Michael Imperioli has a knack for playing mobsters and villains. Best known for his roles as Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos and Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus, the Emmy Award–winning actor has made a career out of exploring addiction and afflictive emotions on-screen.

Off-screen, though, Imperioli is a committed Buddhist practitioner. In 2008, he and his wife took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche, and during the pandemic, they began teaching online meditation classes together, exploring Tibetan Buddhist texts like The Thirty-Seven Practices of a Bodhisattva. Though Buddhism no doubt influences his creative work, Imperioli prefers to focus his practice on his everyday life. For him, Buddhism offers a way to liberate harmful emotions and cultivate patience and compassion on a day-to-day level.

In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Imperioli spoke with Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen about the dangers of the instrumentalization of Buddhist practice, what The White Lotus can teach us about craving and dissatisfaction, his relationship to his dharma name, and whether he believes that liberation is possible in this lifetime.

James Shaheen (JS): You’re best known as an actor, most recently in The White Lotus and famously in The Sopranos, but people may not know that you’re also a devoted Buddhist practitioner. How did you first come to Buddhism?

Michael Imperioli (MI): When I was a teenager, I started reading Jack Kerouac, who knew an awful lot about Buddhism. I mean, if you read his poems, like The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, you really see the depth of knowledge he had about dharma. I was very curious about Buddhism through his writing, so I bought a copy of the Diamond Sutra at St. Mark’s Books [in New York City’s East Village], and I really couldn’t penetrate it. Buddhism stayed somewhere in the back of my mind until much later.

In 2007, my wife and I started going to Jewel Heart, which was in Tribeca at the time, and Gelek Rinpoche was teaching there. That was the first time we went to a Buddhist teaching, and he was our first teacher. Shortly after that, we ended up taking refuge with Garchen Rimpoche. It was funny, because when my wife and I first walked into Jewel Heart, we realized we had both been there in the ’80s when it was Madam Rosa’s, which was a very decadent late-night nightclub.

JS: I remember that. You’ve come a long way.

MI: No mud, no lotus, as they say.

JS: Absolutely. I’ve heard you say that you came to Buddhism during the height of your success when you felt that something was missing. So what was missing?

MI: Maybe it’s not so much what was missing but that there was no ultimate satisfaction in the success that came. I spent my late teens only pursuing acting. I didn’t do anything else. I barely traveled, I was in New York, I did every job I could. I really wanted a certain degree of success, and I was driven toward that. And when that success did come, I realized that it wasn’t an end unto itself. I felt intuitively that what was missing was on a spiritual level—that there was a wisdom that was lacking. Just doing another successful TV show or winning an Academy Award wouldn’t be the answer.

I started exploring a lot of different spiritual paths before Buddhism, not really committing to any, reading books and going to different meetings and centers. I would read stuff like Krishnamurti, and when I was reading the book, it made a lot of sense. Then the book would be over, and I just felt like, “OK, now what?” There wasn’t really a practice to implement in your daily life. And then, when we stumbled into Jewel Heart, I saw the potential for a path and a practice.

JS: You mentioned your ambition and your desire to succeed in your career as an actor, and I remember many years ago, you sat on a panel with Gelek Rinpoche and Philip Glass. Philip said that the very qualities that made him a success professionally were the same that he applied to his practice: attention, focus, discipline, and creativity, among others. Has that been the same for you?

MI: Yeah, ambition has a negative connotation in some ways, but to succeed in anything, let alone an art form, you need a lot of tenacity and perseverance and discipline and passion and creativity. A lot of those are positive qualities, admirable qualities even. Practicing Buddhism takes a lot of discipline, and it takes a lot of perseverance, commitment, open-mindedness, and honesty. I agree with Philip on that.

JS: You know, I met you after that panel, and I interviewed you in 2009. I’ve been listening to your recent interviews, and it’s pretty amazing to hear you talk about your practice nearly fifteen years later with such commitment and depth. It made me realize that it helps me to see change in others that I often miss in myself. Do you ever feel that way?

MI: Yeah, especially with my wife, because we got into it together, we practice together, and we talk about it a lot. It’s a big part of our lives. I see it in her. I see it in simple ways, like when somebody annoys you, you have an awareness that somebody’s annoying you.

When you behave in a way that lets the afflictive emotion of anger get the best of you, you see that and make amends and realize that it’s not what you want to do. I mean, I see the discipline she has and the commitment to it [in reading Buddhist texts]. That’s very clear. But in those simple, day-to-day ways, I see the practice at work. And it’s very inspiring to me to see those changes.

JS: What sort of changes do you see in yourself in your own day-to-day?

“Maybe it’s not so much what was missing but that there was no ultimate satisfaction in the success that came.”

MI: You know, I find that more positive people come into my life—kinder people, more generous people, more compassionate people. And that’s amazing. Ultimately, the practice is bringing awareness to your existence, second by second, day by day: What am I doing in this moment? What am I thinking? I went through most of my life justifying my emotions and my reactions: “I did this because they did that. She took too long in the line in front of me at the coffee shop, and now I’m angry.” We can justify those emotions all the time, and that’s fine. But you’ll be stuck there. Those things don’t just go away.

JS: Often I think about Buddhist practice in terms of becoming a kinder, more compassionate person, and I don’t think that’s a modest goal. But I recently interviewed Anne Klein (Rigzin Drolma), and she said she was challenged by her Dzogchen teacher when he asked her, “Do you have confidence that you can achieve liberation in this lifetime?” I’m still focused on not snapping at my partner or the people I work with, and I consider it a victory when I have the intelligence and poise to make a decision not to be that way. And yet, sometimes I go back to Anne Klein’s teacher’s question: Do I believe I can be free? Does that ever come up for you?

MI: First, I agree with you that it’s not a modest aspiration to work with those afflictive emotions and become aware of them. I think liberation is possible in this lifetime, but it takes an awful amount of commitment. I’m confident that it’s possible; I’m not confident that I’m going to get there. But I don’t really think about it that much.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche once said to his sangha, “So you become enlightened. Then what?” He likens enlightenment to being present at your own funeral, particularly the idea of “you” with this ego mind becoming enlightened. They’re kind of conflicting because enlightenment is the opposite of that. He’s almost saying you can’t really have your self and your ego and be enlightened.

Enlightenment is not this better version of you. It’s not Clark Kent becoming Superman. It’s something else. One of the mahasiddhas said, “I am not really impressed by someone who can turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle is if someone can liberate just one negative emotion.”

