The architect of the Indian constitution. The drafter of the Hindu Code Bill, which permitted Indians from different castes to marry and extended equal rights to men and women. The man who believed Buddhism was the only way to liberation, leading hundreds of thousands of Dalits (“untouchables”) to convert to Buddhism and escape the oppression of the caste system. What Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) achieved was in many ways unthinkable given the tremendous discrimination he faced as a young Dalit. But, had Ambedkar not met and married a young doctor named Sharada Kabir, it’s unlikely that he would have been able to accomplish nearly as much as he did during the last decade of his life.

Kabir, who became known as Dr. Savita Ambedkar after their marriage in 1948, published her memoir in the Marathi language in 1990. In 2022, nearly twenty years after her death, Babasaheb: My Life with Dr Ambedkar was published in English for the first time. Translated by Nadeem Khan, Babasaheb gives English speakers an insightful look into Savita’s complicated commitment to serving her husband—whom many consider a bodhisattva—as a companion, caretaker, and trustworthy confidante during watershed moments in modern Indian history. 

Savita was born in 1909 to what she described as a progressive Brahmin family. Graduating with a bachelor of medicine and surgery from Grant Medical College in 1937, Savita worked as a junior doctor for Dr. Madhavrao Malvankar in Mumbai before accepting a position as chief medical officer of a women’s government hospital in Gujarat. But facing some health issues, she returned to Mumbai and resumed her work with Malvankar. 

Enter B. R. Ambedkar. Savita writes that she wasn’t familiar with him before meeting him at a friend’s house. He was “deeply concerned about women’s progress” and congratulated the young doctor on her accomplishments, Savita Ambedkar writes; they also discussed Buddhism in their early meetings, leaving her “literally goggle-eyed with wonder.”

Though Ambedkar had the elegance of a German prince and the stamina of a high-ranking politician, he was suffering from a number of significant health issues (including diabetes, rheumatism, high blood pressure, and neuritis), which were put on the back burner while he worked on the constitution in 18- to 20-hour stretches. He sought the medical advice of Dr. Malvankar, whom Savita Ambedkar worked with as a junior doctor. 

The Ambedkars’ marriage started as more of a medical commitment than a romance: Savita had offered to live with him to oversee his treatment, diet, and rest; Ambedkar instead proposed, in part because “for the sake of millions of my people, I have to live on.”

“His personality, his work, his sacrifice, his scholarship, they were all mightier than the Himalayas. Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon. How was one to turn down a great person like Dr. Ambedkar?” Savita writes. “The doctor inside me was prodding me to go and serve him medically. The government had placed upon his shoulders the historic responsibility of drafting the Constitution of free India, and therefore it was utterly imperative that his health should be well looked after, and he should be given appropriate treatment.” 

She accepted, and they were married on April 15, 1948, less than three months after Gandhi was assassinated. “From then on till the last moment I stayed with him ceaselessly like his shadow,” she writes.

“Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon.”

Over the past several years, I’ve had a number of conversations with a dharma friend about the faults of applying modern thinking to the lives of ancient Buddhist women. She is working on a book about the Buddha’s birth mother and views Mayadevi as the goddess she is; to compare her to an earthly woman makes no sense, because she was divinely chosen to be the Buddha’s mother. We can take inspiration from her qualities, but to try to think of her as a woman in our world is futile.

In that sense, it was more comfortable for me to think about Savita Ambedkar’s life as a dharma story rather than the biography of a modern woman. When I begin viewing her life through a feminist lens, I see only what she gave up to be the “shadow,” the constant companion and caretaker of one of the most important men of independent India. 

The few glimpses we get of Savita are inspiring and fierce: when Ambedkar was so ill that his constant stream of visitors would not help his condition improve, Savita cut meetings short, or refused to let them start in the first place, so that he could rest. Although they employed a cook, Savita would prepare his food with healing in mind; she taught him yoga asanas and made sure he had oil massages to help with circulation. Savita kept Ambedkar on a strict schedule, helped bathe and dress him; Savita made it possible for him to read and write into the night and work on legislation that affected millions of people at the time (and all the generations to come). Indeed, the ink was still drying on edits and corrections to The Buddha and His Dhamma when Ambedkar died in his sleep on December 6, 1956. 

Yet following Ambedkar’s death, Savita was forced into obscurity. Some of Ambedkar’s followers even alleged that she had murdered him, and a significant amount of the memoir is spent establishing Ambedkar’s health history and how she likely prolonged his life. Though she was effectively blocked from politics, Savita found friends among the younger generation of social reformers in the seventies and eighties, garnering respect from the Dalit Panthers, radical anticaste thinkers who were inspired by Ambedkar, Karl Marx, Buddhism, and groups like the Black Panthers in the US. 

Early on in the book, Savita compares herself to Yashodhara, the Buddha’s wife. Like Yashodhara, about whom we know little from Buddhist literature, Savita’s innermost thoughts and dreams remain a mystery. We are instead left wondering what we might do if a bodhisattva came into our lives. Would we set aside everything to serve them too?

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It is hard to know how to even begin to review a book of the beauty, depth, nuance, and complexity of David McMahan’s excellent Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds. McMahan’s previous book—his seminal The Making of Buddhist Modernism—is undeniably one of the most important books on contemporary Buddhism ever written, and Rethinking Meditation is destined to take its place alongside it as an indispensable classic. 

