In a lot of ways, 2023 has felt like a dream, with many aspects of the year appearing as an unceasing torrent of nightmares. The violence in the Middle East has dominated headlines and ravaged hearts. Amidst the death and destruction, the United States has seen a rise in Islamophobic as well as antisemitic hate crimes, with abounding anger, grief, and confusion, and protests seemingly happening around every corner. 

Simultaneously, this year was a dark time for climate change, as New York City experienced what was the first, but surely not the last, burnt orange smog day, due to the worsening Canadian wildfires. And, as we saw last winter, COVID rates are surging once again, especially among the old and very young. We saw the death of Japanese Buddhist philosopher, educator, author, and SGI president Daisaku Ikeda as well as the passing of musical titans Tina Turner and Wayne Shorter, both of whom were practicing Buddhists. 

Yet there have been bright moments. The global relief and organizing efforts for those who have been displaced by the ongoing violence in Palestine stands as a beacon of hope, showcasing the world’s deep capacity for care and relief in times of humanitarian crisis. And earlier this year, it was reported that dolphins are swimming their way back to New York City’s Bronx and East Rivers—for the first time in over five years, no less—signaling improvements in the quality of the waterways, thanks in no small part to groups that have been working for decades to combat pollution. 

No matter what brought you here, there’s never been a better time to engage in a Buddhist practice to help navigate life’s many obstacles and challenges. No one comes to Buddhism when everything is going their way, and yet by channeling this uncertainty and worry into practice, one can sow the seeds for a better tomorrow, helping themselves and others to show up for life’s tests and hard decisions in a more clearheaded and compassionate way.

This year, we published pieces ranging from teachings on the Metta Sutta and shikantaza to reported pieces exploring the legacy and history of Nichiren and the cultural descendants of the Jataka tales. Whether you are a longtime reader or a first-time Buddhism-curious scroller, we invite you to take a moment of your day to explore lessons from Buddhism that may resonate and help you to live a better life. 

Without further ado, these are our twenty-three favorite pieces from 2023. 

• The Big Picture
  The Dzogchen tradition teaches that we are all intrinsically whole and complete. In a piece for the Fall 2023 Issue, professor of religious studies and dharma teacher Anne C. Klein (Lama Rigzin Drolma) breaks down what that means and how we can overcome the illusion of separateness.
• No Mud, No Lotus
  Known for exploring addiction and afflictive emotions on-screen, when off-screen, White Lotus and Sopranos actor Michael Imperioli is also a humble and committed Buddhist practitioner, studying under the lineage of Garchen Rinpoche. Imperioli spoke with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, about the dangers of the instrumentalization of Buddhist practice, his relationship to his dharma name, and whether or not he believes that liberation is possible within this lifetime.
• Waking Up Is Letting the Mask Fall
  Colombian Zen monk Santiago Santai Jiménez invites us to question the very nature of how we view ourselves, the masks we wear, and the roles we fulfill in society. Jiménez says by returning to emptiness, or what in Zen is often referred to as “beginner’s mind,” more insights begin to emerge and open to moments of transcendent discovery.
• Opinion: Can We Allow the Dalai Lama to Be a Good Enough Refugee?
  In a personal essay, writer, translator, and editor Tenzin Dickie reflects on a controversial episode in the life of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, relating the divided public reaction and gratuitous expectations placed upon His Holiness to the precarity and powerlessness experienced by Tibetans living in exile. 
• After Thay
  In a piece from our Summer Issue, freelance journalist and editor Megan Sweas reports on how the greater Plum Village monastic community is reckoning with the loss of their founder, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the legacy he leaves behind.
• The Glorious, Victorious Life of Bodhisattva Wayne Shorter
  Buddhist mental health therapist, clinical educator, researcher, and internationally engaged consultant Kamilah Majied, PhD, pens a poetic eulogy in remembrance of the renowned jazz saxophonist, composer, and Soka Gakkai International practitioner.
• Memories in Exile: Tenzin Gyurmey
  Writer, dharma translator-scholar, and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner Adele Tomlin writes about the work of Tenzin Gyurmey, the artist illustrating the complexity of the Tibetan diaspora in India through works that combine spiritual iconography with surrealist visuals.
• Thai Monks on COVID Inside the Monastery
  Buddhist Studies scholar Brooke Schedneck, PhD, paints a detailed picture of how COVID-19 forced Thailand’s monastics, who are dependent on lay support, to stay within the monastery walls, and the subsequent effects on both the monks and the broader landscape of Buddhist practice in the Southeast Asian country. 
• Cormac McCarthy’s Buddhist Inspiration
  Triratna Buddhist Order member Vishvapani Blomfield explores how the 2005 Coen brothers masterpiece No Country for Old Men evolved from the Vedabbha Jataka—by way of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale—and how its message has endured.
• The Funny Thing About Death
  Best-selling author and humorist David Sedaris has lots of thoughts about aging. “There’s nothing good about old age,” he told Tricycle earlier this year, “except you can ride the bus and the subway for free.” For our Summer Issue, Sedaris sat down with Tricycle contributing editor and Between-States columnist Ann Tashi Slater for a wide-ranging interview, where the two talk bardo wisdom, dying without regrets, and thrift store hunting’s unique ability to soothe the soul. 
• The First Plow
  This past spring, PhD candidate Victoria Andrews traveled to two Ladakhi villages, Tar and Basgo, to learn about how traditional plowing rituals connect villagers with their heritage and the environment, showing how Buddhism exists beyond temples and texts.
• A Gift
  Following the sudden dissolution of a treasured relationship, palliative care physician Sunita Puri reflects on the multifaceted nature of impermanence. 
• Forgetting the Self at a Party Full of Strangers
  Zen Buddhist teacher and psychologist Matthias Esho Birk, PhD, explains how he turns social anxiety, fear of rejection, and insecurity into fruitful practice. 
• Taking the Ache Out of Attachment
  In an excerpt from one of her guided meditations, Tibetan Buddhist nun Ven. Thubten Chodron provides listeners with a practice to help them to reflect on and work with attachment.
• Charnel Ground Lessons
  Dharma teacher and lay Tibetan Buddhist practitioner Lourdes Argüelles, PhD, reflects on her time spent in a charnel ground in India and a house of healing in California, and what both experiences taught her about accepting the inescapable.
• The Value of Simplicity
  In an excerpt from her latest book, Insight Meditation teacher Kim Allen unpacks a lesson from the Metta Sutta on the great protection that comes with letting go.
• Knowing Nichiren
  In our Spring Issue, Tricycle’s associate editor and Buddhism Public Scholar Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins sat down with fellow scholar, professor emerita of Japanese Religions at Princeton University and award-winning author Jacqueline Stone, for a wide-ranging interview on everything Nichiren, from its founder, to its emphasis on the power of chanting, to the tradition’s highly social and engaged aspects.
• Sexuality, Desire, and the Dharma of Relationships
  In an excerpt from Tricycle’s online course, “The Dharma of Relationships: The Paramis in Action,” contributing teachers Martine Batchelor and Laura Bridgman discuss the different dimensions of sexuality, desire, and intimacy in relationships and in practice. 
• Is That So?
  For our Spring Issue, scholar, award-winning novelist, essayist, cartoonist, and martial arts teacher Charles Johnson pens a contemporary retelling of a classic Zen tale. Listen to Johnson speak with Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, on a recent episode of Tricycle Talks. 
• 1,000 Buddhas on a Native American Reservation
  Journalist Carmen Kohlruss and photojournalist Craig Kohlruss report on a Tibetan Buddhist peace garden in western Montana, and how a special connection between its founders and the local Native American residents are helping it to thrive.
• Love Is Being There
  A brief teaching from monk, author, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh on how mindfulness practice can help us make time to love.
• Meeting Shame with Compassion: A Pure Land Antidote
  Writer, psychotherapist, and environmental activist Satya Robyn explores how Pure Land’s teachings on compassion and the Internal Family Systems model can help unburden our deepest feelings of shame.
• Remnants of Devotion
  Tricycle contributing editor, author, Shin Buddhist priest, and professor Jeff Wilson writes about butsudan, Japanese home Buddhist shrines, and the current state of the once-cherished tradition. 

