she felt, so she started practicing with a local Zen group. The next year, Jissai’s husband was offered a promotion in Rochester, New York, and she jumped at the chance to practice with the Rochester Zen Center (RZC). An introductory workshop led to a retreat, then another, and before long she was practicing at the center as much as she could. Even when her family moved to Kentucky two years later, she continued with the RZC, and with the support of her teacher, Roshi Bodhin Kjolhede, she established a sitting group in Louisville.

Once again, the surging waves—this time the sudden death of her husband in 2011 while she was on retreat in New York. Caught between grief and the practice momentum she’d established, Jissai stepped up her Zen training. Her children were grown, and she had financial support, which allowed her to travel regularly between Rochester
and Louisville.

“Stories speak in ways that explanations of Buddhist theory and doctrine cannot.”

In 2018, Jissai became a novice priest in the Three Jewels Order of the Cloud-Water Sangha (the association of Zen centers and sitting groups led by students of Roshi Kjolhede). Half of her training toward priest ordination occurred during COVID isolation. When in-person activities were restricted, the RZC, like other spiritual communities, conducted their activities online. “It was a real blessing in disguise,” she said. “There were twice-daily meditation sessions, Zen talks, and monthly sesshins. My training continued without skipping a beat.” In 2022, Jissai was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest of the Three Jewels Order.

In describing her teaching style, Ven. Jissai Prince-Cherry says, “I’m more of a storyteller. Like the Buddha’s use of Jataka tales, I tell stories to illustrate a point. It doesn’t matter if the ‘facts’ of the story are true or not. What’s most essential is what the story is pointing to. Stories speak in ways that explanations of Buddhist theory and doctrine cannot. Stories bring the teachings to life.”

To hear Ven. Jissai Prince-Cherry’s talks, visit the Rochester Zen Center podcast at rzc.org/library/archives-podcast

Q: What is “beginner’s mind” and why is it important to cultivate?

“Beginner’s mind” is a term popularized by Roshi Shunryu Suzuki of the San Francisco Zen Center in his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. His famous quote says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.” Beginner’s mind is very open. It’s a childlike mind; we don’t cling to what we know or think we know. That’s how it frees up possibilities. It’s spacious and empty.

In the Zen tradition in which I practice, we use the term “not-knowing” interchangeably with beginner’s mind. In order to know, we need a subject and an object. There’s a knower knowing something—some “thing.” There are distinct lines around the thing, a box, and a label. But this kind of knowing creates distance. There’s a gap between the knower and the known. And yet, life isn’t that way. The lines between knower and known, between subject and object, are way more blurry than we imagine them to be. Beginner’s mind operates before subject and object have split in two. Not-knowing is intimate.

Despite how it sounds, beginner’s mind is neither anti-intellectual nor ignorant. It is setting aside knowledge to remain empty-handed, empty-headed. That’s not a bad thing—being empty-headed. During sesshin, for example, our silent retreats, we do around ten hours of meditation each day for two to seven days. For sesshin, it really helps to be empty-headed.

I recently led a sesshin at my spiritual home, at Rochester Zen Center’s Chapin Mill Retreat Center. People attended who had done many, many retreats, and there were folks that were brand new.

A few of the veterans were burdened by a head full of thoughts about their experiences in previous sesshins, whereas the beginners—they had no idea what they were getting into. They brought freshness to the retreat because they were empty of knowing. They’d certainly heard about what happens during sesshin, they’d read about it, they had the schedule—so they weren’t ignorant—but because they’d never done it before, they weren’t carrying the baggage of past experience. They were free.

The bloated, knowledge-filled expert’s mind isn’t free. It’s like a period at the end of a sentence. Done. The end. A not-knowing mind, on the other hand, embodies a question mark. It’s wide open and ready for anything.

What’s great is we don’t have to make a special project out of cultivating beginner’s mind; we access it by simply doing our practice. Through absorption in our breath, a koan, or shikantaza (“just sitting”), we recover the mind unclouded by knowing. As we return over and over again to not-knowing, we experience firsthand Socrates’ words: “Wisdom begins in wonder.” We directly realize that intimacy, boundlessness, and freedom are our true nature. Beginner’s mind is our birthright.

–JP-C

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When I asked Anushka Fernandopulle about the main obstacle she sees in practitioners wanting to integrate dharma with their work, her answer was clear and immediate.