JS: On the note of negative emotions, you play Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus, and he seems like a case study in dissatisfaction, addiction, and regret. Dominic can’t prevent the mistakes he has to make, although he pays for them in cash. I’ve found that practice can offer an opportunity to intervene, yet most people won’t come to the practice. How do you think of this in terms of the bodhisattva vow? Or is that too crazy a question?

MI: No, it’s not a crazy question at all. The bodhisattva vow is a really big commitment. [laughs]

JS: Kind of like enlightenment.

MI: Yeah. Maybe when you first hear about Buddhism, you think that there’s a way to reach nirvana or some place where all the suffering is gone. Then you take a bodhisattva vow, and you realize that whatever that state is, you’re not going to get there until everybody else gets there, and you’re hanging around for everyone else.

I think The White Lotus really shows the habitual tendencies that become so ingrained through your own karmic imprints from past lives, through your DNA, and through the learned behaviors that you saw in your younger years from your parents or the culture you were in. Those things can really stay with a person and stay in a family unless something cataclysmic happens or some kind of light bulb goes off—or both, maybe at the same time.

The White Lotus is interesting to me because you have very, very rich people in the most opulent, luxurious god realms, and they’re all miserable. When you don’t have those things, you might think that it would make you really happy to live like this or travel first class and stay in the best hotels. And here we have a story of these people who actually do that and are not very happy at all. There’s momentary happiness and fleeting pleasures, and yet there’s still dissatisfaction. Something is not being fulfilled.

JS: Right. There’s an interesting experiment I did when I was much, much younger. I found this apartment in New York, which was no mean feat at the time, and I really loved it. I had a view of the Hudson River, and the apartment even had a window in the bathroom, which in New York isn’t guaranteed by any means. I remember thinking, “I wonder how long before I take this for granted.” I wasn’t yet a Buddhist; I didn’t have a practice. But it occurred to me that we fall for it every time. We think, “Just this will make me happy.” And in The White Lotus, it’s really clear that we fall for it every time.

MI: Yeah, how long did it take before you took it for granted?

JS: I think it must have been about six weeks, and all of a sudden, I was in a mood again. I didn’t care about that window. I didn’t care about the Hudson River. But when I see the character you played, it would be easy for me to hate him if I didn’t also identify with him. He wants his wife back, and yet he’s in the throes of addiction—he can’t help himself, and he can’t help his son. It was such an accurate description of the samsara that we all live in, and again, I think that practice can interrupt that. Or it’s a possibility anyway.

MI: It is a possibility. But even with practice, those ingrained behaviors, especially addiction, are very hard. Pema Chödrön talks a lot about how a lot of the path is one step forward, two steps back. Maybe one day you go one step forward and only one step back, and you should rejoice in the fact that today it was only one step back. That’s progress. I think practice can help because to practice Buddhism requires real honesty with yourself. You really have to have a bold, honest view of your own mind. People can uncover this through psychotherapy with psychologists and psychiatrists. But with Buddhist practice, it’s in a different way, sometimes a mundane, day-to-day way. You really have to make a commitment to being honest with yourself, and that’s sometimes very hard.

JS: Yeah, I’ve found that sangha and a teacher are essential in being honest with myself. Sometimes a teacher can say something that cuts right through your fabrications. I remember once I was harping on something, and my teacher looked at me and said, “Why do you care so much?” And all of a sudden it shattered. I was sitting there seeing myself as this repetitive person harping on the same thing, and I had to really consider, why did I care so much? Practice is important in relationship with others and with a teacher, without which I don’t think I’d have made any headway at all.

MI: Oh, same for me. I don’t think it really exists outside of that.

“The goal of Buddhism isn’t to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to drive next door.”

JS: In addition to being an actor, you’re also a musician. Can you tell us a bit about your band, Zopa?

MI: Zopa is an indie rock trio that was formed in 2006. We took a hiatus when I moved in 2013 for about seven years, and then two and a half years ago, we started playing again. I play guitar, and I sing some of the songs. It’s a very collaborative group. We’re influenced by a lot of the New York bands from the ’70s like the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed, as well as a lot of ’80s post-punk and ’90s indie rock.

Over the years, there have been some Buddhist themes in the songs, and we have a new song that includes the Seven Line Prayer of Guru Rinpoche in Tibetan. There’s something cool about playing those songs live—those mantras and prayers have a certain frequency and resonance that I think might touch people in positive ways.

JS: The name of your band is also your dharma name, Zopa. When did you receive the name, and how has your relationship to it changed over time?

MI: When I took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche, I got the name Konchog Zopa Sonam. Zopa means patience in Tibetan, and the day I took refuge, he said, “Patience is the key to your practice because when you lose your patience, you lose your love.” At the time, I was still very new to Buddhism, and I took that as a pithy Hallmark card nugget—I didn’t really take it to heart.

Years later, I said to myself, “The day you took refuge with him, he said this to you. Maybe you should give it a little bit more importance. Maybe you should really look into what it means for patience to be the key to your practice.” Since then, I’ve started to take it more seriously and really focus on it as much as I can or as much as my awareness allows me to.

Trungpa Rinpoche said that if you’re a dharma practitioner, patience is an obligation. It’s not just something you do because you want to be kind. It is an obligation. Not only that, but it’s also an opportunity to practice. When you feel yourself becoming impatient, you can become aware of that and choose to bring some patience into the situation. These little annoyances become opportunities for practice.

JS: We recently had the interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk on the podcast, and she said that a lot of our artistic practice is waiting and trying to get out of the way. Does this resonate with you, and how do you think about the creative process?

MI: God, yeah. Especially on a movie set, you spend most of the time waiting. But also with writing, if you’re working on a writing project that’s going to take some time—let’s say you set up a schedule to write Monday through Friday from 10 to 3—chances are you’re not going to be literally writing fingers on the keyboard for five hours, and there might be a big chunk of that time where nothing’s happening. You’re not really waiting for inspiration because you can’t wait for inspiration—you’d probably wait forever. But you have to trust that there’s some other process going on subconsciously and that for those hours that you’re there, there is some kind of alignment where you’re in tune with the story or the character. Even if you’re not actively writing or actively imagining it, somehow, your consciousness knows that that period of time is related. You have to trust that, and there’s a lot of waiting involved.

JS: More generally, how does practicing Buddhism shape your artistic work?