The post Tricycle’s Top Articles of the Year appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When the author, radical feminist, and Black Buddhist Christian bell hooks died in late 2021, she was widely celebrated for just about everything in the mainstream press except for her spirituality. 

But hooks’s connection to religion is present throughout her entire breadth of work, which includes thirty books across a variety of genres as well as countless articles on feminism (and how it is for everyone), popular culture, education, recognizing the human rights of children, and more. This missing component of spiritual recognition was part of the motivation for bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist by Nadra Nittle, a journalist and education reporter at The 19th, an independent news outlet that covers gender, politics, and policy. 

The book was published by Fortress Press in November 2023. Tricycle recently spoke with Nittle about the book, hooks’s legacy in spiritual circles and beyond, and as well as book recommendations for Buddhist readers interested in learning more about hooks’s life and work. 

You’re the author of several books, including Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision: Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature. Can you tell me how this book came to be? Sure. I had written a book about Toni Morrison for Fortress Press, which is a Lutheran publisher. My books are for people who are not necessarily religious, but interested in how a figure they might not associate with a spiritual tradition approached spirituality in their work or personal lives. They serve as an introduction to people who have never read these authors before; some people read them as a companion piece to read with their books. 

The publisher wanted me to write another book and had suggested some men. But I thought bell hooks would be a good figure because she was a Buddhist Christian, and many people didn’t necessarily know that, even though she discussed it. It didn’t come up in a lot of her obituaries. Spirituality was foundational to her work. And she died shortly after the Toni Morrison book came out. 

You write about bell hooks visiting your school in the 1990s, when you were a teenager. Can you tell us your impressions of hooks and what has stayed with you? I wish I remembered it better; this was such a long time ago. I had not read any of her books, though I knew she was an important person and an important figure. I remember being pretty intimidated.

I remember the speech she gave, saying that she didn’t think her father had loved her, how she had been saying it for years, and her mother finally agreed with her. She was challenging the idea that all that Black families, in particular low-income families, needed was a man in their home and all of their problems would go away. You heard a lot about welfare queen moms in the 1990s; you still hear about them today, but especially in the nineties. President Bill Clinton had passed welfare reform, and single mothers, especially Black single mothers, were vilified. So for hooks to come out and say, “No, we don’t just need men in the home, they have to be loving men who are not going to perpetuate patriarchy,” was pretty radical. And this is something she discusses in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, and other pieces.

She sat with us at lunch, and I sat close to her. She was discussing movies—this part got cut from the book. There was a movie called Sankofa, about a Black American model who gets more in touch with her African roots, and it also discusses issues around enslavement. I remember one of my classmates getting into an argument with her. My classmate loved the movie, and hooks thought it had problems—obviously, she was very critical of popular culture. But she wasn’t like, “Oh, you’re just a little teenager, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was respectfully arguing with him and treated him as someone capable of having an argument. 

Yes, and one other thing about her visit, which I write about in the book. I didn’t witness this, but bell hooks told one of my friends that she was beautiful, and should consider not straightening her hair and wearing it natural. And she stopped straightening her hair, and she told everyone that bell hooks told her that she was beautiful. I’m not in touch with this person anymore, but hooks really left a positive impact on her. 

I enjoyed learning more about hooks’s cultural criticism in your book. Unfortunately, I only came to hooks later in life, so she’s always been a Buddhist Christian radical feminist to me. And to learn about her interview with Lil’ Kim and her willingness to speak out against Hillary Clinton, even Beyoncé—especially Beyoncé. [In a 2014 panel discussion at the New School called Are You Still A Slave: Liberating the Black Female Body, hooks said Beyoncé was “antifeminist” and a “terrorist” to young Black girls.] To go up against these figures and take a lot of criticism makes her fearless to me. You refer in the book to hooks’s “Buddhist Christian ethic.” Can you expand on what that means? That’s in reference to what she took from both Buddhism and Christianity: the idea that you weren’t spiritual or religious for the sake of being spiritual or religious, you did so for the benefit of other people, to engage in social action. There was love at the root of it, the love of one’s self and the love of other people. She used the late author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s definition of love, which he said was one’s commitment to one’s own spiritual growth or someone else’s spiritual growth. 

You brought up Beyoncé, so when she was criticizing Beyoncé, or criticizing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, she believed that she was doing so in love, in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh and other figures that she was influenced by, like Thomas Merton—people who had social action and liberation right at the heart of their spiritual tradition. 

In a 1992 interview with Tricycle’s founding editor, Helen Tworkov, hooks spoke about her hesitance in meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, whose social activism inspired her Buddhist practice. “As long as I keep a distance from that thread, I can keep him—and I can critique myself on this—as a kind of perfect teacher.” Did she ever meet Thich Nhat Hanh? Yes, she was afraid of meeting him because she didn’t want to be disappointed by him or have [him be] a big letdown. I write in the book about how when hooks first met Hanh, she was still so angry at a past partner who was abusive to her, and she blurted out the words “I’m so angry.” And Hanh told her to “compost” her anger, to turn it into something, for lack of a better term, positive, something that can be used for good instead of her just stewing in anger. And it seems that he handled her anger in a very wise way that she appreciated. 

What about hooks’s upbringing in the Christian church? It seems that she was drawn to social action and outreach from a young age. She was born in 1952 and grew up in Kentucky. She went to predominantly Black churches, where she found people who supported her speaking abilities by reading scriptures; she found people who encouraged her to use her “god voice.” That was in contrast to her home life, where she was more of a misfit and the family scapegoat. She had a difficult relationship with her father; it seemed they butted heads from an early age. She was considered strange or weird by her family members and told she was crazy, even for things like her reading habits. Her mother bought her books, and her family was supportive of her being a good student, but they were still worried if she was going to be a proper young woman who was attractive, found a mate, and was a homemaker—all of those things that she didn’t want to be. 

Her family life really contrasted with her church experience, which was a place of refuge for her. There was an elderly woman, a deacon in the church, who took an interest in hooks and supported her and was loving toward her; she’s the one who told her she had a “god voice.” And both of her maternal grandparents had unique experiences and ideas about spirituality. Her maternal grandmother was not a churchgoing person; she saw the church as being superficial and people caring more about what you wore and who you knew. She was spiritual, but more so when it came to nature—growing things, being self-sufficient, and living off the land. So that was a model for hooks. And her grandfather believed every object had a soul and that she needed to know the stories of all the things around her. He was considered by others to be a strange guy. He was also a pacifist—he never went to war, he refused to fight. hooks believed he was the one family member who truly loved her. 

And this was one of the reasons [why] she was opposed to the traditional, nuclear family, because she believed that it takes a village to raise a child. And if you did have a village, you were more likely to find people who rooted for you and nurtured you. hooks felt that her father was not loving; he was physically abusive to her, to her mother, and at times to her siblings. At one point, this started to affect hooks’s relationship with her mother, because her mother would sometimes act abusively toward her to get into her husband’s good graces. And I haven’t gotten into child liberation theology yet…

We did see a bit of that earlier when you recounted hooks telling your school friend that she was beautiful and to not straighten her hair and engaging in a respectful debate with your other classmate. And with her mother being abusive, that shows that it doesn’t have to be men acting patriarchal, it’s the system, right? Yes. I think the most radical part of bell hooks is her belief that women can enforce or perpetuate patriarchy. Often in popular culture, when we’re talking about the #MeToo movement, or sexism and misogyny in general, it’s framed as women not perpetuating any of these things. And she very much believed women are capable of perpetuating patriarchy and teaching their sons to be patriarchal. She also said women need to interrogate their ideas about women and gender. 

You write that one of the things that drew hooks to Buddhism was her confronting this image of a white Jesus at her Black church. Later in her life, she goes on a pilgrimage to Spain to see the Black Madonna at Montserrat as a way to reclaim the divine feminine for Black women. How did that trip impact her view on spirituality? As a child, hooks went to a church where they had a huge image of a white Jesus holding a globe, and at the bottom of the globe were all the people of color. She discussed how this image really had an impact on her brother who struggled to be a Christian, to be confronted with this image of a white Jesus, that he didn’t feel represented by, every Sunday. It doesn’t sound like she took that as hard as her brother did, but she longed for representations of divine feminine deities portrayed in all different colors, shapes, and sizes.