“People often don’t have a framework with which to see their work as part of their spiritual development, so it can help to have a right view chiropractic adjustment around this! I try to help people see that there doesn’t have to be a division between the two realms. Their work can be part of their path of development, which can help them personally—and also help them become a more effective, compassionate, and wise leader.”

Fernandopulle, an insight meditation teacher and Harvard and Yale graduate, works with practitioners of all stripes, though a large percentage of her teaching over the years has been with leaders and organizations interested in the synthesis of leadership, creativity, and awareness as framed through the dharma teachings. She grew up in a Sri Lankan community in Baltimore and spent many summers in Sri Lanka, where she first was exposed to the buddhadharma, but her connection with Buddhism was tenuous at first. It wasn’t until she was in college that she began studying the tradition in earnest and attending meditation classes at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. After college, she practiced at Insight Meditation Society for a year, and then traveled to Sri Lanka and India, where she spent several years training in a number of Buddhist monasteries and practice centers. After returning to the United States, she joined a four-year meditation teacher training program led by Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, and others.

“I always had a curious bent,” Fernandopulle said. “As a child, I wanted to understand death and the passage of time. I wanted to understand what past, present, and future were. I also played sports in high school, and my dad suggested I sit quietly and follow my breath to calm myself before a big game. So it was natural for me to be interested in insight meditation.”

While Fernandopulle was doing an MBA at Yale University, her teacher, Narayan Liebenson, asked her to teach, and though at first Fernandopulle demurred, thinking she still had much to learn herself, eventually she agreed. She also began to see how her dharma work could support and inform the consulting and coaching she was doing with leaders of mission-driven organizations. Slowly, her teaching evolved, and she’s now been teaching retreats, as well as coaching executives, social justice leaders, filmmakers, and academics, among others, as they explore the meeting ground between dharma and work. Using the paramis, for example, she and her clients work together to see how these qualities of generosity, patience, determination, and the like can help them to be better leaders and to do meaningful work.

True to her inquisitive personality, Fernandopulle has other interests that also intersect with her Buddhist training. A lifelong naturalist, she became interested in birding during the pandemic, and you can tell from the way she speaks about it how excited she is to explore the connection between dharma and nature.

“One way to conceive of the dharma is dharma as nature, and the path of practice as realigning with this nature. We’ve been profoundly misaligned as humans and thus have caused a lot of harm to the environment. We need to become more aware of our connection with nature—the fact that we are that nature.”

As Fernandopulle sees it, her work is to help practitioners apply the teachings to their own experience and life. She herself holds teaching as a practice, and she has a lot of faith in the people who come to her for guidance—in their capacity to realize who they are.

“Everything that we need for awakening is always here.”

“Everything that we need for awakening is always here. It’s closer than our noses, which means all of us have the capacity to be free. I work with those who are sincerely trying to free themselves from suffering, and I help them access the teachings in a way that’s beneficial for them and the good work they’re trying to do. And,” she added, “I’m happy to help with all of it.”

To find out more about Fernandopulle’s teaching and work, visit her website at www.anushkaf.org.

Q: How does practicing mindfulness differ from following a more traditional Buddhist path?

Mindfulness is being taught in all kinds of settings nowadays, which can be great. More people get a taste of what is possible from the development of win places where they already are (schools, offices, prisons, hospitals, sports teams, etc). You don’t have to identify as Buddhist to derive benefit from these practices, so if they are offered at your workplace, etc., then you should definitely take advantage of it. At the same time, it’s helpful to know the background and context of mindfulness to gain full benefit from it—to acknowledge the roots of the various practices and techniques that have come to the West from Asia, and to see that they’re part of a larger framework. We’d never quote someone and not attribute their words, so I think it’s important for teachers of mindfulness to say “This is what mindfulness is; its origins can be traced to the Buddhist tradition taught in South Asia thousands of years ago; and this is where to go if you want to learn more.” This approach feels like it has integrity and also gives people a chance to explore further if they are so inclined.

For example, many of us can appreciate mindfulness of breathing as a technique for finding calm in the midst of a busy life. This is great, but it’s also helpful to know that mindfulness is only one part of what we can cultivate to discover the fullness of our well-being. There are other qualities like equanimity, concentration, joy, compassion, and kindness that are also helpful to develop. The calm that you find through working with the breath can be exponentially increased by continuing to learn and grow in the practice until you find an unshakable peace that goes beyond any changing circumstances.

Practices of mindfulness exist within a broader teaching that asks us to tune in both internally and externally. Mindfulness is therefore one important aspect of the path, but it’s just one step on an eight-step path described by the Buddha. Cultivating only mindfulness is like taking one pill of an eight-pill prescription! You will gain some benefit, but not as much as if you took the entire course.