MI: Typically, I don’t like talking about this because the goal of Buddhism is not to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to drive next door. But I do think that meditation can help with focus. Art demands a certain intensity of focus and concentration, be it performing onstage as an actor or as a musician, sitting down writing, or acting a scene. The more focused you are in the moment, the better, and I definitely think meditation can help with that.

JS: So in other words, it’s an ancillary and unasked-for benefit. But you pointed out something very important, I think: the instrumentalization of our practice in order to get something. Any of us can fall into that.

MI: Yeah, back to Trungpa Rinpoche: it’s kind of like being present at your own funeral. The fact that this 2,500-year-old tradition is still in the world and there’s still a lineage and a connection to that wisdom is so unbelievably precious that to instrumentalize it for some worldly purpose really runs counter to it. If you’re making a commitment to practice, at some point, there’ll be shifts in everything: in the way you interact with and perceive the world. They may be little shifts, but they’re there.

♦

Listen to the full conversation on Tricycle Talks here. 

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Renunciation comes by degrees, has many aspects, and goes by many names.  Letting go, abandonment, non-grasping, relinquishment, and dispassion are all, at root, forms or aspects of it. Morality, generosity, compassion, and mindfulness are all expressions of it.

But renunciation is not just an interior matter.  It requires that one give up real things, actual sources of pleasure, comfort, or security. Only by restraining our preferences in regard to such things can we learn what they really give us. Only through such restraint can we discern, among the many things we pursue, what it is that nurtures the peace and clarity we seek, and what it is that drives us on to further seeking. Through renunciation we discover that our existence is bound up with our preferences but is not limited to them.

Many of us understand, if imperfectly, the wisdom of refraining from self-harm, controlling our impulsivity, or delaying gratification. But we understand such forms of self-restraint as preferences. We want to exercise restraint in these ways when we feel it would be for the best. Renunciation goes further, questioning the logic of preference itself, the desirability of desire. Yet as I’ve come to understand it, the aim of renunciation is not to do away with desire in some absolute sense, but to turn away from it, toward a fulfillment apart from its ends.

To cultivate a renunciatory spirit in secular life entails both self-restraint and self-awareness with regard to one’s preferences. It requires this amidst the ever-surging flood of desires and aversions, opportunities and threats in which “the world” immerses us. Monastic life simplifies this dance of renunciation. Indeed, it obviates the need to think about it, at least at first. The received view in the Western branch of the Wat Pah Pong order, in which I ordained, is that a monk has only to “surrender to the form”—the fabric of customs, rituals, strictures, duties, observances, and deferences of which life in a WPP monastery is woven—and a balance of appropriate, mindful restraint will strike itself. “The form” allows only what is helpful, and offers unlimited occasion for mindfulness.  It provides the ideal “container” for a life devoted to meditative practice, the chief occupation of every forest monk, at least notionally. By shaving the head, wearing robes, withdrawing from sexual life, forswearing the use of money, and eating only in the morning—along with many, many other strictures—the monk binds up her energies and situates herself in restraint. Her expectations narrow, her level of stimulation attenuates, and her inner weather calms—ideal conditions for meditation to deepen. (I use the feminine here to include the many female monks who have now been ordained in Theravada Buddhism, if not in the WPP order.) The monk thus adopts external renunciatory practices in part to effect an internal shift. The external practices are means to an end.

II.

I undertook one such practice on my own years before moving to the monastery. I didn’t think of it as a renunciatory practice, and at the monastery it was regarded as an add-on—not an entailment of “the form” but a personal austerity that a monk might pursue in addition to it. But the practice did have its own catchphrase in the WPP Order: “putting away the books.” This practice descends from Ajahn Chah himself, founder of the broader Thai WPP group of monasteries, and the monastic teacher I most admire. Here is how Ven. Chah assigned this practice to one group of monks:

Take all the books and lock them away. Just read your own mind. You have all been burying yourselves in books from the time you entered school. I think that now you have this opportunity and have the time, take the books, put them in a cupboard and lock the door. Just read your mind.

For me, “putting away the books” may have seemed like a stretch, more self-mortification than renunciatory Middle Way. Books had been at the center of my life from childhood. I’d read for pleasure, consolation, escape, and sometimes knowledge almost every day since learning to read. I’d pursued a career as a writer, editor, and teacher for decades. I believed in books. I also believed, if a bit fuzzily, in small “l” liberal values—reason, science, critical inquiry and debate, democracy, human rights and equality, the value of the individual—that depend on literacy and numeracy. On books.

Yet I’d been willing to “put away the books” right from the start of my journey on the path of Buddhist dharma, years before coming to the monastery. I did so to attend a bookless—and silent—ten-day meditation retreat. On that retreat, I’d discovered an entire world lying just beneath the layer of language and stories habitually occupying my mind. After just three or four days spent mostly in meditation, but the first such days of my life, I experienced a kind of brightening of mind. Sensations and perceptions—sounds, images, feelings, and their accompanying narrative streams—all emerged in a heightened awareness that seemed at once new and familiar. The contours of the mind’s foreground grew clearer, and so too did its uniform background, a silent, still, dimensionless vastness. My briefly sustained devotion to “just read[ing] [my] mind” thus opened a door to the field in which all experience unfolds.

I wanted to go through that door, whatever I had to renounce. From that retreat forward I’d narrowed my reading to books about the dharma, and I scaled back significantly on writing. I maintained these practices after coming to the monastery, barely reading at all during the four silent, three-month winter retreats that I undertook there. I knew I was subduing something vital in myself—my reading, writing, thinking mind. But subduing this seemed necessary to access that underlying subterrain of quiet stillness. In this sense, choosing to renounce “the books” suited my personal aims and interests, and countered my particular rationalistic tendencies.

III.

Yet “putting away the books” also dovetailed with “not being somebody special,” another of our many catchphrases at the monastery. This maxim has several meanings that blur together but only partially overlap. First, “don’t be somebody special” means, don’t be egotistical, in the everyday sense of conceited, vain, or self-centered. Dressing in shapeless brown garments, eating on a schedule incompatible with comfort, giving up intimate relationships, and relinquishing the personal agency afforded by money—such practices wear away at one’s habitual self-regard. “Putting away the books” served a similar function, undermining my sense of the importance of my own stories and ideas.