Rethinking Meditation is really two books in one. The first half of the book dismantles the myth that the Buddhist meditation we practice today is the timeless practice handed down from the Buddha. McMahan demonstrates how every culture and historical era reinterprets and repurposes Buddhist practice to make it relevant to its place and time. Every culture and era has “filters” and “magnets” that de-emphasize some aspects of the Buddhist tradition while amplifying others. Thus, modern Western meditators filter out classical Buddhist themes that are incongruous with late modern Western culture (e.g., rebirth, the foulness of the body) and emphasize themes that are culture-congruent and relevant to the moment (e.g., interdependence, secular re-enchantment, savoring the moment).

As a result, the ways in which an Indian Buddhist monk in 200 BCE understood meditation, and the purposes to which he put it, and those of an American convert Buddhist in 2023 are remarkably different. For example, the ancient Indian monk contemplated the foulness of the body—how it was filled with phlegm, pus, and bile—and engaged in charnel ground meditations to watch bodies decompose in order to disenchant himself with the body. Modern mindfulness meditators, on the other hand, engage in body scan practices to experience the body more fully, to reinhabit and become more intimate with it, and to live a fully embodied life.

McMahan also dismantles the idea that meditation is a “science of mind” that enables practitioners to objectively discover the “way things really are”—some true, unchanging nature of reality. Instead, he describes how the various mental maps from different schools of Buddhism shape and limit the kinds of insights practitioners are likely to discover through meditation. It makes a great deal of difference whether one thinks one becomes a Buddha through developing and embodying certain views, mental states, attitudes, and competencies (e.g., the paramitas and brahma-viharas) or whether one views enlightenment as an uncovering and realization of the Buddha one already is. McMahan is nuanced here, however, and acknowledges the possibility that meditation has the potential to deconstruct categorical thinking—a possibility also suggested by Nagarjuna’s tetralemma and Zen’s admonition to “go beyond words and letters.” Thus, different strands of the Buddhist tradition both constrain and liberate discovery. What meditation will show you depends on how you think about meditation. But even when meditation encourages us to transcend our categories, we are all still limited by our social imaginaries, our conditioning, our mental habits, and the constraining visions of our traditions.

What meditation will show you depends on how you think about meditation.

In the second part of the book, McMahan explores three aspects of late modern culture that strongly affect contemporary understandings of Buddhist practice: the ethics of appreciation, authenticity, and autonomy. We can understand how the ethic of appreciation affects modern Buddhism when we consider mindfulness meditation’s orientation toward embodiment, “stopping to smell the roses,” and finding new satisfaction in mundane repetitive tasks such as doing laundry. We see it also reflected in the title of Maezumi Roshi’s book Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice. This ethic of appreciation that characterizes a good deal of modern Buddhism in East Asia and the West is not something we find in early Indian Buddhism.

The ethic of authenticity is reflected in the idea that we have an authentic self (as opposed to a socially conditioned self) that needs to be uncovered, actualized, and expressed. We see this in the idea that meditation involves “going within” to discover one’s genuine self. Of course, early Indian Buddhism insisted there was no such thing as an essential or unchanging self.

The ethic of autonomy involves what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “buffered” self—a completely independent, rational observer who is in control of his or her appetites and desires and is able to maintain equanimity in the face of untoward life circumstances. We see this reflected in the idea that meditation builds inner imperturbability and peace regardless of external circumstances, and that we are responsible for our own happiness.

McMahan suggests that we replace the idea of the autonomous self with what he calls “situated autonomy”—an acknowledgment of our embeddedness in social structures, counterbalanced by the simultaneous acknowledgment that practices like meditation can enhance our agency through increasing our awareness of possibilities for mental and physical action. McMahan points out that certain aspects of the Buddhist tradition mitigate against this autonomous self. The inner citadel model of the self is in conflict with late modern perspectives on the plural, contingent, dialogical, and interdependent nature of selves—perspectives that dovetail with traditional Buddhist views on nonself, dependent origination, and emptiness. The interdependent self introduces the possibility of an ethical responsibility toward all beings and the natural environment that mitigates against the individualized buffered self. This leads to an engaged Buddhism that is not just about feeling good but doing good—and doing good in ways that undermine systemic forms of privilege and oppression. But nuanced as always, McMahan points out that this new Buddhist interdependence is a modern secularized variant—it aims at a better world in this life rather than a future life, or through transcending the world completely to arrive at nirvana.

I have not sufficiently commented on the beauty of McMahan’s prose. There are very few academic writers who write as beautifully as he does—at times lyrically and poetically—and yet never losing precision, complexity, and nuance. You will want to read this book all at once, but the ideas are complex enough that you ought to read it slowly.

Rethinking Meditation is a book you will want to have on your shelf. It examines “traditional” Buddhist and secular mindfulness rhetoric and will help readers to think more clearly about how our understanding of meditation is inevitably affected by historical, social, and cultural contexts. 

♦

This article was originally published on existentialbuddhist.com.

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Evil incarnate, looming apocalypse, the heroic team-up of a magic-wielding princess and a pure-of-heart knight. It’s a tale as old as time—or at least as old as 1986, when Nintendo released the first Legend of Zelda game, marking the start of what would become one of the most widely recognizable and critically acclaimed video game franchises to date. This May, Nintendo released the highly anticipated nineteenth installment in the franchise, titled Tears of the Kingdom—and, more or less, the plot remains unchanged from the previous eighteen. Some may call it lazy rehashing. I call it a mark of samsara.