If you want to go deeper, then having a broader context will be extremely helpful. But you can gain benefit at whatever level you engage. These are practices of human development, so you don’t have to consider yourself a Buddhist to try them. I wish you well with your path. May you find the highest happiness and peace!

–AF 

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When Sister Dang Nghiem was about to leave for the United States from Vietnam, her grandmother shared three deep wishes for her: that she raise her younger brother properly, that she get a higher education, and that she become a nun. In the years since then, Sister D, as she calls herself, has faithfully carried out all three, spinning a life out of the threads of a difficult upbringing.

Born as Huynh Thi Ngoc Huong in 1968 in Central Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam War to a Vietnamese mother and an American GI, Sister D was raised by her grandmother while her mother worked in Saigon to support the family.

“As Amerasian children growing up in Vietnam, my brother and I felt that we did not belong there,” she said. “We did not receive much acceptance outside of our home. Instead, we received rejection and abuse. It was painful.”

In 1980, Sister D’s mother disappeared without a trace. Surmising that she’d been killed, Sister D’s grandmother realized that she had to ensure her grandchildren’s future. Their mother had put in an application for immigration to the United States, but when it was accepted, her grandmother felt that Sister D and her brother were too young to go to America alone without their mother. When Sister D turned 16, her grandmother insisted that they go, saying she wouldn’t be able to protect the two of them if she passed away. In 1985, the two children traveled to the US and were placed in foster homes in Arizona. Despite all the challenges, Sister D studied hard and graduated from college with two degrees: one in psychology and another in creative writing. Soon after, she was accepted by the University of California, San Francisco Medical School, where she worked even harder, and she seemed well on her way to making a place for herself. But when John, her partner, died during a tragic swimming accident, her world caved in on itself.

Three weeks earlier, Sister D had attended a retreat with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. She learned about the four noble truths and realized that although for years she’d been a victim of abuse, she was also the perpetrator.

“I felt that even though the trauma of my childhood wasn’t there anymore, I was actively nourishing it with my negative thinking. When my partner died, I couldn’t go on as I had.”

Within three months, she’d moved to Plum Village, where she immersed herself in monastic training. She was ordained, first as a novice, then as a fully ordained nun by Thich Nhat Hanh. She’s now been ordained for twenty-two years.

Whatever I can transform, I can transmit—and the opposite is also true.

When I asked Sister D what she saw as the focus of her practice, she replied without hesitation: “To transform myself for my own sake, for my parents’ sake, and for the sake of everyone, because whatever I can transform, I can transmit—and the opposite is also true. I am keenly aware of that responsibility, both as an individual and as a spiritual practitioner.”

Sister D trains with fifty or so other monastics at Deer Park Monastery in Escondido, California, where she’s lived since 2004. As one of the resident teachers, she offers dharma talks, leads retreats, and helps run the monastery according to the six harmonies taught by the Buddha: harmony in living as a community, sharing all the benefits, practicing the precepts, speaking kindly, sharing insights, and making decisions together.

As for the focus of her teaching, Sister D’s message is both pointed and relevant. She teaches people to “be their own soul mates.” In Vietnamese, the word for “soul mate,” tri ky, means “one who remembers, knows, takes care of, or masters oneself.”

“I teach that to children, teenagers, and adults, and they love it because it’s concrete and empowering. It shows that we don’t have to look to others to give us happiness. We can trust ourselves. We can be there for ourselves.”

Sister Dang Nghiem is the author of three books: Healing: A Woman’s Journey from Doctor to Nun; Mindfulness as Medicine: A Story of Healing and Spirit; and Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal with Mindfulness. You can find her many talks on the websites of Deer Park Monastery and Plum Village, as well as on YouTube.

Q: Can we use Buddhist practice to heal from illness or trauma?

Healing and the Buddhist path are one. The Buddha didn’t call what he was doing “Buddhism.” He described a path, an art, and a way of life in which we cultivate our innate capacity to be awake and aware.

I trained as a doctor, and when someone has a concussion, for example, we ask them three questions: What’s your name?, Do you know where you are?, and Do you know what day it is?. We’re essentially asking whether they’re oriented to person, place, and time. The truth is, whether we’re ill or have an injury or not, we live in a fog most of the time. We react out of habits formed from the coping mechanisms employed for survival earlier in life. So, to practice means to be aware of who we are, what we are thinking, and what we are doing. It means to be awake and oriented, so that we can see what’s arising inside and around us in the present moment and take care of it with clarity and effectiveness. This is how we bring about healing.