But in the language of the WPP Order, “not being somebody special” also refers more broadly to bhava (“becoming” or “identifying”). In this sense, it means refraining from understanding or defining oneself, and thereby creating oneself, in terms of what one does, thinks, feels, or more broadly, is at a given time. This notion underlies the common advice in dharma circles not to believe, not to inhabit, such perceptions as “I am certain of X or doubtful of Y,” or “I am angry or calm,” or “I am a success or failure…”—say, as a writer, or for that matter, as a monk. To believe such perceptions is to reify a passing condition as an essential self. “Not being somebody special” thus connotes an ultimate, absolute kind of renunciation, the letting go of any enduring sense of self at all.

For me, “putting away the books” may have seemed like a stretch, more self-mortification than renunciatory middle way. Books had been at the center of my life from childhood.

These two meanings—not being egotistical, and not identifying—blend together in the following reflection by Ajahn Sumedho, the American founder of the Western WPP monasteries:

I remember that in my own experience, I always had the view that I was somebody special in some way. I used to think, ‘Well I must be a special person.’ Way back when I was a child I was fascinated by Asia, and as soon as I could I studied Chinese at university, so surely I must have been a reincarnation of somebody who was connected to the Orient. But… no matter how many signs of being special… you can remember,  …they’re anicca [‘transient’], dukkha [‘unsatisfactory’], anattā [‘not self’]. [In our practice,] we’re reflecting on them as they really are. What arises ceases. Whatever it is, it can be used for mindfulness and reflection—that’s what I’m pointing to, how to use these things without making them into something. This I trust: …in just waiting, being nobody and not becoming anything, but being able just to wait and respond.

Notice that the egotistical thought that Ven. Sumedho cites, “I must be a special person,” does not exhaust his category “whatever it is.” Any phenomenon whatsoever, not only egotistical thoughts but anything at all of which one can be aware, “can be used for mindfulness and reflection.” For Ven. Sumedho, “being nobody” goes beyond being less self-dramatizing or more humble. It asserts our potential, through practice, for dwelling in a peaceful awareness of “not becoming anything.”

Learning not to “become” egotistical made sense to me, but I was less certain about the mysterious condition of “being nobody.”  Not “becoming” any of one’s potential motivations or inclinations—whether egotistical or, say, altruistic—sounded to me like self-abnegation and quietism, notwithstanding Ven. Sumedho’s mention of somehow “being able to respond.” It sounded like denying my own initiative and discernment in favor of a passive faith in some extrinsic, mystical agency.   

Nonetheless, Ven. Sumedho’s teaching conveys—lyrically, if elliptically—the renunciatory aspect of mindfulness practice. The blend of the two meanings I’ve discussed of “not being someone special” helps us to understand mindfulness as a respite from both the endless labor of keeping one’s ego inflated, and the rollercoaster of self-construal on which we swoop and curve through the good and bad of worldly life. I recognized the yearning for this respite as lying close to the heart of the renunciatory impulse that had brought me to the monastery.

IV.

But there is a third meaning of “not being someone special” that I found less compelling. Sometimes the monks used the phrase to refer neither to being humble nor to being no one, but rather to being like everyone else. In this sense, the phrase promotes an exclusive group identity centered on sameness. The phrase cautions against, or rebukes, expressions of personal identity that deviate from the norms of the monastery. And implicitly, the first two meanings of “not being someone special”—not being egotistical, and not identifying—link a monk’s failure to conform to egotism and spiritual cluelessness.

With this third meaning in view, the practices constituting “the form” emerge as markers of a normative identity, that of the “good monk.” Apart from effecting any internal shift, “the form” defines a cultural code, and functions—in the manner of a “total institution” like the military or a mental asylum—as an instrument of social conditioning. To be a “good monk,” one “surrenders to the form” in this cultural, observable sense. The “good monk” is evidenced not by spiritual insight but by comportment. He is meek, laconic, and compliant. Foremost, he is loyal to the monastic hierarchy, and especially to the senior monks who interpret and codify “the form” for the rest.

Thus, while all manner of shortfalls are forgiven, any monk who is to remain at the monastery must learn—and the “good monk” must master—submission, if in the name of “surrender.” Every new monk enters monastic life “in dependence” on an acariya, a particular senior monk in the role of teacher and benefactor. In the Western WPP monasteries, juniors relate to seniors as disciples to gurus, often serving literally as their personal servants. The exemplary junior monk defers to his acariya not only in matters of conduct and observance, but also in his personal decisions, views, and all spiritual matters.

Questions and doubts are allowed, but only to the degree that the “dependent” monk couches them in deference and hesitancy. If questions and doubts harden into dissenting views, the monk holding them must keep quiet about them, or better, strive to abandon them. Indeed, there is a prescription for the monk who “doesn’t get it”: the monk should direct his mindful awareness to his doubts and “wrong view,” know these as doubts and views, and abide in the peace of the knowing mind until whatever doubts and views have arisen within it, like all other conditioned phenomena, pass away. By persevering in this practice, he will arrive at confidence in the rightness of the views endorsed by the senior monks. These are right because the senior monks are the final arbiters of tradition, and as a first principle, tradition is right. By renouncing his individuality, his personal agency, and his independence of action and mind, the monk thus embraces “the good way.”

Yet despite the authoritarian flavor of the WPP training system, amazingly, the “dependence” that I’d accepted delivered just what it promised, and indeed what I’d come for: uniquely supportive conditions for long-term, committed meditative development. I’d set aside deeply-held values, attitudes, and activities on which I’d staked my identity. I’d put myself in a position where my personal inclinations were frustrated at every turn. I’d given over responsibility for my decisions to paternalistic, dogmatic authority figures. In exchange I’d received a set of understandings and practices to test against my experience, and—beyond our half days of menial duties—abundant free time for meditation.

V.

Bracketing off my reservations about our little society, I spent countless hours, the majority of this free time, in solitude, meditating in my cabin and walking in the fields and forests of the monastery. Metaphorically, the ground did shift for me during this time. Insights unfolded in what felt like a self-steering, self-sustaining process. This was anything but a smooth process, as my reflections here may suggest. There were long periods of water-treading, spikes of frustration, fear, anger, resentment, boredom, and tailings off into despair. But despite the many things that had come to seem wrong with my life at the monastery, there was an underlying sense of correctness, of being on the right course. And there were experiences of sublime beauty and meaning, “openings” of heart and mind, expanses of joy, clarity, and calm.