Tears had some big shoes to fill. Its 2017 predecessor, Breath of the Wild, was heralded as a near-perfect game, and Tears recycles both Breath’s engine (the coding framework that the game runs on) and its map of Hyrule, a sprawling kingdom that is as much of a character as Link—the game’s protagonist and sworn protector of Hyrule’s princess, Zelda. As the game opens, Link and Zelda are exploring ancient ruins beneath Hyrule Castle and accidentally stir an ancient slumbering evil. Link is knocked unconscious, awakening some time later with Princess Zelda nowhere to be found and a dusty old mummy-ghost arm in place of his own.

But it ain’t just dusty, old, and mummy-ghost-y—the spirit of the arm’s original owner, who happens to be the first King of Hyrule, bestows Link with some nifty magical powers to aid him on his quest. They’re not quite what you’d typically expect from a fantasy game—they’re more like tools for interacting with the game’s physics-based world. One lets you telekinetically grab almost any object in the game and fuse it to something else. Another lets you reverse an object’s passage through time. Need to get across a chasm? Try breaking some trees and fusing a couple of logs together. Or move one log across, bring it back, jump on it, and reverse its pathing.

After a brief tutorial section to introduce players to the new bag of tricks, Link is told to visit four major Hyrulian cities. But it’s more of a suggestion, really—at this point, you’re pretty much free to do as you please. And damn is it fun.

It’s hard to describe how expansive and alluring the game’s world is, but imagine being dropped in an interactive Miyazaki film—that pretty much sums it up. Hyrule is just as gorgeous as it was in the last game, with stunning environments that vary from rolling dunes and sand-swept ruins to frigid, mountainous expanses; from lush green plains to volcanic crag. But with Tears’s additional two maps—one below Hyrule and one above—what was already a massive game world to begin with has been tripled. Sky Islands dot the horizon, while below Hyrule lie The Depths—a nearly pitch-black, sprawling void that curiously mirrors the terrain of the surface world (mountains become valleys; valleys, mountains).

Given the open-world, nonlinear format of the game, you can easily ignore the game’s main story and spend hours simply wandering. But in a way, that is the main point of the game: every mountain, every cave, every lake is fully explorable, and you are intentionally given tools to do just that—climbing, swimming, hang gliding. The game rewards you for treating its world with the same care that it was crafted with—for taking the time to investigate and appreciate all of your surroundings, no matter how unimportant they may seem. All sorts of hidden treasures, puzzles, and whimsical side characters can be uncovered by the inquisitive and attentive player. 

That feeling of adventure—of a world filled with mystery and awe and the simple urge to explore and appreciate it—is the core of the game. Creator Shigeru Miyamoto says that the series is imbued with his childhood memories of adventuring through the forests, caves, and “secret doors and pathways” of his hometown, Kyoto.

Perhaps our heroes are just as responsible for the apocalypses they continually avert.

The world we explore in Tears is also directly modeled on Kyoto: “I took a map of Kyoto and overlaid it on the game world, and I tried to imagine going to places that I know in Kyoto,” director Hidemaro Fujibayashi said about designing Hyrule for Breath of the Wild. “You have all of these famous temples and shrines and whatnot. . . . [I]t made it really easy to envision how that would translate to the game map,” art director Satoru Takizawa added.

The exploration is almost necessary. In order to increase Link’s maximum health, players must find Shrines of Light—of which there are a whopping 152 scattered across the map. When I ran into my first group of tougher enemies, I quickly realized that I needed more health to stand a chance. So I made my way up to the highest nearby vantage point, opened up my hang glider, and charted a course for all the shrines that I could see. It was hard not to feel like Basho, wandering the countryside from shrine to shrine on my own pilgrimage of sorts.

Resembling real-life Shinto rock shrines, each Shrine of Light transports players to a puzzle. Some are trickier than others, but all put your perception, creative problem-solving, and mastery of the game’s core mechanics to the test. Because there are so many ways to approach the game, it can be tough to find the appropriate solution. I’ve caught myself stubbornly throwing one method at the wall over and over again, trying to force the puzzle into submission. But when I notice that frustration, I can take a step back, clear my head, and try it a different way—and voilà! The solution is right there, clear as day—a stark reminder of Suzuki Roshi’s beginner’s mind: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”

It’s a concept that applies to the game’s combat too. Every weapon has a set durability, meaning that they’re bound to break after felling just a few baddies—a mechanic that reeks of impermanence. But you can also fuse items to your weapons on the fly for different effects. Sure, you can fuse plenty of stuff onto your weapons to just make them hit harder. But for the creative player, this mechanic provides endless ways to approach combat. If there are monsters standing in water, try attaching a Shock Fruit to an arrow to stun them. Or put an Ice Fruit on a spear to freeze enemies and keep them at bay. 

And then there’s one of the game’s most compelling new features: robotic engineering. Man and machine convene—players can collect various basic components (a steering wheel, a fan, a flame emitter) and combine them however they please. If you’re resourceful, you don’t even have to fight at all—you can just build a giant mech to do it for you. Or if you’re in a rush to explore a cave, you can just barely see partway up a mountain, build yourself a hot air balloon, or maybe a hovercraft.

Though Tears excels in its gameplay and environmental storytelling, its plot is by far its weakest point. Yes, there are fun characters and a couple of unexpected turns, and the plot is certainly enjoyable enough, but overall it’s much the same as the other installments: Link and Zelda fight the big bad to save Hyrule.

But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (Or if it is broke, fuse it back together.)

And there’s a reason the series can get away with it: the games aren’t really telling the story of Link and Zelda, but rather a Link and a Zelda—two entities stuck in samsara, doomed to repeat a never-ending battle between light and dark, good and evil. 