We know that we can’t go back to change our past. We can’t see the future. Yet both past and future exist in the present moment. If we take care of the present, we can transform and heal the past, and we can create a good foundation for the future. Healing takes place in the present moment, and it takes place when body and mind are unified.

Sexual trauma is a tremendous wound for many of us. It’s prevalent and heartbreaking. When I work with young people, I help them to recognize the difference between sex, intimacy, and love. Many of them are seeking acceptance and acknowledgment in sexual relationships, and it ends up causing them deeper suffering. One way to heal this wound is to cultivate self-love and acceptance—to have deep respect for ourselves. Then we have an inner well of love and compassion to share with others. We’ll also attract people who have the same kind of reverence for themselves, who are soul mates to themselves.

Another wound is our addiction to electronics. We’ve learned to self-regulate by using images and media to numb ourselves, to escape, or to avoid confronting problems. Unfortunately, it only creates all sorts of medical and psychological problems, especially for children. Mindfulness practice can help them to recognize and become more comfortable with their bodies and their feelings, so they don’t have to shut them out or avoid them.

Finally, there’s the whole issue of meaninglessness. We may have so much material comfort readily available to us that we lose track of the meaning of life. We lose our purpose. An antidote to that is to cultivate joy and gratitude for the simple things in life—for the fact that we’re alive, that we have food and a roof over our heads, that we can practice.

The Buddhist path helps us transform and heal suffering for ourselves, for our children, and for society at large. We have concrete daily mindfulness practices as well as the monastic and lay communities for guidance and support. The Buddha himself is often likened to a physician because he gave us a way to treat the ills of the world. Buddhist practice is empowering, proactive, and scientific.

–Sister D

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It was in Reading, a town in the county of Berkshire in Southeast England, that Satya Robyn was first exposed to Buddhism. She’d read Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and was drawn to Zen by its aesthetic and to Buddhism in general by the teachings of Pema Chödrön. Interested in learning more, she attended a few beginner’s sessions at a Zen center where, as she noted, the teacher was “wonderful” but “the group wasn’t quite right. . . . There wasn’t enough warmth. I couldn’t feel like I belonged. But I kept going. I talked to the teacher about it, expecting her to say, ‘Just keep doing it,’ but instead she encouraged me to trust that feeling.”

So Robyn did, next trying Tibetan Buddhism—a “culture shock”—and then, many years later, joining a Pure Land group she’d been introduced to through psychotherapy training.

“It hooked me in,” said Robyn. There she encountered the Japanese term bombu, meaning “foolish beings of wayward passion,” and immediately felt she understood it. “We’re all bobbing along on the waves of our greed, hatred, and delusion, they told me. That’s where we begin. And there was something immensely relieving about that for me. I thought, ‘Oh, I’m allowed to be like this.’”

The group, the Amida Order, run at the time by David Brazier, became Robyn’s home. She ordained as a priest and that was when she was given the name Satyavani (satya is Sanskrit for “truth,” and vani, “eloquent communication”)—a fitting name, for in addition to being a psychotherapist, Robyn is a writer. She made it her legal name and shortened it to Satya.

When I asked Robyn about her motivation for becoming a priest, she explained she’d realized that she wanted to make the dharma the center of her life. From there, it was a logical step to want to share the teachings with others.

In addition, she found that her spiritual work dovetailed nicely with her activism. As a member of the global environmental movement Extinction Rebellion, she relied on her faith to give her the courage to engage in protests that she would otherwise have shied away from. It even helped her absorb the grave effect of a first arrest: “I’m a good girl, a law-abiding citizen. But I sat in my red robes in the middle of the road, just sobbing about the situation we’re in and feeling the craziness of having to take such an action. Six police officers picked me up and carried me off to a police cell.”

“There is a source of infinite love and wisdom, and my job is to help people find a connection with it.”

This was in 2019. In 2020, Robyn and her partner, Kaspa Thompson, left the Amida Order and became the lead teachers for Bright Earth, a Pure Land Buddhist temple in Malvern, Worcestershire; they continue their own training as lay ministers with Bright Dawn, a center in Coarsegold, California.

“If you had to explain to your Aunt Mary, who knows nothing about Buddhism, what the aim of your practice is,” I asked Robyn, “what would you say?”