We were encouraged not to evaluate or interpret our meditative experience, not to fret over our progress, not to grasp for “attainments.”  To avoid fixing our private experiences within a rigid framework of concepts, my acariya advised me not to talk about what I experienced too much—yet another restraint. The idea was to let intuitive awareness guide us towards understanding. Wisdom would deepen of its own accord. One undertook such self-silencing, as one did “putting away the books,” not only for the inner stillness it might enable, but to turn from theories of experience to experience itself. It was “concepts”—thinking and deliberation—that were to be renounced. From this would follow gnosis: “seeing things as they are.” Of course, this too is a theory, one drawn from the full set of maps and frameworks endorsed by my seniors at the monastery.

There were also, well, books. As I’ve suggested, “putting away the books” was never an absolute for me. I approached complete abstinence during the winter retreats, but for the other nine months of the year, I continued to read in a measured way. I simply couldn’t accept, as our orthodoxy implied, that ignorance (avijjā) had one meaning in the Buddha’s teachings—an exclusively spiritual blindness—and another in our modern age, in which ignorance and book-banning are synonymous.

At first my reading focused on the most approved genres—the only ones in which junior monks were encouraged to read. These were books by Thai forest masters like Ajahn Chah, along with books by their Western disciples, the teachers of my teachers at the monastery. I also read steadily in Buddhist scriptures, a somewhat less-approved genre due to its potential for mishandling by juniors who “didn’t get it.” For perspective, I began reading as well in other Buddhist traditions and in academic Buddhist scholarship. In my fourth year at the monastery, my growing knowledge of the early Buddhist dharma—in particular, what I discovered to be its foundational commitments to reason, open-mindedness, and critical inquiry—led me onward (or backward) to less explicitly Buddho-centric readings in philosophy, physics, and neuroscience, the dharma of nature.

Where the carefully circumscribed guidance of my immediate teachers left me confused about my meditative experiences, my wider reading—in view of both the unities and the inconsistencies I found—led to insight, and in the best sense, disillusionment. My experiences in meditation, though reflected in many of the frameworks I encountered, did not fully conform to any of them. I couldn’t take any lens—traditional, Buddhist, modern, or otherwise—as transparent, as a means to somehow “direct” experience, to “seeing things as they are.”

Rather, I came to understand that perception constructs, rather than relays, our experience. Experience is unavoidably theory-laden, whether the theory involves a progression of clearly-delineated jhana “attainments,” supernormal powers and realms, or natural psychophysical processes. But perhaps the discrepancies between the paradigms of the early Buddhist scriptural teachings, the Thai forest tradition, other traditions, and modern naturalism saved me from shoehorning my experience into any one particular framework. I came to renounce the illusion of “seeing things as they are” in some ultimate sense, along with any source of authority with claims of transcending interpretive frameworks.

As “putting down the books” had been necessary for my meditative development, picking them back up thus proved crucial to understanding it. Ajahn Chah himself explains, “when you have examined and understood the mind…, then you have the wisdom to know the limitations of concentration, or of books. If you have practiced and understand not-clinging, you can then return to the books. They will be like a sweet dessert.” It isn’t that “the books”—or by extension, thinking and explicit learning—are categorically bad in Ajahn Chah’s view. Rather, both “the books” and the meditative “concentration” afforded by putting them down entail “limitations.” Each is subject to “clinging”—whether to intellectual knowledge in the case of “the books,” or to the refined pleasures of deep practice in the case of “concentration.” Ajahn Chah directed his orders to “put away the books” and “just read your mind” at young monks from education-oriented backgrounds. We should therefore understand these directives as situational, rather than as laying down a blanket principle of renunciation. Once “putting down the books” has served its purpose, Ajahn Chah suggests, letting go of this practice—renouncing “putting down the books”—may be valuable, even “sweet.”

Might such situational reasoning apply as well to other practices, aspects of “the form” I’d approached as renunciatory practices, but that I’d come to find sexist, fatalistic, authoritarian, or obsessive, and thus anti-spiritual? No. One wasn’t to pick and choose where “the form” was concerned. My teachers presented the WPP version of monastic life as a unitary, indivisible whole synonymous with the vinaya, the monastic discipline set forth in the Buddhist scriptures. But while “the form” does indeed center on truly ancient,  vinaya-rooted renunciations—the robes, the alms bowl, the celibacy, the putting down of money, the ethical restraints—my reading revealed countless regulations and customs accreted over time from other sources. These sources include cherry-picked commentarial interpretations; Thai gender, family, and other cultural sensibilities; the royalist, nationalist agenda of Thai ecclesiastical authorities; and the conservative social and religious biases of the Western “elders” of the Order.

I learned moreover that even our bedrock monastic reality of living in a monastery—much less one of the handful of insular, exclusive Western WPP monasteries—is not the only form of renunciant life available to a Buddhist monk. I read in the Buddhist scriptures of forest-dwelling monks, town-dwelling monks, park-dwelling monks, wandering monks, and monastery monks. In secular Buddhist scholarship, I read that even this pluralism likely represents a retrospective narrative compression of succeeding historical phases into an idealized original period. Throughout Buddhist history, I learned, the establishment of monks in monastic institutions has been intermittent and uneven. For instance, the confinement of Thai forest monks to monasteries—after centuries of wandering in actual forests—developed as a consequence of the deforestation and political consolidation of modern Thailand.

Ajahn Chah’s conditional endorsement of “the books” aside, the main implications of such conclusions bore not on monasticism, but on me. From the viewpoint of the “good monk,” I had “lost my way.” I’d failed at “putting away the books.” I’d let myself think and question. I’d lost the sense even that thinking and questioning were inclinations of mind to renounce. I seemed to have come full circle, back to the small-“l” liberal values mentioned above which begin with and follow from reason and critical inquiry. I could not reconcile these values with “the form” as I’d come to understand it. Thus, I was failing too at “surrendering to the form” in its authoritarian aspects, and at “being nobody” in its conformist sense.

The exclusive ethos of the WPP order leads most who join it to conclude that a monk unwilling to accept “the good way” has no way to move forward as a monk, and hence no other option but to disrobe and leave. After five years at the monastery, I was indeed no longer willing to accept “the good way” as a good way. And so I left.

VI.

I didn’t disrobe, though.  I’d internalized enough of the ethos of the order that part of me felt I should. Indeed, an inner drumbeat of shame had pushed me towards disrobing for over a year. But “the books”—and my growing disillusionment with the order—empowered me to decouple disrobing from leaving the monastery. I wasn’t a perfect monk, but by any reading of the vinaya, I remained a monk in good standing. Indeed, the monastic code allows a monk who loses confidence in her acariya—one might argue, requires such a monk—to renounce “dependence” on that teacher, and to leave that teacher. This ancient allowance reflects the characteristic wisdom of the canonical Buddha: in the end one must trust one’s own deepest discernment as the only way (if not a foolproof way) to find one’s way forward.