One of the reasons she became interested in Buddhism was [because] she saw Buddha portrayed in various colors, shapes, and sizes. One of her first encounters with Buddhism was through Buddhist nuns during the time she was a student at Stanford University. She met them, took an interest [in their message], and decided to pursue Buddhism. In terms of the divine feminine and Christianity, she was interested in the Virgin Mary and, specifically, the Black Madonna. She hadn’t grown up hearing about or seeing a Black Madonna, but eventually, she made a pilgrimage to Montserrat, Spain, to view this statue. 

It’s also important to mention that the Catholic Church has recently made an effort to start portraying Jesus, Mary, and other figures in different races and ethnicities, so that people feel represented. 

All About Love: New Visions, hooks’s book that was published in 2000, made a resurgence during the pandemic and even made the New York Times’ bestseller list for the first time, twenty years after its original publication. Why do you think it resonated so much with readers? In the US, we now have more single-headed households than partnered or married households. During the pandemic, especially during lockdown, people were isolated, and it made them think about their connections to other people, maybe in a way they hadn’t before. And people who were partnered or married had to deal with being around their partners for sustained periods, whereas before they were going out or going to work and didn’t have to see their partner or children as much. The pandemic forced some people to engage with their partners and children in ways they hadn’t prior to the pandemic. It makes sense people were interested in a book like All About Love during that time. Quotes from the book were being shared on TikTok and other forms of social media, so I think it was a perfect mix of social media, the pandemic, and younger generations being exposed to the book for the first time. And there are some influential people, like the filmmaker Sofia Coppola and the model Emily Ratajkowski, who began to cite the book as important in their lives and development. 

I also discussed that we can see from dating sites like Match.com that people are looking for more substantial relationships, not just a pretty or handsome face. All About Love is a go-to book for people interested in going beyond the butterflies and rush of feelings at the beginning of a courtship; this book is really about a deeper connection. And she was really clear that she didn’t want to just focus on romantic relationships. A lot of people who like All About Love cited the fact that she writes friendship should be equal to any other relationship, and that friendship will be different (than romantic love) but should not be devalued. And that was a lesson hooks wished she had learned before entering into an abusive relationship where she found herself isolated. 

There’s a quote attributed to the Buddha about friendship being the whole of the spiritual path. And the other thing is the epidemic of loneliness that we sometimes overlook. And she was discussing that more than twenty years ago. Now, there’s more attention to the fact that it’s not just elderly people who suffer from loneliness; there are a lot of young people who are lonely and looking for connection. And that may be a reason why [so many] young people [are now appreciating] the book. 

Toward the end of All About Love, hooks writes that the book is a guide about love, but also death. And if we treat each interaction with someone as if it were our last, that would change how we interact with others; it would allow us to live more consciously. To me, that’s a very Buddhist sentiment. Are there any Christian parallels between living consciously or staying connected to loved ones who have died? As a text, the Bible focuses on the importance of your ancestors. But in contemporary Christianity, in the US, I think that ancestors are not focused on in the same way. hooks was interested in how Black American and West African spirituality mixed with mainstream Christianity, and how during enslavement, Black people had to hide their African spiritual traditions but found a way to still have yard shrines and altars, even if it was just having rocks or things placed in a certain kind of way. Or the pictures in their house arranged in a way that transcended enslavement and white supremacy in an attempt to separate Black people from all that. 

And hooks believed in the power of naming ancestors too. That’s the whole reason she chose a pseudonym after her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. I tried to honor hooks by naming her grandparents in the book.

Lineage is so important in Buddhism—who your teacher is and lineages that can be traced back to the time of the Buddha. It’s interesting to see the parallels with other religions. Can you recommend a few books for Buddhist readers who have never read hooks or who would like to revisit her more spiritual works? All About Love is one of the books where she most engages spirituality, be it Buddhism or Christianity. Her memoir, Bone Black, will allow you to see where she came from and why spirituality was important for her. [Bone Black also provides some framework for] the lessons and understanding [she received from] her Kentucky ancestors, who were not at all familiar with Buddhism [but who] paved her way to becoming a Buddhist; whether it was her grandfather being a pacifist and telling her that everything has a soul or her grandmother using quilting as a form of meditation, losing herself in the process and coming back to herself. And then, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. She’s urging Black women to not just have a patriarchal, fundamental approach to Christianity, but to expand our options, whether that’s through Buddhism, traditional African religion, Hinduism, or something else. 

I wanted to close with something hooks wrote in All About Love: “Sometimes, we invoke the dead by allowing wisdom they have shared to guide our present actions.” Since you have spent so much time with hooks’s writing, what do you think she would make of the world right now, especially with multiple conflicts going on? Her grandfather, who was one of her teachers, was a pacifist. Hanh and King were pacifists. So I think she would be horrified. 

About ten years ago, she was one of many writers and scholars who signed a letter in support of Palestine. I imagine she would be heartbroken by what’s happening there. And she cautioned people to be wary of the media and the messages in the media. She talked about the importance of making sure you have access to a wide range of information and aren’t just turning on the TV and absorbing whatever messages [come your way, which often] perpetuate what she coined as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” I think she would urge people to take in the news with caution and advocate for peace and liberation. 

⧫

This interview has been edited and adapted for length and clarity. 

The post The Spiritual Lives of bell hooks appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There is an image I often come back to, where I am sitting at home, minding my own business, quite content, [when suddenly] I hear a knock at the door, only to get up and discover that it’s greed, fear, jealousy, or hatred at the threshold. How do I act? What do I do in that moment? In the past, I have flung open the door and said, “Welcome home, it’s all yours,” only to forget that I live here. My consciousness, my awareness lives here. My capacity to love lives here. This is just a visitor. 

When I think back on the Buddha’s reminder that the mind is naturally radiant and pure—the mind is shining—I can chill for a moment because the visitors are just dropping by. They’re not permanent. They aren’t indicative of my deepest, innermost self. The Buddha said that it is because of visiting forces that we suffer. So it’s in that spirit that I work to reconfigure my relationship to all of these difficult and challenging states that may come, that will come. 

Naming the Experience

To establish the beginnings of a more authentic relationship [with this unexpected guest], see if you can recognize what’s going on by naming it. Every time my mind says, “this is a bad thing to feel, it shouldn’t be here,” I try to retranslate that identification from “bad” to “painful,” “difficult,” “full of suffering,” or “devastating,” and watch to see what happens.

Watching the Mind

I talk about sitting and looking at my own fear. One of the things we say in mindfulness practice is that we pivot. Usually, with a strong emotion, our interest is going toward the object. If you really want a new car, for example, you likely spend your time thinking, “Should I get that kind of upholstery or that kind of upholstery?” It’s not that common to turn our attention around to the desire itself and say, “What does it feel like to want something so much?” 

What is this feeling? What’s it like in my body? What’s the mood of it? 

And that’s how we come to understand feelings as compounds. It’s not just anger. Within the anger, you might also see fear, sadness, and helplessness. When observing my own fear, I notice that despite the world’s pronouncement that we’re afraid of the unknown—which, of course, is true—I’m actually most afraid of all the stories that I tell myself. 

When I first went back to New York after many months away, ahead of that trip, in my mind, I was just watching [my mind create narratives/stories], “I haven’t been back to my apartment in New York for four or five months. I heard people can get Legionnaires’ disease when they turn on the faucet after it’s been off for a long time. My faucet hasn’t been turned on for a long time. I wonder what the water’s going to look like. Will I be able to tell? Does it smell a certain way? What are the symptoms? What am I going to do if the first night in New York I come down with Legionnaires’ disease? There it is!”

Whereas, even in the midst of that, if I remind myself, “You know what? You don’t know. This is just a story. You’re not even in New York yet.” Then I relax. I feel space. I feel openness. So the goal in some way is that space. It’s not an icy distance, it’s space. It’s important that you’re not all caught up in it, [that] you’re not defined by the emotion and driven into action. That’s a state of freedom.

Mindfulness is the place in the middle, which is not sucked in and overcome by something; nor is it pushing it away or recoiling from it in fear.