Skyward Sword, the series’s 2011 installment, follows the pair’s first iteration. They battle the demon king Demise, an “eternal being” that has “conquered time itself.” Having previously been defeated by the Goddess of Light—who we learn Zelda is the mortal incarnation of—Demise is out for vengeance. When the duo finally best him at the end of the game, he utters the curse:

My hate . . . never perishes. It is born anew in a cycle with no end! I will rise again! . . . An incarnation of my hatred shall ever follow your kind, dooming them to wander a blood-soaked sea of darkness for all time!

In a 2021 paper titled “I Coveted That Wind: Ganondorf, Buddhism, and Hyrule’s Apocalyptic Cycle,” University of Pennsylvania professor Kathryn Hemmann dissects the lines in their original Japanese. The word translated above as “hatred” originally reads as on’nen, a Japanese Buddhist term “used to refer to the effect of lingering hatred within the cycle of samsara”; the word “incarnation” was translated from gonge, a term used by the heavily syncretic Shugendo sect to describe Shinto deities as “temporary manifestations that a Buddha or bodhisattva takes in order to save living beings.”

The “curse” is more of a warning: the karmic repercussions of striking down hatred—of hating hatred—ensure that it will rise again, just as its return ensures that our heroes (or iterations of them) will be around to usher in a new era of peace. Perhaps Demise and his gonge are indeed bodhisattvas, for without the apocalyptic decline that they bring, there is no great renewal—and perhaps our heroes are just as responsible for the apocalypses they continually avert.

It’s a profoundly Buddhist metanarrative that mirrors the cyclical cosmologies found in various schools: from kalpa to kalpa, the “good” perpetuates samsara just as much as the “evil” does. I say bring the kalpas on—so long as Nintendo keeps delivering these delightful Zelda games.

The post Link in Samsara appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

♦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Buddha is the meditator par excellence. When people think of meditation, they often picture the Buddha, his hands in what is called the dhyanamudra, the “meditation pose,” right palm resting on the left palm, thumbs touching to form a circle. And yet more common is a different pose, left hand turned upward and resting in his lap, right hand extended over his knee. It is called bhumisparsha in Sanskrit, literally “touching the earth.”

A fabulous exhibition of early Indian Buddhist art opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York on July 21, continuing until November 13, featuring masterpieces from 200 BCE to 400 CE, a golden age of Buddhist art. It is called “Tree and Serpent. Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE – 400 CE.” The signature shows, as one might expect, a tree and a serpent, indeed a magnificent serpent, with five hooded heads. The Buddha, however, is nowhere to be seen. Unless, that is, one knows how to look. Unless one knows the story. Because if you look closely, you see a small rectangle on the coils of the giant snake, and below the rectangle, you see what appear to be a pair of footprints. The footprints are the footprints of the Buddha; the seat is where he is seated in meditation. The Buddha, however, is not there. 

This is one of many representations of the Buddha in early Indian Buddhist art in which the Buddha himself is not represented. Instead, there is a seat, a wheel, a stupa, or a pair of footprints. Art historians call these works “aniconic.” It is not that other humans, gods, and animals are not depicted in these works. Only the Buddha is absent. Art historians have been arguing for more than a century about why this is the case. No prohibitions of drawing, painting, or sculpting the Buddha have been found in the Buddhist canon. And in later centuries, as we know, statues of the Buddha began to appear in both northwest India and in central India. Striking examples of both aniconic and iconic works are found throughout the exhibition.

And so the Buddha is absent in this piece, at least in the form that is familiar to us; this piece is clearly aniconic. But why the giant serpent? For this, you must know the story. After he achieved enlightenment, the Buddha spent seven weeks—forty-nine days, the same period as that between death and rebirth—in the vicinity of the Bodhi tree. Not eating, not sleeping, not speaking, reliving the experience of enlightenment, trying to decide whether he should teach. Each of those seven weeks is marked by a particular event at a particular place; those places are now shrines at Bodhgaya. During the third week, there was a horrific rainstorm. A huge serpent, the guardian of a nearby tree, emerged from a lake, wrapped himself around the Buddha, and spread his hood, providing shelter from the storm. This is the event depicted in the sculpture.

Such stories abound in the works on display in “Tree and Serpent,” suggesting that early in the history of Buddhism in India, scenes from the life of the Buddha could be carved in stone, without textual description, and often without the Buddha himself, and be still recognized by the faithful. Ordinary people knew these stories, and if they didn’t, there was likely a monk around, especially at a stupa, who was happy to tell the tale. 

“Tree and Serpent” is the result of the imagination, the expertise, and the remarkable labor of John Guy, the Met’s senior curator of South and Southeast Asian Art. He has brought together many stunning pieces, many displayed outside of India for the first time. And he has moved beyond the usual Buddhist sites in the north that we associate with the life of the Buddha to include extraordinary works from South India, where Buddhism thrived for so long. The importance of the show, however, goes beyond its individual pieces.

The Buddha obviously lived and died in India; we still go on pilgrimage to the four places that he is said to have recommended on his deathbed: the place of his birth, his enlightenment, his first teaching, and his passage into nirvana. But it sometimes seems that during his eighty years in India, the Buddha’s feet never really touched the ground. Some texts actually say that they didn’t. “Tree and Serpent” corrects our mistake. Ancient India, like so many traditional cultures, had an animated landscape, with all manner of spirits and sprites. Buddhist texts list eight types of nonhumans, none of which are animals. The most common of these were yakshas and nagas, two names that are difficult to translate. A yaksha is often the spirit that inhabits a tree, easily offended and able to both cause harm and bestow benefit. Tibetans had such difficulty translating the term that they rendered it simply as “harm-generosity.” Nagas are serpentine creatures, not quite snakes, often depicted in Buddhist art with the head and torso of a human and the tail of a snake. The Sanskrit term was translated into Chinese as “dragon.” Nagas live beneath the waters in bejeweled palaces. They have magical powers, and their breath is poisonous to humans. Much of ancient Indian religion was concerned with pleasing, or at least not offending, these spirits. “Tree and Serpent” makes clear that Buddhism was deeply grounded in this natural and supernatural land. 