“I would say my experience is that there is a source of infinite love and wisdom, and my job is to help people find a connection with it. We call it Amida Buddha, the Buddha of Infinite Light.

“But it doesn’t really matter what you call it. The important thing is to bring people into a relationship with this source. Religion should be consoling, I think. It should help us feel less afraid, and when we’re less afraid, we’re kinder. Given what we’re facing, the questions I ask myself are, How can we stay grounded and resilient? How can we continue to be kind to ourselves and others without something bigger to lean into?”

The implication, of course, is that “something bigger” is that connection to infinite love. “It’s a difficult thing to sell in this society,” Robyn told me. “And yet when people get it, they really get it.”

For more information on Satya Robyn’s work and teaching—particularly the new dharma study program she and Kaspa offer for those interested in the practical benefits of Pure Land Buddhism—visit brightearth.org.

Q: The central practice of Pure Land Buddhism is chanting the nembutsu in order to be reborn in Amida’s Pure Land. As a modern Buddhist practitioner, why would I want to do this?

In my experience, knowing that you will be OK when you die brings great relief and relaxation. When we recite the nembutsu (“Namu Amida Butsu” or “Namu Amida Bu”), we’re immediately received by Amida Buddha, the Buddha of Infinite Light. We don’t have to worry about what’s going to happen, and this relaxation offers an assurance that everything will be OK. At the same time, the Pure Land is not an end point. We understand it as the perfect training ground for enlightenment. And once you achieve that, you come back and help people.

The great sage Shinran—successor to Honen, the founder of our school—said that when we recite the nembutsu, we are known and accepted and loved by Amida Buddha. There’s nothing we have to do to earn that love. We are received just as we are. That is just so radical! We don’t need to do any complicated practice; we don’t even need to be good people. We don’t need to have lots of money or be born into the right family or have free time or be academic—we just need to say the name of Amida Buddha, and that’s all that’s necessary. That’s why Pure Land Buddhism came into existence: Honen wanted everybody to have access to this kind of basic acceptance, not just the elite.

As a teacher, I want people to know that they too are acceptable just as they are. I want them to have a taste of this unconditional embrace. Interestingly, sometimes people bring this up as a criticism of the tradition, saying that being accepted just as we are could give us license to do evil. But Shinran said that just because you have an antidote, that doesn’t mean you should drink the poison. It’s still good to be a good person. And in my experience, if somebody loves you, you’re more likely to want to offer them goodness in return.

Still, one of the advantages of being part of Pure Land Buddhism is that there’s permission to be very honest about our limitations. We can be very free about what we can and can’t do. At the same time, we keep trying. We’re all hungry for connection, for love. That’s what we’re doing in our practice: we’re taking refuge by leaning into love.

–Satya Robyn

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Nikki Mirghafori describes herself as an accidental Buddhist. Her path led from a childhood in Tehran, Iran, to sitting silent retreats in the Theravada tradition in her thirties in the United States. Early on, she remembers asking herself the big life questions: Why am I here? What is the point? What is this? She read the poetry of Rumi and Hafez in Farsi as a teen, sensing in their words a knowledge that, as she put it, ignited her heart’s desire to know and understand, to put out the fire of her “existential angst.”

In her twenties, while in graduate school at Berkeley for her doctorate in computer science, she took up guided imagery and breath meditation to accompany and support a loved one facing cancer. These practices would be helpful precursors to the formal training she’d take up later on. A few years later, Mirghafori was struck by a mysterious illness that left her utterly depleted. Desperate for relief, she followed a friend’s suggestion to sit a silent retreat, and after attending a couple of Insight Meditation workshops, she attended her first 10-day retreat with Jack Kornfield in Yucca Valley. “It was profound,” she said, “as if a door had been opened to a universe in my mind I didn’t know existed. I was completely hooked.”

Over time, Mirghafori’s dedication to the dharma deepened and she studied with various teachers. But as an Artificial Intelligence scientist, she never intended to teach the dharma. Yet it seems that life had other plans for Mirghafori, because in 2008, after she had studied the jhanas (stages of deepening concentration) and a detailed analytical method of vipassana with the living master Venerable Pa Auk Sayadaw, he empowered her and instructed her to teach. “Studying with Pa Auk Sayadaw changed my life,” she said. “The fire of existential angst was extinguished at last.” She didn’t tell anyone about her teacher authorization for years, though. Wanting to study and practice with a dedicated cohort, she joined a mindfulness training program at UCLA and a compassion cultivation training program at Stanford. Then, in 2012, Jack Kornfield invited her to join the four-year teacher training at Spirit Rock/Insight Meditation Society/Insight Meditation Center, and in 2016 she again received empowerment in the Theravada lineage. Currently she serves on the Teachers Council at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, and as a teacher at the IMC in Redwood City, California. She also serves on the board of directors at Spirit Rock.