Not Compounding Suffering

Some things in life just hurt. Losing somebody hurts. People can be so unjust toward themselves in the light of that, insisting “This should not hurt. If I were a better person, if I’d been meditating longer each day, it would not hurt.” Which is quite unfair. There’s a layer of extra suffering [in our making] assumptions and interpretations that we do not [actually] have to endure. [When this takes place], we pile [it] on and we’re not holding that original hurt in a compassionate light or with any spaciousness. 

One of the extra layers of suffering we add on to our feelings or stories is what I call our inner critic. I’ll suggest to people that they give it a name, give it a wardrobe, give it a persona, because the transformation is going to be in how you relate to your inner critic, so we establish a relationship that way. I say [this] with apologies to any Lucys who may be [reading, but] I named my own inner critic Lucy, after the character in the Peanuts comic strip. I named my inner critic Lucy, because a friend had rented a house for many of us to do a retreat, and [when] I went into the bedroom set aside for me, there was a cartoon on the desk. And in the first frame of the cartoon, Lucy is talking to Charlie Brown and says, “You know, Charlie Brown, what your problem is? The problem with you is that you’re you.” Poor Charlie Brown replies, “Well, what in the world can I do about that?” And then Lucy responds, “I don’t pretend to be able to give advice. I merely point out the problem.” 

Somehow, whenever I was walking by the desk, my eye would fall right on that line. “The problem with you is that you’re you.” Because that Lucy-dominant voice had been so strong in my childhood, in my earlier life. Soon after seeing that cartoon, my very first thought was, “It’s never going to happen again.” And I greeted that thought with, “Hi Lucy.” Over time, my favorite response to Lucy became, “Chill out Lucy. Just chill.” That’s different from, “You’re right, Lucy. You’re always right. I’m completely worthless.” It’s also different from, “Oh my God, I’ve been meditating for forty years. Why is Lucy still here? I spent all that money on therapy. Why is Lucy still here? She shouldn’t be. I’m a failure.”

Mindfulness is the place in the middle, which is not sucked in and overcome by something; nor is it pushing it away or recoiling from it in fear. In a vast oversimplification of a certain Tibetan Buddhist practice, they would say:

Invite Lucy in for a meal. Keep an eye on her. Don’t let her have the run of the house, because you might end up with no silverware, but you don’t have to be so afraid. You don’t have to be so ashamed. You don’t have to be so freaked out. Your awareness, your capacity for kindness, for compassion, is actually much stronger than Lucy. Lucy may come. Lucy may come a lot. But you’re OK because of the environment that’s being created.

I used this as an example for the group I was teaching, and some of them didn’t like it. So I said how about inviting Lucy in for a cup of tea? They didn’t like that either. So I said, “OK, what’s acceptable?” And one said, “How about a cup of tea to go?” 

If We Can Be with Something, We Can Learn From It

Interestingly enough, something we often mistakenly do is insist that Lucy never show up again, but that is not going to work. Instead, we can consider what’s skillful and unskillful, realize that we’re not going to prevent things from arising, and refocus our attention toward how they are met. 

The states that lead us toward contraction and suffering are translated as defilements. Whatever we call them, they only function as actual hindrances when we relate to them in a certain way. Otherwise, they’re more like clouds moving in the sky. 

If a certain emotion comes, for example, and you try to dismantle it or evade it immediately, there’s not going to be a lot of learning. But if you can hang in there with it, take some interest in it, pay attention in this different way, there can be a lot of learning, just as I learned in that very personal insight about my own fear. It could be a personal insight, or it could be a more universal insight like, everything that arises—everything—is impermanent. If you look at anger and you see moments of rage and moments of fear, moments of sadness, moments of helplessness … that’s an alive system. That emotion that arose seems so solid, maybe so unchanging, but really look at it: it’s constantly changing. Physical pain arises in a superficial glance, it feels like some entity has just taken over our knee, our back, or our head. But if we really pay careful attention, we see, “Oh, it’s moments of burning, moments of twisting, moments of piercing, moments of iciness. None of that sounds good. None of that feels good. But that’s an alive system. And within that, there’s movement and flow.”

I have a friend, for example, with a very severe chronic pain condition, who said to me, after working in this way, “I found the space within the pain.” We like to think when we look at pain, that it’ll just go away. But it may not be that way. And yet something can happen that brings a whole other kind of relief, if we can find the space within it. We’re investigating when we’re not running away, when we’re not drowning in something that is arising and yet temporary. 

♦

If you would like to learn more about this offering, visit this link here. 

The post A Guide to Changing How We Relate to Difficult Emotions appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the peculiar time span known as the 2020s, the residents of a dying nation known as the United States—who’d been oversaturated and over-traumatized with information—elected as their leader a manic-depressive failed actor turned reality TV star. With an oversized ego, a broken heart, and no real experience or interest in governing, the first millennial president made the secret decision to devote all the powers of his office to building “the Path,” a contiguous footpath that would circle the entire planet. The goal of the Path was twofold: to deliver unity and enlightenment to an atomized world, and to rewin the allegiance of the President’s ex. 

To better know, feel connected to, and eventually manipulate his people, the President would privately turn to an anonymous social media account, which consisted of either utopian or dystopian travelogues about the new cities that were allegedly emerging beyond the President’s ability to see from his self-isolation in the nation’s capital. Wanting, naturally, to capture the source of the travelogues’ insight, the President located and kidnapped their author, an urban nomad and former Buddhist monk called the Tourist, whom the President would adopt as a secret spiritual advisor. In those brief moments between the collapse of one pillar of the American dream and the next, the Tourist would soothe the President’s existential dread by telling him stories of the so-called “New American Cities.”

These are the stories of Sunyata Woods and Sankhara Rapids.

Sunyata Woods—City of Somethingness

After fleeing Cohenville in terror—chased by a man in traditional black samue, swinging a perfectly rounded white stone in a leather sling above his head, with a disturbingly untroubled look that made me realize I was not as nonattached to my physical survival as I had previously thought—I resolved to get as far from that city as I could. Whether I succeeded or not can be debated, as before long I found myself arriving in Sunyata Woods, Cohenville’s sister city and rival for the title of the Zen capital of the empire. 

For all their uniquenesses, cities do have kin—rivals, antagonists, soulmates—bound together by culture and karma and markets. But while Cohenville sought to shun and punish tourists, Sunyata Woods embraced them. And why? Why does Sunyata Woods advertise her attractions and her citizens’ meditative achievements on televisions across the empire, during bodysurfing competitions and reality shows about modern gold miners, no less? 

It is said that, for all the Sunyatans’ excellence in the sport of emptiness, they do cling to a certain ember of self, which makes them more relatable to us than the Cohens, and safer to visit. Sunyatans have names and living wills, the barest minima of personalities and bank accounts. 

If you visit Sunyata Woods, you can ask the citizens (they are a curious people, who maintain no defenses against the curiosity of others): if you accept the teaching of the mind’s innate emptiness, and of the self as an illusion that inevitably perpetuates suffering, why do you not go as far as the Cohens? Why do you not strive to eliminate or surrender every trace of a self, by any means necessary? What advantage does maintaining a self offer the true seeker, who is a tourist toward liberation, who dreams of no destination more than whatever place or nonplace is beyond suffering?

The Sunyatans will happily elaborate upon the differences in their and the Cohens’ understanding. Cohens say they prize emptiness, but if you follow their logic upstream, you’ll find it flowing from a belief in the opposite of emptiness—that the universe is completely saturated with being, which fills even the spaces between the things that make up the things that make up the atoms. Cohens believe that by emptying the self, which serves to separate the inner world from the outer, that the unification of those two realms can be achieved. When the self is dissolved, the world floods in to fill the space with itself, subsuming the emptiness. 

To the Sunyatans, this is an abomination, for Sunyatans believe in actual emptiness as the original and final thing, and this is what they’re after. They grant the Cohens the supposition that there’s an innate somethingness to being, which like the most invasive species or gas or government colonizes even the smallest spaces, in between even whatever it is that space is made of. But for the Sunyatans, the self isn’t only an illusion. It occupies some liminal category between something and nothing that, when sufficiently thickened and purified, can keep the two from interpenetrating. A perfectly cultivated self, the Sunyatans’ mythology says, creates a kind of border around the only true emptiness there is. Without such a self, there’s no quarantine to effectively frame and contain the holy vacuum, to keep the somethingness of the world from flooding in. 