The exhibition makes clear that we cannot understand the Buddha until we see what surrounds him. In “Tree and Serpent,” the Buddha comes back home.

The Buddha and his monks lived in a world of spirits who needed to be appeased; many texts are devoted to this. But just as the Buddha commanded the respect of the visible powers—kings and merchants—he also commanded the respect of the invisible: the yakshas and nagas who control the natural world. When the Buddha delivered a sutra, they were often in attendance. Their reverence for him is depicted throughout the exhibition; one of the Buddha’s epithets is devatideva, the “god above the gods.” Thus, “nature worship” is not something that we should consign to the category of the primitive. It has been with Buddhism from the beginning. It is with Buddhism now. The exhibition makes clear that we cannot understand the Buddha until we see what surrounds him. In “Tree and Serpent,” the Buddha comes back home. The beautiful exhibition catalogue, Tree & Serpent. Early Buddhist Art in India by John Guy and published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a major work of scholarship and is not to be missed.

⧫

John Guy. Tree & Serpent. Early Buddhist Art in India. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2023.

This show will be on at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, until November 13. 

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In a well-known koan from the Book of Equanimity, an abbot asks a scholar where he is going. The scholar replies that he is going on pilgrimage. The abbot then asks, “What are you going on pilgrimage for?” The scholar confesses he doesn’t know. The abbot simply responds, “Not-knowing is most intimate.”

Chenxing Han takes this last line as the guiding philosophy of her new book, one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care. Written in the aftermath of her friend’s death from acute myeloid leukemia, one long listening is an ode to not-knowing, chronicling how grief fundamentally restructures Han’s view of reality. She describes the book as a “mala bracelet of rumination-worn beads” that circles around three autumns: the fall of 2014, when she began a chaplaincy residency at a hospital in California; the fall of 2015, when she moved to Taiwan to study spiritual care at a Buddhist college; and the fall of 2016, when her friend and former roommate passed away. Han’s friend once said to her that autumn is “the most honest season,” as it “does not pretend that life blooms forever.” The autumns that Han chronicles in one long listening are no exception. Filled with reminders of impermanence, these three seasons of Han’s life are times of profound loss and quiet transformation as she learns what it means to grieve—and to care.

The memoir’s fragmentary structure mirrors how Han comes to understand grief: as a cyclical process that ruptures expectations of coherence and instead unfolds in its own time. Over the course of the memoir, we watch Han revisit the same memories, turning questions over again and again as if in prayer, never arriving at a clear answer but rather delving deeper into the intimacy of not-knowing. In eschewing linear narratives and clean resolutions, she aims not just to describe the experience of chaplaincy and grief but also to evoke it in all its opacities and uncertainties.

As she lets go of her expectations, she comes to experience the mutuality of spiritual care, allowing herself to be transformed—and cared for—by the patients she meets.

Han, as a hospital chaplain, interfaces with uncertainty on a daily basis as her patients and their loved ones grapple with new diagnoses, rapid physical decline, and death. Confronted with their many questions—“Why does my father have cancer? Is grandma ever gonna leave the ICU? Where is my daughter now that she’s dead?”—she can only answer honestly, “I don’t know.” For Han, this is the heart of chaplaincy: learning to accompany others through the unknown and unknowable as they come to terms with illness and impermanence. Of course, this is no easy task: “At the threshold of every patient’s room, I can foresee nothing of the visit ahead,” she writes. “This not-knowing is terrifying.” Often she is called in when other medical providers are at a loss and when every possible intervention seems inadequate. There is no easy fix; all she can do is listen and be present. Yet sometimes, impossibly, presence is enough. Her honest and tender vignettes of bedside visits illustrate the intimacy that can emerge from holding space for another without rushing to offer a solution. Her patients trust her with their despair and heartache—and with their hidden joys. (“No one told me this work would be full of love stories,” she muses.) Through listening openheartedly, Han bears witness to the fears, delights, shames, and regrets that make up a life.

This is challenging work, and Han frequently finds herself on the verge of burning out. In her first written assignment as a chaplain resident, she “waxe[s] poetic about the chaplain as bodhisattva,” striving to offer herself fully to her patients, sometimes losing herself in patients’ stories as a means to “forget [her] own hauntings.” Soon, though, she realizes how untenable it is to attempt to accompany every patient through their existential distress without also tending to her own. At a friend’s urging, she begins to give herself “permission to fall short of limitless generosity,” accepting that she, too, is in need of support. As she lets go of her expectations, she comes to experience the mutuality of spiritual care, allowing herself to be transformed—and cared for—by the patients she meets. Sitting at the bedside of a dying elderly Chinese man, she is transported to her own uncle’s deathbed; visiting a Buddhist writer who is undergoing chemotherapy, she receives a blessing not to give up on her own writing. These moments blur the lines of who is caring for whom, and Han comes to recognize that “we are each other’s bodhisattvas.”