At bottom, I like being a monk. For me, the Theravada monk’s defining restraints bring a baseline sense of calm, of simplicity, of living a harmless life that I value. I prefer this way of being to the more burdened, impassioned, distracted life I led in “the world.” And I’d learned that leaving the monastery did not necessarily mean returning to “the world.” “The world” is not a place. It’s an inner churn. In this sense, renouncing “the world” turns out to be a matter of preference after all, a preference for peace and clarity over churn.   

Monasticism can offer support for this preference to the extent that it supports renunciation, but only to this extent. Many convert Buddhists will surely continue to find scope for spiritual development—and a few will find monastic homes (if not homelessness)—in convert-led “traditional” monasteries like those of the Western WPP order. Many will make shorter stays, and some will benefit from them, as I did. I don’t know where else but a monastery one might hope to find support for the years of secluded practice that I found in New Hampshire, a mode of training with a qualitatively unique transformative potential.

Yet at some point in the drive to uphold and perpetuate “the form,” the Western-convert monastery tips its monks from renunciation into identifying and inflating themselves with its various practices. This is sīlabbataparāmāsa, “clinging to rules and rituals,” a spiritual danger against which the canonical Buddha warns his monks repeatedly. We can cling to anything, from the customs of another culture to those of our own, from books to renouncing books, from “the world” to the world of a given monastic order.  We can mistake renunciatory means for religious ends. The same external forms that for a time support inner development may come, as conditions change, to impede or reverse it.

The challenge is to discern which externalities—traditional or otherwise—lead one forward, and which hinder our development. We can fall short in our renunciatory practice, failing to challenge our preferences, failing to risk discomfort of body or mind, failing to question the reality of the self we fashion out of our pleasures and statuses. Or we can go too far, beyond Dom Cuthbert Butler’s “natural asceticism” of renunciation, into obsession and compulsion, self-punishment and bodily “purification,” and subjugation to hierarchies and belief systems. The arch-conservative, non-negotiable cultural forms enforced by the Western-convert monastery finally lead many, as they did me, into a spiritual cul-de-sac.

Since leaving the monastery, I’ve turned to the project of renewing my life as a monk. I’ve lived with other independent monks, studied and practiced alongside diverse lay Buddhists, and spent time at an urban temple where the monks, all native Thais, practice in the Thai forest tradition (of a parallel order) in ways refreshingly different from their Western-convert counterparts in the WPP order. These experiences have strengthened my sense of the possibility I found in “the books” of a range of viable lifeways for monks beyond the monastery.

A Theravada monk must live by the vinaya—it’s what makes her a monk—but this does not preclude a life aligned with her values. And not everyone with renunciatory aspirations needs to be a monk; there are many whose values, in view of their commitments, preclude a life in robes. For me, the illiberal values that the Western WPP “elders” preserve by or impose on tradition—some to the extent of discounting books—proved unworkable. I’ll long remember my heart sinking at the noncommittal smiles of the senior monks, and the uncertain chuckles of the juniors, when a monk shared news one morning of a recent book-burning at a forest monastery in Thailand.

We may need new institutions—perhaps with more fluid boundaries and flexible exits—to offer shelter from “the world” for dedicated renunciant practice uncompromised by ideology. We may need to reinvent traditional gift economies such that monks in the modern world can find reliable support informally, person-to-person, as they wander. We surely need a broader range of possibilities for all who wish to develop as renunciants, in or out of the robes, not only through meditation, but also by thinking and questioning, reading and writing. We need this precisely for the purpose of narrowing and then living our understanding of what renunciation entails: not subjugation to a fixed set of customs, beliefs, or restraints, but a turning towards inner freedom.

The post Putting Away the Books appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

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From the writings of ecologist Joanna Macy to the strategies of climate action group Extinction Rebellion, environmentalism in the West has long been nurtured and informed by Buddhist perspectives.

Dekila Chungyalpa now clearly sees how the dharma that she grew up with shaped her path to becoming the director of the Loka Initiative, a climate change outreach program for faith leaders—but she wasn’t always able to reconcile her career as a conservationist with her identity as a Tibetan Buddhist.

“I had to have this moment of reckoning, because I knew I would lose credibility among peers who thought that what I was doing was too touchy-feely. People said that it would affect my reputation as a scientist and field conservationist,” she told Tricycle.

She had just started a promising career at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the early 2000s, when a meeting with the Karmapa, one of most influential Tibetan lamas, changed everything.

At the time, Dekila was the youngest director at the WWF, and she and her fellow scientists were waking up to some of the alarming truths that now make up the devastating headlines and despairing reports of the contemporary news cycle. Seeking a vacation from the mental anguish, Dekila went with her family on a pilgrimage to Bodhgaya. It was there, at the site of the Buddha’s awakening, that she had an audience with Ogyen Trinley Dorje, one of the two claimants to the title of the 17th Karmapa and the head of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. He asked Dekila to create environmental guidelines for his monasteries in northern India.

It was a karmic offer she couldn’t refuse.

“I thought, OK, great—my next lifetime is secure. I’m about to add so many karma points to my karma bank,” she recalls. “I’ll draft up these guidelines and go back to my normal work.”

But the Karmapa’s vision went beyond a simple handbook about recycling for monastics. “He was clear that the monks and nuns should not remain on their brocade mats. He wanted them to go out into the community and start grappling with floods, droughts, and abnormal monsoons—the very real environmental changes that they were seeing outside their windows.”

“He was ready to start a plan of mitigation: making the carbon footprint of these Kagyu monasteries as small as possible.”

Khoryug, as the project became known, is a network of monasteries in the Himalayas working to protect the environment and institute practical measures, like installing solar panels, rooftop rainwater harvesting, and growing vegetables. Dekila still serves as the environmental advisor to the Karmapa, facilitating reforestation efforts and disaster management strategies for over 50 monasteries and nunneries.

Her involvement in Khoryug led Dekila to found WWF’s Sacred Earth in 2009, a program that expanded Khoryug’s vision beyond the Tibetan Buddhist community, building relationships with religious institutions—including churches, monasteries, and indigenous communities—toward the goal of solidifying conservation efforts around the world.

***

Although the twists of fate that led to a career transition happened naturally, it wasn’t always easy for Dekila to own her decision to bridge the gap between environmental science and personal faith.