These dogmatic fineries will mean little to the Tourist, except that the Sunyatans can’t really be known except through their passion about them. The Sunyatans use their selves—and bodies and relationships, jobs and possessions—as instruments to advance the collective evacuation. Above all—and this is what really separates them from the Cohens—they use their children. While Cohens are morally forbidden from creating and legally forbidden from raising children, Sunyatans are equally compelled to create this deepest form of attachment, which makes for them, as it does everyone, the worst sufferings of mind, which go on to encapsulate the profoundest blisses of emptiness when sitting in meditation.

The meditation the Sunyatans practice and rigorously drill their children in is also unique. Rather than surrendering thoughts of self, from birth young Sunyatans are trained to cling to them with all the grip-strength of competitive rock climbers. The little Zensters spend all their days at elite self-academies, where they learn to achieve ever more rapid, resilient, sustained, and artful generations of self-cultivation, so strong that none of its inner nothingness will be converted to somethingness by the generative power of witness. 

It will be unsurprising, then, to learn that it’s from Sunyata Woods that all the Zen Champions of recent memory have emerged. Certain wunderkind, tracked from an early age for achievement and fame, receive corporate sponsorship, and even private tutelage from the great masters. They demonstrate their aptitude in meditation Olympiads, in which they’re subjected not just to raucous crowds and live international broadcasts but also the latest in biofeedback and neural imaging, which yields True Emptiness Scores across the most imaginative of tortures and disturbances—frozen mats, needle pricks, and cigarette burns to their knees on the block, other mortifications of the flesh, insults offered from one’s own parents and romantic interests, shaming and exile from one’s community—none of which, when all goes well, corrupts the wall of self or the victorious emptiness the children protect inside. Observe the Sunyatan champion celebrating his supremacy on the podium, the ring of fire around the pupils that have narrowed to the point of vanishing, inside which is contained the unspoiled emptiness that is his true and only prize.

Sankhara Rapids—Where the People Cannot Remember

Just as many cities share the same name—we have many Franklins and Washingtons and Greenvilles—there are also many cities in this amnesiac land known (and forgotten) as places without memory. But only in Sankhara Rapids is that forgetting codified by writ of law. It’s not that the Sankharans are neurophysically unable to remember, nor that they don’t want to. Rather, to engage in any act of memory is seen as a kind of violence against the authority of the present moment—like poisoning yourself with some terrible drug, which disgraces not only the individual citizen’s body and mind but also their entire vibrational field, spreading ripples of destruction into the lives of everyone else. 

So the Sankharans shame and repress the memory impulse, just as many other cultures shame and repress the human’s impulses toward combat, sex, and other forms of fun. Any Sankharan found engaging in an act of public remembering is immediately confronted, by all within earshot and stone’s throw, until the sinner repents, begs forgiveness and the mercy of exile, and insists on the supremacy of the now. 

The citizen and the tourist are both expected to obey the mandate against remembering even in private, even alone, when memory is most dangerous and least avoidable. Schoolchildren are taught an escalating sequence of self-flagellations, obliterating their attention’s natural wanderlust with pain. Remedial students and repeat offenders who have grown immune to such stimuli are prescribed special medicines and mantras to be administered before bed, to suppress the remembering-engine of dream consciousness. (Forgetting to self-administer these treatments is considered a sign of healing.) All Sankharans sleep tangled in hammocks that are actually human-sized dream catchers, lofted protectively above the groundwaters of memory. But all the repressed histories are like demons—cunning, determined, with no need for sleep or rest. They find and exploit any path of escape to the mind’s surfaces, moving through the slightest cracks in its defenses like air. Despite all the energy that goes toward sealing these cracks, all systems fail eventually, and the demons inevitably succeed in remembering themselves into being through the citizens’ minds, without the citizens ever becoming aware they are reenacting not only their own individual memories—regrets, losses, heartbreaks, triumphs—but also all the buried sins on which the city was founded. For Sankhara Rapids, like most cities, was taken in blood, and built in bone. 

The forgettingness imposes certain limits on commerce and property ownership, which promotes a culture of taking and sharing as each moment dictates, with the model citizen often forgetting whether they identify as a generous or selfish person, empathetic or pitiless, employed or penniless, single or partnered or polyamorous. But certain spontaneous structures do emerge. At some point in my stay—I couldn’t (cognitively or legally) have said how long I’d been there—I found myself in a building that had that day decided or discovered itself to be a diner. I was studying the ways of all the ghosts of the foundational tortures, who brought themselves back into being through the oblivious locals as they unconsciously mutilated their paper napkins, impaled their breakfast potatoes with primal glee, slurped their spilled yolks through a straw. Then I saw someone burning an auroch onto the underside of her avocado toast with a lighter, and I half-realized it was her. It was the clearest view of her face I’d had in months, and yet my mind refused to fully carve the image for future retrieval, nor to understand who exactly this person was. I was compelled to sit and watch for what might’ve been hours—I’d forgotten about time—as she seemed to wonder what she was doing there in that place, as that person. I found myself following her as she left at dusk, as the day changed to night and all the violent spirits took their evening constitutionals through the people who would never remember becoming the remembering of that which they refused to remember. I watched the way she seemed to be walking nowhere but to inevitably be walking away, always away, cutting an almost drunken wave as her feet went out of their way to fall on insects and flowers without seeming to recognize them or to remember she’d ever felt any preference for sparing life rather than destroying it, maybe forgetting there was any difference between life and death at all.

⧫

Get the full story by reading the first installment, New American Cities: Cohenville, as well as more, at Fiction on Trike Daily.

The post New American Cities: Sunyata Woods and Sankhara Rapids appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Mahayana scriptures can seem bewildering, garish, even fanciful to modern readers. They seem to be remote from our ultimate concern, from our search for truth, from our longing to see things as they really are. Among such texts are the three Pure Land scriptures, which tell of an ancient Buddha named Amitabha (“Infinite Light,” or Amida in Japan). While we cannot endorse such texts as historical records, neither should we dismiss them as simply false or as fiction; rather, they awaken our creative imagination. They speak the language of myth.

A myth is a symbolic narrative that communicates important truths that cannot properly be revealed in any other way. To understand a myth we have to enter into it. To enter into the myth of Amida is to immerse ourselves within an imaginative narrative, like living through a poem. This is to recognize that there is a deeper dimension to human consciousness that transcends the scheming will. This is to recognize that there is a source of infinite value, an indefatigable, compassionate impulse that is eternally reaching out to bless us and fulfill itself through us. We can embrace this impulse or, rather, allow it to embrace us. We can be “grasped never to be abandoned” by Amida’s compassion, to use a refrain of Shinran, the founder of Shin, or True Pure Land Buddhism. The myth of Amida and their forty-eight vows affirm that, in spite of the painful and sometimes tragic events that may mark our lives, there is a benevolent, existential current that seeks to well up within us and to flow through us.

In his book, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1958), theologian Rudolf Bultmann states, “myths give to the transcendent reality an immanent … worldly objectivity. Myths give worldly objectivity to that which is unworldly.” In other words, myths enable us to connect with the transcendent, the sacred dimension, the “great matter.” In Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), another theologian, Paul Tillich, writes that “humankind’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.” Symbols and myths, he argues, are the authentic language of religious life and the only way in which the sacred can reveal itself directly. A symbol can never be fully “translated” into other terms but must be approached through the symbol itself. Since a symbol has multiple levels of significance and depth, its meaning can never be exhausted. For this reason, understanding them is a process that is never finished, never complete.

When symbols are structured into narratives, they form myths. The Pure Land of Sukhavati and its presiding Buddha Amida are symbols, and the narrative of Dharmakara, or Amida, that we encounter in the Pure Land scriptures is a myth. This means that we should not subject them to a literal interpretation. So how can this myth be understood in a meaningful way? The story of Amida and the creation of the Pure Land offer a myth of deliverance or liberation. They offer the promise of reconciliation with ourselves by means of a dynamic state of transformative awareness that embraces both our undoubted impulse toward self-transcendence and our inescapable fallibility. Through entering into the drama of this mythic narrative, we may go deeper into its significance in our own lives. To take a myth literally is idolatry. To interpret a myth, on the other hand, unleashes its transformative potential. Understanding a myth is never complete but rather refreshed and renewed each time we immerse ourselves within its narrative.