This lesson becomes all the more poignant as Han finds herself in the throes of her own grief. As she sits at her dying friend’s bedside, Han notices all the ways that her friend is caring for her and teaching her how to go on after her death. After her friend dies, Han comes to view their friendship as “one long listening.” And though she initially finds herself livid with the “listening-bereft world” after her friend is gone, eventually Han discovers that she is still listening—and her friend is too. Honoring her friend’s memory becomes a way of opening up to the everyday wonder of the world, and Han is often startled by the beauty she encounters—and the care she receives—when she sheds her expectations and follows what she views as signs from her departed friend.

In a poem written after her friend’s death, Han quotes the Upaddha Sutta’s refrain that “admirable friendship is not the half but the whole of the holy path.” In this light, one long listening is a testament to the ways that friendship can guide us through grief, cataloging Han’s companionship with patients, friends, strangers, oceans, trees, and the world itself. For its readers, the book serves as a companion, orienting us to the intimacy of not-knowing, the sustaining power of friendship, and the importance of honoring the losses in our lives. Through listening to Han listen, we might learn to listen to the world—to its cries and its silences, its sorrow and its pain, its joy and its despair—and to find beauty in it all.

♦

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Dreaming the Mountain is the first English anthology of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Tue Sy’s poetry. Although he’s a prominent figure in Vietnamese culture, you won’t find much of Tue Sy’s work in the West, but translators Nguyen Ba Chung and Martha Collins have taken a step toward filling the void with their forthcoming bilingual book. An evocative, lyrical, and quietly complex collection, Dreaming the Mountain gives English speakers a taste of a truly extraordinary man’s work.

A professor, Buddhist scholar, translator, and political dissident, Tue Sy writes from a vast breadth of experience. Born in 1943 in Laos, he joined the Linji Buddhist order when he was a child, going on to attend the Institute of Buddhism and become a tenured professor at Van Hanh University in Ho Chi Minh City. He’s translated numerous Chinese and Pali Buddhist works and produced a robust collection of philosophical teachings covering subjects ranging from Theravada and Zen Buddhism to Heidegger and Foucault.

In 1978, due to the continued suppression of Buddhism, Tue Sy was sent to a reeducation camp for three years. A year after his release, he was arrested again and eventually sentenced to death. With the help of human rights organizations, his sentence was reduced to hard labor for fourteen years, but when his scheduled release finally came, the government demanded Tue Sy write a letter asking for leniency. He refused and was only freed after ten days of fasting.

Dreaming the Mountain is a moving depiction of a mind seeking freedom in a chaotic world: the doubts and certainties, the careful, profound observations, and, ultimately, the dedication to liberation. It belongs with the greats of wartime poetry and Buddhist literature, but it’s also a generous companion for any of us seeking to understand this human life.

As with most Zen poetry, nature is omnipresent in Tue Sy’s writing. Wind, sunlight, moss, clouds, and waterfalls appear as characters throughout the poems, their meanings evolving in subtle and unexpected ways like slippery demigods—sometimes angel, sometimes demon. Beyond the universal natural world, there’s the precise landscape Tue Sy inhabits. He wrote most of the poems in this book from Nha Trang, Vietnam (where he previously attended the Institute of Buddhism) or secluded in the neighboring forest, far from his family and friends in what was then still Saigon. It was in Nha Trang that he began to dream of “a desolate peak in the Truong Son Mountain Range, pounded and battered by storms,” which became a symbol of Vietnam for him.

“Dream” is a multivalent term throughout the work, conjuring everything from fantasy to noble aspiration to a lost cause. It’s the gap between real and imagined, and a poignant refrain for someone searching for home in a nation that abandoned him. Tue Sy also uses “dream” as an explicit reference to the illusion caused by ignorance. He writes: “I go to the dream-place / Like early dew, like lightning, like evening clouds,” summoning the Diamond Sutra’s description of conditioned phenomena.

“Why do people die,” he asks, “but love doesn’t die?”

Dreams are also an apt frame for the multiple physical and temporal realities in Tue Sy’s writing. In one breath, we’re on the ground in the Van Gia forest or the reeducation camp where “an army march tramples the setting sun,” and in the next, we’re traveling to paradise. He writes: “Half of me stays in an inn / Half lives in the deva realm with the fairies / Half stays awake in long underworld nights.” Tue Sy’s past and future lives meander beside his poems like shadows, signaling his desire to escape the endless cycle of death and rebirth:

The same life, still listening to troubling stories
Still living and dying with pretense and devastation…
Once, before a gracious old monk, I faltered
Could I, that once, have made a serious error?
Tomorrow I will wait, this time, for you 

It’s a pleasure to witness the way Tue Sy navigates ultimate and conventional reality in every line. In a single sentence of grief, he gestures to both the mass death caused by political violence and that caused by samsara: “For thousands of years, people have said goodbye.” Even when directly dealing with samsara, he shifts between two pairs of eyes. One is disgusted and exhausted by the suffering of human life, and the other sees that nirvana is right here, right now. Renunciation lives alongside the wisdom to know there’s nothing to renounce. From the reeducation camp, he writes,

What magic is behind so much destruction?
And yet a rose just bloomed beside the stream—
Everywhere is the home of the Pure Land

Tue Sy’s poems read like private conversations with himself, turning over sorrow, exile, loneliness, aging, and an enduring sense of the divine like warm stones in the palm of his hand. Even as he wanders through the deepest shadows of human suffering, he comes back again and again to the heart. “Why do people die,” he asks, “but love doesn’t die?”