As Mirghafori explains, her professional training as an AI scientist has melded well with her dharma teaching, giving her, among other skills, empirical understanding of the doctrine of not-self, an extension of emptiness. “What appears as an intelligent self is made up of levers of causes and conditions—biological, psychological, cultural, and so on—akin to lines of code; which doesn’t make us and the world any less amazing,” she added. “It’s still wondrous and sacred.”

When I asked Mirghafori what she thought was the most urgent teaching we modern practitioners have to learn, she answered without hesitation. “Learning to love. It may sound trite: ‘Love is the answer.’ But so many of the problems we’re having in our world—they’re because we don’t love enough. We don’t love the earth. We don’t love each other. We don’t love ourselves. We don’t love challenges. We don’t love what is. We don’t love the mystery. So yes, learning to love is most urgent.”

♦

Visit nikkimirghafori.com for more information on Mirghafori’s teaching.

The post Meet a Teacher: Nikki Mirghafori appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At the turn of the millennium, Ivonne Prieto Rose was practicing law in northern California and Christopher Rose was studying literature at Pomona College. Now known as Karma Yeshe Chödrön and Karma Zopa Jigme, respectively, the two have since spent three years in retreat, received authorization as teaching lamas in the Karma Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, and cofounded the Prajna Fire online sangha—all as a married couple.

They met in Kathmandu while studying at the Rigpe Dorje Institute (RDI), an international program rooted in traditional Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, meditation, and translation. Though they both came to RDI looking to deepen their Buddhist practice, neither one anticipated finding both a life path and a life partner.

“I was a lawyer in Silicon Valley right around when the tech bubble was mushrooming and about to implode. When I had a chance to leave that position, I figured I’d take a year or two off and study in Asia—I had just encountered the Tibetan buddhadharma a couple of years before, and I was in that stage where I just couldn’t get enough of it,” said Yeshe.

Zopa, a New Mexico native, was exposed to Buddhism at a young age through Lama Karma Dorje’s residency in Santa Fe. He met several Tibetan lamas and took refuge with Kyabje Bokar Rinpoche (who would become Prajna Fire’s root guru), but he didn’t get serious about the dharma until graduating from college in 2000. “My parents got me a plane ticket to Asia to go on a pilgrimage, and that kind of just hooked me—it really wasn’t my initial plan.”

After hitting it off at RDI, the two planned a three-year retreat together—together but separate, that is. “We were so looking forward to separate male and female wings and being in retreat as individuals,” Zopa said.

Yeshe added that as a married couple “you end up with each being half of a couple all the time. So it was a nice idea to not be that for a little while.”

But apparently karma had other plans. Vajra Vidya Retreat Center only had one wing and a total of five retreatants, and when the pair drew numbers for rooms, they wound up next door to each other. They ended up happily working closely together throughout the retreat and jokingly called themselves the “Dharma Marines” because they took their work so seriously.

In 2016, soon after completing the three-year retreat, Yeshe and Zopa founded Prajna Fire as “an offering of gratitude and respect to their teachers and a portal for Western students to access time-tested methods for studying and practicing the buddhadharma.” Through a variety of channels, Prajna Fire seeks to balance “traditional methods for cultivating experiential understanding of buddhadharma with a modern inflection”—the gray area that many contemporary Western teachers must navigate.

Yeshe describes their teaching style as an “integrative” approach—a shorthand adaptation of their Kagyu background that emphasizes “listening, contemplating, and meditating” as a practice framework. “It’s a way of bringing the dharma from out there somewhere into your head and then down into your heart, where it becomes almost like the operating system for your life. . . . When you get down to the nitty gritty, it’s about teaching us how to have this inner dialogue with the Buddha and the lineage masters so that we can examine our own assumptions.”

♦

Visit prajnafire.com to access their calendar, teachings library, podcasts, and other features.

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The first time Reverend Seiho Morris encountered Buddhism, he was 17 and researching a paper for school on Friedrich Nietzsche when he randomly pulled off a library shelf the Shobogenzo, Eihei Dogen’s primer on Soto Zen, and began to read from it. “To study the way is to study the self,” it said. “To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all living beings. To be enlightened by all living beings is to drop the barrier between oneself and other.” Morris was high at the time and in the throes of addiction, but the words pierced through the haze. “Something moved through me,” he said. “I was no longer intoxicated, and it scared me.”