According to Bultmann, through interpreting myths we enable for ourselves a more authentic mode of existence. Myths draw on images and themes that are familiar to us and that belong to the visible world, albeit their intention is to evoke realities that are not visible and that call to us from beyond the horizon of the known. Rather than offering a description or explanation of the visible, outer world, myth is concerned with interiority, with human imagination. Myths are poetry.

Bultmann developed an approach to interpreting myths that he called “demythologizing.” This process does not aim to deconstruct myths, nor does it simply translate them into other terms (which would then make them redundant), but consists of a never-finished exercise in creative interpretation, an exercise that is always transformative. Through the practice of demythologizing, we may harvest the existential riches latent within myths.

In approaching symbols and myths, we must commit to a kind of wager. In this case, we must wager on the fact that Amida’s myth has something significant to say to us about our existence and that through opening ourselves up to its significance, through entering into it, we will be recompensed with an enlarged self-understanding. While we remain outside the myth, as a spectator, it can never come alive for us as a world of living significance. We will never know what the ocean feels like until we plunge in. Understanding begins not by means of a bird’s-eye view (which is impossible), but from a particular and restricted standpoint. We may then go about the process of verifying the myth by saturating it with intelligibility. This results in a transformation of consciousness. Through their interpretation, symbols and myths assume the gravity of existential agents; they become means by which we can bring alive our understanding of what it means to be human and what is of maximum value to us.

What could it mean for us to demythologize, or deliteralize, the myth of Amida and the Pure Land? It would mean to understand it not as a narration of historical events that happened a long time ago but as revealing something about the nature and purpose of human existence and of the possibilities that may unfold within it. The Pure Land is life understood as a field of going for refuge. From our side, from the inside, the world manifests itself to us as infused with sacred meaning, as a call toward enlightenment. The world unfolds before us as a dimension that not only enables but also invites, and even enacts, liberation. The Pure Land is the present moment sacralized. The Pure Land is epiphany.

The Pure Land is not necessarily an external, material world, but rather a spiritual dimension that we can begin to inhabit as we open ourselves to the blessing of Amitabha. In The Collected Works of Shinran, the Shin founder offers a tantalizing reflection in relation to the inside-or-outsideness of the Pure Land when he writes: “Hence we know that when we reach the Buddha-land of happiness, we unfailingly disclose buddhanature.” Buddhanature is more commonly interpreted as a potential within us; something that can come alive as we become spiritually sensitized, like a seed that grows and then flowers. Yet Shinran appears to be saying that awakening to our buddhanature is in fact the same as being reborn in the Pure Land. We might say, perhaps, that the Pure Land is neither inside us nor outside but both; it discloses to us the sacred context of our lives. 

To offer a different perspective, the Pure Land might also be seen as a kind of cosmic sangha, which is inconceivably vast, and infinitely more refined, a field of blessing, saturated with value and significance. This suggests that, instead of being a place, the Pure Land articulates a relation, even the spirit of kalyāṇa mitratā, or spiritual friendship. The Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa declares that the Pure Land is this very world. We see it as impure owing to our distorting perceptions and afflictions. Amida and the Pure Land are not really separate from one another, neither are they separate from us. To enter the Pure Land is to enter into Amida’s body, even to be reconstituted by Amida as Amida. It means to be welcomed into Amida, but not in such a way that submerges or dismembers us. Rather, it entails recognizing more completely how we are intimately connected to others as we realize our solidarity with them, as we awaken to our shared cares, fears, and longings. In his Collected Works, Shinran articulates this sentiment: 

When a foolish being of delusion and defilement awakens shinjin [true entrusting], 
He realizes that birth-and-death is itself nirvana; 
Without fail he reaches the land of immeasurable light 
And universally guides sentient beings to enlightenment. 

Amida symbolizes the sacred world breaking in on us or erupting within us. Amida is a transcendent factor that works upon or through us but which never fully belongs to us. Better, it can never be appropriated by us. Nor can it in any way be manufactured or contrived. Amida is pure compassion reaching out to all beings through us. Amida’s infinite light eternally shines upon all without exception.

The myth of Amida and the Pure Land do not contradict historical or factual truth, but rather they enable us to wake up to the value and scope of our human existence.

The post Demythologizing Amida appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“I don’t believe in moving on or moving forward,” says author Yiyun Li. “It’s more that something big happens, like the death of a child, but then you make space from within so you can contain that something and still live another life.” In her latest story collection, Wednesday’s Child, Li explores the landscape of loss, a terrain she herself has navigated since the suicide of her 16-year-old son in 2017. Vital and heartbreaking, the stories delve into motherhood and marriage, love and friendship, aging and death, illuminating the struggle to come to terms with the losses that life brings. 

Born in Beijing in 1972, Li earned a BS from Peking University in 1996 and an MS in immunology at the University of Iowa in 2000. She planned to pursue her PhD but changed course when she became interested in writing; she completed her MFA in creative nonfiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She has published eleven books, both fiction and nonfiction, among them Where Reasons End (2019), a novel written as a dialogue between a mother and her teenage son after she loses him to suicide.

Li is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and director of the University’s Creative Writing Program. Her many honors and awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Malamud Award, and a PEN/Hemingway Award. 

Li spoke with me over Zoom about existing in liminal spaces, discovering how loss can expand us, and finding meaning and joy in even our saddest moments. 

*

In Wednesday’s Child, the characters are often in between-states, including the liminal period after immigrating to a new country. You’ve lived in the US for nearly three decades. Do you feel rooted in America, or like you’re between America and China? That’s such a good question. I think I feel in between. I don’t fully belong to either place. I grew up in Beijing and left when I was 23, but even when I was there and fully immersed in that society, I didn’t really feel a sense of belonging. At the same time, it was hard to set myself apart from others, because China is crowded and there’s no personal space. I’ve been in America for twenty-seven years now, and though I don’t feel entirely at home here, it’s easier to set myself apart from others. I live among people and I teach, but psychologically I feel apart, and that’s very important to me. 

Why is it so important? I like to think carefully about a lot of things. So I need space—physical space, but mostly mental space. I need to not be in constant communication with people. My ideal way to spend my days is thinking on my own. If I’m with people all the time, I have no time to think, no thoughts.

When you came to the US to attend the University of Iowa, were you planning to emigrate? Yes. There were many things I was not certain of, but one thing I knew when I was in China was I did not want to live in China. The urge was so strong that I never had a moment of doubt. 

Why did you want to leave so badly? There was a lack of resources when I was growing up. Now China is booming, but when I was in college, in the 1990s, it was dire. In my junior year, my boyfriend—now my husband—and I went to a job fair in Beijing. Every single job had a sign that said “Males only.” I thought there was no future for me in the country, or for the country itself, so I decided I must leave. 

One concept in the bardo teachings is that we’re the protagonists of our lives, in the sense that the choices we make determine our trajectory. Do you ever think about what your life would have been like if you’d stayed in China? “If I’d stayed”—that’s exactly how I look at fiction. Fiction is all about someone’s alternative lives. I always think about my characters’ alternative lives, but I’ve never wondered, “What if I had stayed in China? I would have married this person, I would have had that job.” I closed the door to that. There was one moment in my American life when there was a reunion for my middle school. These middle school friends in China emailed and asked me to send my current picture for an album they were making. Of course, I did not send it. 

Do you think of yourself as Chinese, American, Chinese-American, Asian-American? I wouldn’t say I’m Chinese because I did give up my citizenship. I have an American passport, but do I feel American? Probably not. Still, I’m more American than Chinese in the ways I approach the world. I don’t really think of myself as an American writer though. Nor do I think of myself as a Chinese writer because I don’t write in Chinese. When Kazuo Ishiguro first started writing, people were always asking, “Are you a British writer? Are you Japanese-British?” And he said he wanted to be called an international writer. I think that’s a very good way to answer.

That in-between is important. I’m just here in the between, living mostly in the world of books. In that sense, I have a country, made up of books by writers from all over the world. That’s my point on the map.