Are these love poems? Not in the way we might be used to. A current thrums beneath them that sounds like the fourth noble truth: there is a path out of all of this suffering. When Tue Sy speaks of love, I hear a fierce devotion to that path of freedom. “Love, in every moment of my dreams,” he writes. “For love, I’m reaching out to catch stars.”

♦

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It is not easy for Westerners to practice Tantric Buddhism, or even to come to a genuine understanding of why anyone would want to. We today are separated from the societies that produced the classic Vajrayana texts by vast distances of space, of time, and of fundamental cultural assumptions. The issue is not merely that the details of the rich and complex rituals can be perplexing. The fundamental nature of the practices themselves can be bafflingly obscure.

The Magic of Vajrayana speaks to these challenges in a new and powerful way.  Ken McLeod vividly describes many of his own experiences from a life of Vajrayana practice, interweaving these with translations of practice-oriented texts from that tradition and with helpful comments and instructions on how to approach the practices they describe. This book is not for beginning practitioners and does not seem to be intended for the merely curious. Meant for committed spiritual seekers, the volume presents a searingly honest account of the suffering, challenges, and insights of a life spent engaging with a living mystical tradition.

If you call upon the protectors, be careful what you wish for!

McLeod’s reputation is largely based on his innovative and compelling translations from Tibetan, which often differ in striking ways from how Buddhist texts are more usually rendered into English. Rather than striving for a pedantic, philological form of accuracy or seeking to convey as much information as possible about how the texts fit into the cultural contexts that produced them, McLeod instead aims to evoke in the reader similar experiences and emotions to those that might have been felt by the original audience of the text. His translations strike at the heart, piercing our complacency with sharp words and opening doors to devotion, awe, compassion, and sheer clarity. Here is a taste of what he offers, verses from a traditional text depicting the meeting of Khyungpo Naljor with the mahasiddha Niguma:

Experience arises like magic.
If you practice like magic
You awaken like magic
Through the power of faith …

Don’t think about your teacher or your practice.
Don’t think about what is real or not real.
Don’t think about anything at all.
Don’t control what you experience.
Just rest in how you are right now. 

The largest portion of the book, covering three chapters, describes in detail a deity practice, called “Mastery of the Deathless,” for the goddess White Tara. McLeod’s exposition of this practice is detailed, illuminating, and inspiring; he brings the reader face-to-face with the majesty and wonder of the imagery involved. Many aspects of his discussion relate to fundamental issues about how to approach Tibetan Buddhist practice more generally. McLeod vigorously rejects the use of terms such as “imagination” and “visualization” to explain creation-phase practice. Such terms, he warns, encourage students to think their way through the practice. They carry the implication that it is necessary to control what you experience during the ritual. And then, “Twenty years later, if you are still doing deity practice, you wonder why nothing has changed.  Nothing changed because you never left the conceptual mind. . . . To engage deity practice effectively, stay in the clear empty knowing that is just there when you recite the spell. Rest right there and let the practice unfold.”

As often in his earlier teachings, McLeod emphasizes the importance of balance in a life of spiritual practice. Pushing too hard, going to excess, can lead to serious adverse consequences. McLeod notes that movement practices, such as t’ai chi and qigong, were helpful to him after his own practice led to severe and long-lasting health issues. He also presents instructions for a mountain–offering ritual as a means to maintain or restore balance.

The volume also includes a complete description, with the necessary mantras, of a practice invoking a six-armed form of the protector deity Mahakala. Here the reader encounters the bizarre and unsettling side of Tantric practice. The explanations provided are enormously helpful in making sense of how such texts can fit into a way of life shaped by a commitment to spiritual awakening.

McLeod’s presentation of the protector ritual crackles with intensity, producing a disturbing effect that, for some, may include an edge of actual terror. Some would question the wisdom of the decision to make such a text available to the reading public. However, for anyone who takes such practices seriously enough to want to engage in them, McLeod’s own account of their effects in his life should be a sufficient warning: if you call upon the protectors, be careful what you wish for!

His translations strike at the heart, piercing our complacency with sharp words and opening doors to devotion.

The last chapter of the book, “Living Practice,” distills insights from McLeod’s spiritual journey into clear, direct words of advice. This chapter does much to clarify how McLeod understands how Vajrayana methods relate to the shared aims of Buddhist traditions generally. His advice ranges widely across a broad variety of practices and shows how different methods can enhance and support one another.

Those practitioners who are struggling to make sense of what Vajrayana practice instructions actually mean, and to fit them into the context of Buddhist values and aspirations, may well be grateful for McLeod’s book and for its deeply practical, experiential approach. Other readers will appreciate that the text preserves rare and precious teachings from the Shangpa lineage of the Kagyu tradition, teachings likely to be unfamiliar even to those who are deeply versed in other forms of the Tibetan tradition. And some at least of those who engage with this book may find that new possibilities have opened, and their understanding of how to practice has shifted, through the workings of the ancient Vajrayana teachings manifesting in a fresh, vivid, and unrelenting form. Again and again, McLeod’s words lead us out of concepts, frameworks, and theories and plunge us directly into the majesty of ritual, the darkness of suffering, and the mystery of life.

Listen to an interview with Ken McLeod here. 

Becoming White Tara

You are White Tara. You sit in a crystal palace on a lotus and moon throne. Delicate elegant silks drape your white body. Gold jewelry set with diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and topaz highlights your every feature. You have seven eyes. The eye in your forehead looks into the essence of being. The two other eyes that grace your countenance take in the infinities upon infinities of beings that arise, abide, and vanish in the countless world systems that themselves come and go over eons in the vastness of infinite space. Four more eyes, on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet, take in the pain and confusion of every being in every world. With a combination of understanding and compassion you see how each and every one of them struggles in their life. Your ability and willingness to help them are expressed in your right hand, extended in a gesture of unending giving. Your left holds at your heart the stem of a lotus flower that blooms by your head, a reflection of the utter purity that is present even in the swamp of samsara. You sit relaxed and at ease, the consummate serenity in your bearing devoid of any trace of self-consciousness or self-importance. . . .