“For most of my education and career, I was made to feel like it was unscientific to subscribe to spiritual beliefs, and that it was unprofessional to bring your religion into the workplace. Being a brown Himalayan woman, I also felt this unspoken pressure to display my culture but suppress my spiritual identity.

“When I began to work in an interfaith context, it was first and foremost a healing experience for me, because I was finally able to bring the science and my own faith together and say, ‘I am these two things wholly and completely’—that there doesn’t need to be a contradiction,” she said. “But it took some time for me to get there.”

Dekila was born in Sikkim, a state in northeastern India nestled among Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Around the time Dekila became a teenager, her mother left home to start a three-year solitary retreat, a practice common to serious Vajrayana practitioners, but unusual for women at the time.

“My mom was really careful to explain to me that she was doing it out of her love for me, and out of a drive to reach the level of meditative equipoise she had been practicing toward. She felt that there was no other choice, that this had to be the next step.”

Her mother, Ani Dechen Zangmo, was a Buddhist nun who chose to live by herself instead of in a nunnery. She later became the root teacher of American lama Justin von Budjoss. “She was a powerful female presence in a predominantly male dharma world,” he said, reflecting on Ani Zangmo’s willingness to shake up the status quo. “She knew that there was a politics to that, but it wasn’t born out of politics.” 

Dekila grew up with her mother and the rich familial love offered by her extended family (“all of my family’s houses were clustered right next to each other; it really was a kind of ‘it takes a village’ situation”), as well as her grandmother (also a nun), who encouraged the young environmentalist’s passion for the natural world. “Probably by the time I was six or seven, my place of comfort and refuge had become the trees outside.”

While the war on climate change is sometimes framed as exactly that—a war, with either the earth or humans in the role of relentless attacker, the metaphor never resonated with Dekila. “I grew up knowing that the earth cradles me and cradles humanity. At no point have I felt that my relationship with nature is an adversarial one.”

This wholehearted trust has led Dekila down a path of lifelong ecological service.  

“Working with monks and nuns helped me awaken to the truth of interdependence scientifically, spiritually, and professionally. It helped unite the pieces of my identity, and made me realize that this unity was a source of strength that could benefit others,” she explained.

***

Dekila now heads the Loka Initiative, a new project which she co-founded with Buddhist scholar-researchers Dr. Richard Davidson and Dr. John Dunne of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds. Launched in 2018, the initiative hosted its first symposium last year, uniting religious leaders with environmental experts in an effort to spark new dialogue, and bolster climate activism by tapping into existing forms of community resilience that are already the bread and butter of many religious institutions.  

“The thing is, I found that religion was a way to reach people. Framing the problem of climate change in terms of people’s own spiritual mission—their mandate for why they chose a religious life—helps me connect them to the reality of ecological devastation and the things we can do about it.”

The Loka Initiative has worked with a variety of faith groups, including American evangelicals, who Dekila said get a bad rap. “There’s a tendency from the science side to look at evangelicals in particular and say, ‘They’re all climate deniers.’ But I think this attitude comes from a place of deep attachment to our own identity and an unwillingness to imagine that the people we don’t agree with are motivated by the same things we are—by a desire to be happy and healthy.”

Overlooked by the media, Christian groups that organize on the ground and promote sustainability are a growing trend. “Churches have always been the first responders, and often function as a kind of coordination hub during a crisis,” Dekila observed. “In the US, churches are consistently the most generous group when it comes to giving after a disaster.

“So, while an evangelical leader may not believe in climate science, he is still part of the climate solution. He still has a role to play in helping his community prepare for the effects of climate change and minimize their carbon footprint.”

Dekila’s efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. She earned the prestigious Yale McCluskey Award for conservation innovation in 2014, has published multiple papers, and frequently speaks about her work at places like the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She remains a fellow at WWF and sits on the board of the Society of Conservation Biology’s Religion and Conservation Working Group.

Today she reflects on the sense of wholeness she now feels.

“When I first started conceptualizing Sacred Earth, I received some advice from Martin Palmer, founder of the Alliance of Religions in the UK, who told me that as long as I could be authentic in presenting myself as a person of faith first and a scientist second, no faith leader would turn me away.

 “That’s proven to be the case so far.”

The post How Dekila Chungyalpa Draws on Faith to Protect the Planet appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

7:30 a.m. After morning ablutions, I greet my infant son, change his diaper, and then take my 5-year old daughter to school.

9:30 a.m. To get to the city, I walk 15 minutes from my home in Westchester County, New York, and hop on the train to Grand Central Terminal. 

11:15 a.m. Once I’m at the Shinnyo Center for Meditation and Wellbeing near midtown Manhattan, I offer morning chanting and prayer in front of the altar, followed by two public lunchtime meditation sessions.

3:00 p.m. At least once a month I visit the New York City Police Department’s Midtown South Precinct to speak to the officers and lead a mini-meditation as part of their roll call. Assigned to this precinct as an NYPD clergy liaison, I am here essentially to help these first responders help others. I want to provide the officers with something that can support their health, wellbeing, and state of mind as they patrol New York City’s streets. If they succeed, we all succeed.

4:00 pm. After a walk through Bryant Park, I go to New York University, where I teach a weekly evening meditation class, ending my day in the city.

♦

See more of Rev. Grainzvolt’s day, including the NYPD roll call, on Instagram @tricyclemag.

See previous installments of “A Day in the Dharma” featuring Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, abbot of the Bhavana Society, and Ven. Karma Lekshe Tsomo, cofounder of Sakyadhita.

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On February 5, Tibetans celebrate Losar, the lunar new year, ushering in the year of the pig. As is customary for such events, ceremonies meant to cleanse the upcoming year of negativities are accompanied by extravagant feasts for large crowds, featuring delicious Tibetan staples like momo (dumplings) and thenthuk (hand-pulled noodles) that have come to be devoured worldwide, including in the West, where my own family lives.

The global rise of Tibetan cuisine, like that of Tibetan Buddhism, began with the fall of Tibet. Following China’s invasion of the Himalayan kingdom, scores of Tibetan refugees fled into Nepal and India in the 1950s and ’60s, bringing nothing but their resilience and recipes.

One beloved representative of Tibetan cuisine—the momo—debuted in the United States in 1982, when Phintso and Pema Thonden, refugee diplomats dispatched by the Tibetan government-in-exile, opened Tibet Kitchen in Manhattan’s Curry Hill district, not far from the United Nations. By day, Mr. Thonden was the Dalai Lama’s political ambassador, toiling at his desk in the Office of Tibet. By night, the Thondens were introducing UN diplomats and ordinary New Yorkers to Tibetan dishes.