Who lives in that country? Well, the Russians: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev. A lot of British writers, some American writers. In America and China, there’s this urge to expand, invade, claim property, like how the early Americans pushed westward, but in my country of books, you don’t have to expand: you go in rather than out. My tendency is to go inward, rather than outward.

Not to be acquisitive. Right. I tend to be inquisitive, rather than acquisitive. 

For you, going inward also means exploring the dimensions of loss and grief, as you do in Wednesday’s Child. In the story “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,” which is about a couple who has lost their son to suicide, you write that perhaps “grief was nothing but disbelief” or “the recognition of having run out of illusions.” How has your understanding of grief evolved as you’ve experienced it and written about it? I used the word “grief” in that story even though I have such a big argument with that word, because its etymology is “heavy burden.” There are certain things that are burdens in life, but I know now that if you lose someone, it’s not a burden. You carry them on. You don’t want to put them down, you don’t want to forget them. 

The other thing, for my characters and for myself, is that grief changes your relationship with time. You feel more patient and have a more philosophical view of how time works. Our lives are so intertwined with time. When we talk about life, we’re actually talking about time: “I have to go to a meeting.” “I have too much to do.” “I don’t have enough time in my day.” Time is the centerpiece of our lives. But now I feel I have some distance from time. Time is important, but if there’s a lot to do and I cannot finish it, it’s OK. 

So grief has created a feeling of expansiveness. That’s the opposite of the common idea that grief narrows your world. I’m working on a piece for the New Yorker, and I was just talking with my editor about this. We were discussing the word “anguish,” what we feel when we lose someone. I looked up “anguish,” and it means “narrowing.” But in my experience, even though it feels like narrowing, it’s the opposite. Grief doesn’t narrow you down, it expands you. 

What’s it like for you to write about grief? My editor and I were working recently on a nonfiction piece of mine that dealt with a loss that I’d experienced, and she said, “When you write, you’re putting the words under anesthesia. You’re putting the story under anesthesia, and then you can do dissections.” We weren’t so much looking at the life story behind the piece as looking at words, at commas, at adjectives. Just by paying so much attention to how the story is written, or how the words are arranged, you’re removing yourself to a certain distance. It’s either before or after you write the piece that you feel the feelings in it.

In a recent New York Times essay about love and the death of your son, you say, “I raised myself as a warrior queen.” What do you mean by that? People say, “You had to overcome a lot to become a writer.” Maybe so, yet I don’t look at it that way. Losing a child, though, is a big thing. The most important lesson I’ve learned is that there are moments when you must have willpower. You have to make a meal, or not only a meal but something delicious and attractive, even as you wonder, “What’s the point of a nice-looking meal?” Or to take another example, there’s the willpower to garden, even when you wonder what the point is when life can be so terrible. People are dying in Israel and Palestine—what’s the point of planting flowers? 

It’s easy to feel there’s no point, and doing these things anyway is willpower. You have to have some will, and you have to use it. That’s why I say I’ve raised myself as a warrior queen. I may not have a lot of ambition or desire to communicate with people. I don’t want a lot of things. But the one thing I want is to have this willpower. I live by it. So many horrible things happen, but you still have to hold your life together. And what holds life together are the little things. When you’re really sad, you can find joy in baking a cake or doing some gardening.

In spite of the tremendous loss you’ve experienced, you have a lovely, upbeat manner and are quick to laugh. Even the saddest story has a funny moment, right? My biggest regret is that very few reviewers say my writing is funny. I would like people to see the humor in my writing. The ability to laugh is one of the most important things. And I do laugh, all the time. You have to, even at the saddest moments. 

I also make a huge distinction between sad and unhappy. Unhappiness and joy oftentimes do not coexist, and unhappiness is more like a bitter state, which is not good. But I don’t feel unhappy. I feel sad. I can say I’m very sad. I have a sad story. But I’m not unhappy, because sadness and joy can coexist.

The post On Grief, Willpower, and Finding Happiness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The reason that we suffer is simple: to paraphrase the Rolling Stones song, “we can’t always get what we want.” And in not getting what we want, we create conflict for ourselves and others. It may seem simplistic to reduce all our suffering to our unmet wants, but if we take the time to look closely at our situation, it becomes evident that the Buddha’s teaching on the source of our distress is exactly right. We suffer because we have something we don’t want, we want something we don’t have, or we have something we can’t keep. If we think of the concept of craving (Pali, tanha) as a triune, then its three faces are avoidance, desire, and clinging.

The first face of craving is avoidance. It turns away from the pain that comes by craving for what we have that we don’t want to go away. No one wants to grow old, yet most of us do—or we hope to, once we realize that aging is a privilege, given the alternative. None of us want to get sick, and especially not for long periods of time. We certainly don’t want to die, although we most decidedly will. These three “signs” of existence, as the Buddha calls them, may be different in context from one life to another, but not in fact. And although we understand that resistance is pointless, to accept the conditions of life feels so much like defeat, that we’d rather fight than surrender to the inevitable. It feels like a betrayal, the way things are set up—like there’s a bug in the system or a few lines of fine print no one bothered to point out when we signed the contract to live our lives.

“I was a good husband, a good father,” a patient once said to a therapist friend who worked in a nursing home. “I did my job, I paid my taxes, I even climbed a few mountains. Why the hell is this happening to me?” By “this,” he meant getting old; he meant losing control; he meant letting go of everything he’d worked so hard to get. It’s not easy to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that if we check the right boxes, we’ll somehow be spared the indignity of our decline. But the fact is that from the moment we’re born, we’re already dying. No matter how rich, how famous, or how powerful any of us become, none of us are exempt from these three signs. Yet few of us are willing to carry the truth of our fragility or the certainty of our deaths. We’d rather look for security wherever we can find it.

There’s a story of a fisherman who’d been struggling to feed his family. Every morning, he’d go out on the ocean, cast his net, and, invariably, he’d haul it in almost empty. This pattern continued until one day, when he left early with his brother and, after only an hour, pulled in a catch so big that it threatened to capsize his skiff. Carefully, the fisherman tied up the bulging net and stowed the catch in his boat. He then grabbed a piece of coal from a bucket and drew a big X on the side of the boat under the gunwale, or the upper edge of the side of his boat.

“What are you doing?” asked his brother.

“This is a great fishing spot!” the fisherman said. “I’m marking it so that we can come back tomorrow.”

If we can’t fight old age, maybe we can fix youth in place. If we can’t avoid death and the anxiety that comes with it, maybe we can keep them at bay with the pleasure that comes from having money, or good looks, or a nice house, or a prestigious award. If the first kind of craving is avoidant, the second is grasping. It’s the face that looks toward its goal, which is very simple: to get what we want because it makes us feel good, not bad. This approach to living seems so obvious, so reasonable, that it’s almost absurd to question it. Who wants to feel pain? Who doesn’t want to feel pleasure? Isn’t pleasure natural and desirable? Indeed, pleasure by itself isn’t a problem, nor is our wanting it. We’ve all felt the rush of joy that accompanies all kinds of pleasant moments: digging our toes into sand, smelling the fragrant steam coming from a pot of stew, receiving an unexpected windfall of money, finding an elegant solution to a persistent problem.

The difficulty comes from grasping itself, which is relentless and impervious to the truth of impermanence. Yet we all know that vacations end, scents fade, money is spent, another problem replaces the first.

There’s nothing in Buddhism that says we can’t or shouldn’t enjoy life’s modest or magnificent wonders. The problem isn’t enjoyment either. The difficulty comes from grasping itself, which is relentless and impervious to the truth of impermanence. Yet we all know that vacations end, scents fade, money is spent, another problem replaces the first. Things shift, they break, they get lost, they decay. People leave or die. Everything that is, wanes, and no amount of effort can stop this passing. But as with old age, sickness, and death, our general response to this constant change is distaste. We don’t like change, and we don’t like it when it happens to us. When it does, our first response is to go looking for more things. More wine, more sex, more clothes, more likes, more titles, more trips—which makes desire a perfect, self-sustaining system. Without interference, it’ll spin endlessly from seeking to grabbing to losing to seeking again. And although we could accept impermanence and focus on figuring out where else we might find lasting satisfaction, it seems much easier to just hold on to what we have. This is the third face of craving.