Touch now the purpose of your life, the sole reason why you are here: to help beings know in themselves a peace that is inexpressible in words, a peace that transcends understanding, a peace that immediately frees all who touch it from the confusion and reactivity of samsara.

♦

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After years of lockdown, upended lives, and emotional overwhelm, we can finally go outside—now what? It’s hard to pin down a feeling defined by ambivalence, but Katherine May articulates post-COVID numbness in Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age with precision and forthrightness. Her attention is shallow; her mind is constantly watching for the next threat; her emotions are both overpowering and inaccessible. “Lately I can’t read a whole page of a book,” she says. Sound familiar?

The Maslach Burnout Inventory, a psychological diagnostic tool, says burnout is the result of three factors: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (also referred to as cynicism), and a diminished sense of accomplishment. This isn’t the first time that May, who was diagnosed with autism late in life, has experienced burnout, but it is the first time she’s seen it in so many others. The “pandemic hangover,” as she calls it, is marked by a sense of being “bored, restless, empty-headed, and bodily resistant to changing it.” She wants to write but flicks between social media channels instead. Time has taken on a disturbing quality. “Every night, when I wash my face,” she says, “I feel as though I have been standing at my sink in one continuous moment across several months.”

May wants the magic back. Childlike wonder and ancient reverence call to her. She wants the dam to break, to let loose a moment of catharsis so powerful it shakes off all the cobwebs. She wants to be enchanted again.

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. . . . It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection.

The book is divided into the four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Each part contains reflections on parenting, her childhood, meditation, and places with histories of enchantment. The elements’ evolving meanings illuminate the central themes of embodiment, interconnection, and hierophany, which she defines as divinity revealing itself to us through ordinary experiences. A being who is tapped into hierophany has “a supernatural key to see wonder in the everyday”—in other words, this is a being for whom everything is bliss. The elements remind us of our own physical material, too, and how that material is ever changing and eternal, personal and cosmic. In her section on water, for example, the sea’s unpredictability mirrors her Ménière’s disease, a condition caused by an excess of fluid in the inner ear. The act of taking off her shoes literally “grounds” her amid existential angst.

Turning to the natural world for answers is nothing new, but May catalogs her investigation with refreshing honesty and grace. Not every walk in the woods summons a Whitman-like transmission. Sometimes, like the rest of us, she shows up at a spiritual landmark and putters around, unsure of what to do, until it’s time to get back in the car.

Although the epiphanies May craves don’t happen automatically, she comes to a more useful truth: no place is inherently magical. You can return to the same woods again and again and find them different each time. May refers to this as experiencing “deep terrain.” The beeping toys and gadgets that her son is drawn to are shallow terrain, like most of the territory a burnout-brain seeks safety in. Deep terrain, on the other hand, is rich with multiplicity, symbolic meaning, and mystery and makes you find fresh understanding each time. It isn’t simple.

The Leonid meteor shower of 1833 is a perfect example. One early morning, an estimated 72,000 streaks of light fell across the sky in magnificent arcs. The witnesses, who at the time didn’t have the scientific knowledge to explain it, had to reckon with the mystery in their own ways, each one coming to their own uncertain conclusion about the nature of the universe. That very plurality of meaning is the magic of deep terrain. It doesn’t offer a straightforward answer. Engaging with its layers of history and life isn’t a means to an end but a practice in and of itself, one that requires curiosity, reverence, and ceremony. Most importantly, you create your own meaning. “We are not the passive recipients of the numinous,” May writes, “but the active constructors of a pantheon.” God is found not in the woods but in the woods’ potential to be anything.

“Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory.”

Just because something has the potential to be enchanting, though, doesn’t mean we can force it to be so. How do we create the causes for magic? One tool May uses is meditation. In stillness, she learns to open herself to the full spectrum of experience. When we scan the news for the next threat (a symptom of COVID burnout, May says), our minds are looking to control our experience. A headline provides an object for our otherwise vague fear. If we define our discomfort well enough, the idea goes, maybe we can get out of feeling it. In meditation, on the other hand, May realizes there is no narrative to pinpoint. The illusion of a definite reality dissolves along with the protective barrier it provided.

Sometimes that hurts. When it does, we can find strength in compassion. At a Zen Peacemakers retreat, she learns that it’s much easier to face hard truths when you’re buoyed by care—by both the care others have for you and the care you have for them. If you can feel into our interconnection, there will always be hands waiting to catch you. Sometimes that means practicing with a physical sangha; sometimes it just means recognizing how many minds have wrestled with the exact same suffering you’re dealing with now. In the presence of that community of searchers, which stretches endlessly back and endlessly forward, uncertainty can become a beautiful mystery.

May unpacks the predicament we’re all in and refuses to give an easy answer—there is no get-enchanted-quick pill. How do we take joy in not knowing? How do we add texture back to a flattened reality? How do we feel magic again? Her lyrical, often funny, earnest guidance is grounded in basic human nature but leaves room for our own unique paths. In the end, it’s just like the woods: we must make meaning ourselves. The effort may be awkward and uncertain, but on the other side is magic. And if you’re looking for a place to start, going for a walk is always a good idea.

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