Tibetans trickled into America in those years, some seeking to import the dharma and others hoping to export political assistance. A decade later, Congress included special legislation for “displaced Tibetans” in the Immigration Act of 1990, turning the trickle into a wave. One thousand Tibetans were selected through a lottery to resettle in America. (Luckily, my mother was one of the winners; unluckily, she was resettled in Minnesota, a state whose notorious winters make the Himalayas seem like the Bahamas).

These Tibetan “pilgrims,” who had traveled an even more distant and tortuous route than the original Mayflower passengers in search of refuge from persecution, are responsible for proliferating Tibetan culinary delights throughout the land—from Boston to Berkeley, Madison to Minneapolis, Seattle to San Francisco. Today, New York City alone boasts some 40 Tibetan eateries, most of them clustered in Jackson Heights, Queens, where cafés and food trucks animate the sleepless streets. Here, I introduce you to some of my favorite Tibetan foods, served during new year festivities and beloved all year. Happy Losar!  

Momo (Handcrafted meat or veggie dumpling)

Few things can warm the soul on a cold night in early spring like a plate of steaming momos. There was a time when momos were a rare fare for an ordinary Tibetan family. Ingredients were precious and scarce, and recipes labor-intensive: one person to mince the meat, a second to mix the ingredients, a third to knead the dough—and that’s only half way there. You’d then flatten a small piece of the dough, place some filling at the center, and gently persuade the edges into unity, as if building consensus among the ingredients. Finally, the momos would go in the steamer for 12 to 16 minutes, depending on the type of filling and thickness of skin. Whew! The collective nature of its production, though, unfailingly transformed the mundane labor into an elaborate ritual of social bonding. Adults did the heavy lifting in the momo-making enterprise, while children were welcomed as observers, and, eventually, apprentices.

Tibetans, Mongolians, and Bhutanese insist upon the robust beef momos, while Indians and Nepalese settle for chicken momos in deference to religious considerations. Momos drowned in a sea of red and yellow sauce adds a Kathmandu twist—one of several adaptations the momo has undergone in its long and fabled history. Vegetarians sometimes feel marginalized in Tibetan restaurants, but at Little Tibet in Jackson Heights, you can enjoy the delicious (and healthy) kyutsel momo, made simply with chives, olive oil, and flour.

Several communities claim this dish, and Tibetans and Nepalese occasionally get into heated debates over which side of the Himalayas this jealously loved dumpling originated from. According to the historian Jamyang Norbu, the momo may go back to 13th-century Persia and Khorasan, whose resident Mongol khans (managers of the largest land empire in history) leaked it to the Tibetans.

(A word of caution: if you devour too many momos in one sitting, you may get what is known as the momo burp, which sounds a lot more innocent than it smells.)

Thenthuk (Hand-pulled noodles)

Thenthuk, hand-pulled soup noodles, emerged as the perfect comfort food in the windswept frontier towns along the Sino-Tibetan tea route. Originally from Amdo—the region of northeastern Tibet that is home to the Dalai Lama, the savant Gendun Chophel, and the scholar Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism—thenthuk can be anointed “the food of the poet-scholar” in my opinion, not least because it is fast and easy to cook.

Then- means “to pull,” and –thuk means “noodles.” It’s not a super creative name, but the Amdos reserved their creativity for poetry. They didn’t squander it on trivial enterprises like naming dishes. 

You can find comfort in a hot bowl of thenthuk at any Tibetan establishment, and both vegetarian and non-veg variations are sensational. Some restaurants also serve mothuk, which is—you guessed it!—momos swimming in thenthuk broth. Chef Jigme of the restaurant Böd: Himalaya conjures up a fried version of thenthuk, which is divine, especially when consumed hot off the wok.

Drokgyu (Nomad meat sausage)

The drokgyu is a Paleolithic-style sausage popular among the nomads of Tibet, whose Denisovan ancestors populated the plateau some 40,000 years ago.

The dish recently arrived in New York thanks to Chef Jigme, who grew up as a nomad in Labrang, the site of one of the greatest monasteries in eastern Tibet and also a hotbed of Tibetan resistance. Like many others of his generation, he escaped to exile in Dharamsala, India, where he ran a wildly popular restaurant for ten years before moving to New York.

This king of all sausages is stuffed with beef, blood, Sichuan pepper, onions, and salt. “It is a sine qua non of every nomad family on Losar,” says Rinchen, a former nomad who eats here every day.

Pork Chili / Paneer Chili

Pork chili is immensely popular, especially among those of Nepalese, Sherpa, and Bhutanese heritage. It is made with slices of double-fried pork belly, green chili, black bean sauce, sweet flour sauce, bell peppers, and Sichuan peppers. The tingmo, a steamed plain dumpling, usually flies as the carb wingman to this all fat-and-protein adventure.

The vegetarian avatar of this fare is the paneer chili, known as chura khatsa in Tibetan and Bhutanese. Paneer is Hindi (and originally Persian) for the un-aged farm cheese used pervasively in India and used extensively in modern Tibetan and Himalayan cuisine.

After your meal, I recommend a cup of chai. This spiced Indian milk tea turns out to be the perfect antidote to—or refuge from—the infamous momo burp you’re about to have.

The post Celebrating the Tibetan New Year with Momos and More appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

7:30 a.m. I get up and sit shikantaza (meditation) for half an hour. I sit again in the late afternoon.

8 a.m. On Sundays in particular, I go to the Center. First I wipe down the exterior window sills, and then we start. We have three periods of sitting meditation and two of kinhin (walking meditation). I offer dokusan (private interviews) and give a dharma talk.

9 a.m. I drive to the grocery store to pick up items for dinner. Depending on what I’m making, I’ll prepare and cook when I get back or later in the evening.

10 a.m. I practice Iaido, the art of drawing and cutting with a samurai sword, a couple of times a week at the Center.

11 a.m. After returning home, I study until 3 or 4 p.m. Whether I’m preparing for a dharma talk or study group or reviewing koans, I like to stay at the top of my game.

Related: Articles by Jules Shuzen Harris

5 p.m. I prepare dinner. My specialties are salmon and pasta, although sometimes I put ingredients into my crock pot in the morning and let that cook all day.

♦

See the previous installment of “A Day in the Dharma”: A Day in the Dharma with Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, Abbot of NYC’s Village Zendo

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