Morris spent his formative years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Salisbury, Maryland. His father was a professional jazz musician and his mother a university professor. At 14, after five suicide attempts, he was diagnosed with clinical depression. A few years later, it was that fateful Dogen quote that set him on a path to recovery. Today he’s an ordained Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk who has been sober for 34 years.

Soon after his experience at the library, Morris made his way to Rochester Zen Center and read Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen. While learning to sit zazen under Roshi (then Sensei) Bodhin Kjolhede, he got his first taste of the practice after falling off the raised tatami mat. “You want to look like the Buddha when you step off your seat,” he said, laughing, “but it doesn’t work, because your feet are asleep. That was my first introduction to Zen ego deflation.”

At the age of 22, in the wake of a bad breakup, he decided to enroll in Zen training at Dai Bosatsu Zendo Kongo-ji, a Rinzai monastery in Livingston Manor, New York. Among his teachers was Eido Shimano, one of the Japanese teachers responsible for bringing Zen to America. But when stories of Shimano’s sexual misconduct surfaced, Morris was crushed. Coming face-to-face with his teacher’s fallibility was eye-opening and a difficult lesson in discernment. (“The situation became a kind of koan for me,” he said later.) He struggled to reconcile Shimano’s duplicitous and harmful behavior with the image of the teacher he’d once respected.

Over the years it has become clear to Morris that codependent behavior infiltrates sanghas and society at large. “We don’t know how to relate to each other or ourselves very well,” he said. In a society where so many are riddled with anxiety and addiction, codependency is a means to “use people to fix our thoughts and feelings about ourselves. Dharma practice helps to bring these relationships into greater homeostasis.”

Using his experience as an addiction counselor, Morris fuses his Zen training with twelve step methodology to create three- and five-day immersion workshops, practicing mostly with people he describes as “the untouchables”: addicts, alcoholics, and those with mental health issues. As an ordained monk who’s also African American, Morris believes he’s a bit of a “unicorn” in the Rinzai Zen community, but his identity plays an important role in his work, especially as it intersects with race—or what he prefers to call caste. In these environments, he brings Zen to his students in the same way he came to Zen. “Wherever we see our struggle, that’ s our practice.”

He’s quick to emphasize that he’s not trying to “fix” people but is working to help them see their strengths and restore their sense of dignity and purpose. Most importantly, he says, he wants to “heal the dysfunctional relationship we have with our mind that causes us to produce our number one export and import in America: suffering.”

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The dharma has been slow to take root in Latin America. But perhaps no one has played a more critical role in sharing Buddhist teachings with Spanish-speaking seekers than Marco Antonio Karam, director of Casa Tibet, the Latin American counterpart of Tibet House, headquartered in Mexico City.

Born in Mexico City to an upper-class business family, Karam is proud of his background and says his upbringing gave him the tools to promote the Tibetan culture in Mexico. Early on, Karam was trained in classical organ and even considered a career as a musician. “But Buddhism was always my first choice,” he said, “even though I didn’t have a clue in those early days how to make this possible.”

Karam was drawn to Buddhism as a teenager when he read the books Born in Tibet and Meditation in Action by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Later he traveled to Denver to seek advice from Trungpa, who was teaching at Naropa University. “He was the one who gave me suggestions on how to consolidate my Buddhist education.”

Now, many years later, one of Karam’s missions has been to educate Mexicans about the meaning and importance of Buddhism.

“Many people erroneously see this ancient tradition as a New Age spiritual practice,” said Karam. “What Casa Tibet has tried to do over the last 32 years is present the depth of Buddhist teachings and their relevance in contemporary society.” To that end, Karam has worked to “‘tropicalize’ the Buddha’s teachings so they are pertinent and meaningful to Western, Latin American, and Spanish-speaking audiences.”

That means underscoring the similarities between these apparently different cultures. “To begin with, our culture is theistic, mostly Catholic, and very conservative, in contrast to Buddhism’s nontheistic tradition. And over the centuries Tibetan Buddhism has accentuated introspection and contemplation, which is not as common in Christianity.” Yet despite their religious differences, Karam believes Mexicans and Tibetans do have things in common, such as large, close-knit families, a baroque outlook toward life, and a love for spicy foods. He discovered some of these similarities while studying with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in

Dharamsala, India. After getting to know Karam, the Dalai Lama decided that this Mexican lama was the one to bring Tibetan culture to Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries.

The idea of opening a Tibet House in Mexico came from both the Dalai Lama and one of Karam’s most influential teachers, Geshe Lhundub Sopa, the first Tibetan to be given a position as a full tenured professor at an American university. In the 1980s, Karam studied under Geshe Sopa at Deer Park Buddhist Center in Wisconsin.

Since its official opening in 1989, Casa Tibet has expanded to nineteen Spanish-speaking centers in Mexico, Central America, and some US border states. It has two thousand active members, while hundreds of thousands have participated in its various activities.

Karam himself teaches four classes each week from Mexico City that are geared to different levels of practitioners, from neophytes to longtime students of Tibetan Buddhism. As a translator of Tibetan, Karam says Spanish is a natural fit for teaching the dharma: “The Spanish language allows for the construction of a vast vocabulary that can render terms in a very accurate manner,” he said. “It is extraordinarily rich for the translation of Buddhism.”

Examples of Casa Tibet’s Summer 2021 Spanish-language seminars? “What Is a Bodhisattva?” and “Cultivating Good Feelings for People Who Drive You Loco.” (Spanish speakers interested in Buddhism can join the seminars online via casatibet.org.mx.)

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The dharma was always there, helping Reverend Blayne Higa stay balanced during 17 years of public service in his home state of Hawaii. Back then his focus was urban planning, which he’d studied in graduate school before ordaining as a Shin Buddhist minister.

“The dharma helped me work in public service and not be so reactive to events and situations. It helps us to be able to apply equanimity to the everyday stresses and struggles that everyone faces,” he said in a Zoom interview.

Working in public service, Rev. Higa longed to go deeper into his own Buddhist roots, and he left Hawaii in 2016 to study at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California, where he focused on Shin Buddhist ministry and chaplaincy and received a master’s of divinity degree. He was then ordained, receiving both the preliminary tokudo and full kyoshi certification, at the Jodo Shinshu Hongwanji-ha temple in Kyoto. Back in Hawaii, he was named resident minister at the Kona Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, the region’s oldest Buddhist temple, which will celebrate its 125th anniversary next year.

“I feel a great sense of responsibility to honor the rich history of this temple by helping to envision a vibrant sangha that embodies the Buddhadharma for today and the future,” he said. Rev. Higa is a fourth-generation Japanese American whose great-grandparents migrated to Hawaii to work in the sugarcane fields. His mother’s family practiced Shingon Buddhism, a Japanese school in the Vajrayana tradition.

“My grandmother was very devout. I learned to appreciate Buddhism and spirituality by her example,” he said. Although he grew up Buddhist, he didn’t know much about the dharma until college, when he came across books about Shin Buddhism in English.

“I was drawn to the Shin Buddhist spirituality of living with our imperfections and how we are embraced by universal wisdom and compassion,” said Rev. Higa, who started attending a Shin Buddhist temple in his early twenties.

Although Shin Buddhism came to America with the early Japanese immigrants, Rev. Higa considers it “a universal path of awakening” that is being woven into America’s spiritual fabric. “Asian American Buddhist communities have been hiding in plain sight for many years, even though they were the first sanghas to be established in America,” he said. His hope is that with more awareness, the voices and stories of Asian American Buddhists will come to be seen as part of the “wonderful” diversity of American Buddhism.

In his brief two years at the helm of Kona Hongwanji, there have been plenty of opportunities to apply Buddhist teachings.

First came COVID-19. During the lockdown, Rev. Higa’s sangha responded by organizing food giveaways for elderly members of his congregation who were spread out across western Kona. “We have a lot of seniors not connected to technology. So we started a phone ministry team. Our volunteers called all our members, just to check in and to offer that lifeline,” he said. They also packed fresh food boxes. “The temple is most importantly about community and relationships. Many members and their families have been part of our sangha for generations.”

With COVID also came the rising wave of anti-Asian hate crimes. Although Rev. Higa’s community has not been directly targeted with vandalism or violence, the issue is of great concern to him.

“It is really sad to think that we are still facing these deep-seated levels of animosity or hatred for any group,” he said. Such crimes, he added, stem from the three poisons outlined by the Buddha—greed, anger, and ignorance.

“The dharma offers a path of liberation from suffering,” he said. “So it is important for Buddhists to be able to comment and reflect on the nature of suffering in our world and to offer guidance on how the dharma can help.”

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