The orientation of the first face is avoidant, the second is grasping, and the third is fixated. Its sole preoccupation is to keep things as they are. Of the three types of thirst, this is perhaps the most painful and unnatural—like sticking your tongue to a frozen mailbox. Holding on always comes at a cost: primarily, disappointment, and, peripherally, exhaustion, because things are neither lasting nor dependable. Getting what we want is hard enough, but to keep what we have is impossible. It’s simply not the way things work.

In one of those strange confluences that happen every so often, the day I started writing this article my bicycle was stolen. It was a distinctive bike—a purple beach cruiser with a basket and a rear-mounted, custom-made crate that fit my dog, a good load of groceries, or a five-gallon water jug, as needed. It was graceful in a midlife sort of way, and I loved it. So I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt when I walked out of my doctor’s office and saw only absence. It felt like a boundary had been breached, as if someone had entered my personal space without my consent. But then I thought, who created those boundaries? What is stealing when the something that was taken was never really yours? What is the meaning of “mine” and “yours” when the boundary that separates us fades, like everything else that’s conditioned? I’m not condoning stealing or any other invasion of privacy. Boundaries exist for a reason. But in working with craving, it’s useful to take a close look at those limits and see what happens when we enlarge them. Or when we question the nature of want, of having or owning, and of the owner.

The late Bhikkhu Nanananda once said that “conceit” (belief in an independent self that is somehow superior to other selves) is misappropriation of public property—that is, of the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air. The Buddha said that conceit is the last defilement to fall away before full awakening.

A bhikkhu thinks thus: ‘This is peaceful, this is sublime, that is, the stilling of all activities, the relinquishing of all acquisitions, the destruction of craving, dispassion, cessation, nibbana.’ In this way, Ananda, a bhikkhu could obtain such a state of concentration that he would have no I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit in regard to this conscious body; he would have no I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit in regard to all external objects; and he would enter and dwell in that liberation of mind, liberation by wisdom, through which there is no more I-making, mine-making, and underlying tendency to conceit for one who enters and dwells in it. (Ananda Sutta AN 3.32, trans. by Bhikkhu Bodhi)

Releasing ourselves from I-making and mine-making doesn’t prevent us from enjoying life’s pleasures. On the contrary, it helps us delight in them even more, since we’re able to acknowledge their transiency and value. Whether what we hold is a bicycle, a cherished memory, or our own precious body, letting go of craving allows us to carry these things more lightly.

My teacher always says, “Practice when it’s easy,” so here it is, a tiny loss to prepare me for the true relinquishment of my conscious body. Like my bike, my body—which has also done an excellent job of taking me from one place to another—is on loan temporarily. Like my bike, one day, it too will disappear. It’s my sincerest wish that I am able to let go in that moment with some modicum of grace and acceptance. In the meantime, I hope that the one who has my bicycle enjoys it as much as I did. I hope they find happiness and fulfillment.

It’s definitely true that we can’t always get what we want—and it’s precisely because of this that we can thoroughly enjoy what we have, for the time being.

The post We Can’t Always Get What We Want (And That’s All Right) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In both Buddhist and Hindu traditions, devotional objects seek to bring the viewer and worshiper into tranquil and compassionate states, aimed at getting the mind into concentration, samadhi, and closer to the sublime. In The Benevolent Beings: Buddhas and Bodhisattvas from South and Southeast Asia, currently being exhibited at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum until February 19, 2024, the interplay between the objects of these two religions is on full display. Inspired by assistant curator Lakshika Senarath Gamage’s personal experiences growing up in Sri Lanka, Gamage organized the show to “speak to the continuity of devotional engagement with objects that remain essential to healing and tranquility” in these two traditions.

In contrast to the monumental deities that make up part of Norton Simon’s permanent collection, many of the objects exhibited in Benevolent Beings reflect small-scale everyday devotional objects, whether previously installed in temples or possibly kept in people’s homes—some still bearing traces of their original intended use. The exhibition’s design evokes South Asia’s 13th- to 18th-century Buddhist temples, and the three galleries are organized to guide visitors to increasingly sacred objects as they progress through the exhibition, encouraging slow and deliberate contemplation and the feeling of interaction and interconnection between the object and the viewer. As a visitor, I felt encouraged to slow down and look closely to immerse myself in the values shared across these two dharmas. The challenge of this exhibition is to keep in mind that these are devotional, votive objects and not just art items. With thoughtful and meaningful curation, the exhibition aims to be accessible to both religious practitioners as well as the lay art-appreciating public. 

Visiting this exhibition as a scholar of comparative religions, I am reminded that Buddhism has always existed in the context of other traditions. We recall that it was first introduced into the region in the 4th century CE in conjunction with several types of pre-Hindu religions, Vedic beliefs, and local indigenous animistic cults. The Buddhas and bodhisattvas in this exhibition highlight the syncretic nature of the artistic exchanges between pre-Hindu and Buddhist and, in some cases, Islamic, or Persian, art and culture. The art exhibited in these galleries retains regional distinctions yet showcases a sense of cosmopolitan artistic interplay. 

The first gallery features a selection of mythical bird-shaped incense burners from South India, including Censer in the Form of a Mythical Bird, designed to either venerate the Buddha or to please the senses of the Hindu gods. It also includes a Buddhist Manuscript with Covers, from northern Thailand or Myanmar, and Hanging with Nepali Stupas, a cotton scroll, which most likely originated in India. Most of the objects in this gallery were commissioned by either laypeople or religious patrons who aimed to accumulate merit. By commissioning works of art, patrons believe that they acquired an abundance of blessings and protection, a practice that continues to this day. The gallery also includes a selection of bodhisattvas and merciful gods, including Ganesha with the Hindu Triad, a 10th-century sculpture of Ganesha, a beloved Hindu “remover of obstacles,” as well as the god Vishnu. 

In both the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, elephants are sacred symbols. In Buddhism, elephants are the guardians of the Buddha and Earth’s energy and represent physical stress that also indicates mental stress and responsibility. Similarly, in Hinduism, elephants also represent intellectual and mental strength. Further, the notion of mental strengths and knowledge is exemplified in the Bodhisattva Manjusri, a bodhisattva of wisdom, who generally holds a sword in one arm to cut off all delusion. Notably, Vishnu often appears in Buddhist temples to protect visitors in sacred spaces. Gamage explains that it is not unusual for Hindu gods to be placed near the Buddha. Placing Buddha close to Vishnu allows the worshipers to combine blessings for earthly matters with a focus on transcendent values, further underscoring the notion of religious interrelation. Buddha with Two Bodhisattvas, a triad of the Buddha with two bodhisattvas, can be perceived as having only Buddhist relevance. Here, the idea of compassion is underscored with Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of infinite compassion, on the Buddha’s right, and Vajrapani, the earliest protector and guide of Buddhism, on his left. However, we should note that Vajrapani shares his origin with the Vedic deity Indra, also the king of gods in Hinduism.  

Another significant art object is the statue Buddha, from 20th-century Thailand, which features the Buddha standing on a lotus pedestal placed on a mythical bird. It appears that artisans possibly combined the Buddha with Garuda, which in Hindu mythology is the bird and the mount of Vishnu. While the Buddha does not have a similar carrier, since he is not divine but human, some Vishnu devotees consider the Buddha Vishnu’s avatar or a manifestation of the deity on earth. The interplay of the traditions can also be observed in Descent of the Buddha. Here, we see Hindu creator Brahman, who is positioned on the Buddha’s right, and Indra, the king of gods, on the left. In Descent, note how the depiction of the Buddha is made to look much larger than his Hindu counterparts, illustrating the concept of hierarchical scale, or hierarchical proportion, displaying the sensibilities of the environment where it was created and the weight of importance given to the separate traditions by the image’s creator, Tibetan artist Phurbu Tshering of Chamdo.

The second gallery aims to convey the concept of multiple Buddhist heavens and evokes the same architecture as seen in South Asian Bodhi shrines. A Bodhi tree is placed in the center and is surrounded by four sitting Buddhas or four stupas or four objects. This setting allows practitioners to circumambulate the Buddhas (or four stupas or four objects) just as they would have done in the Bodhi shrines. For the general public, it is a space to encounter each individual Buddha within a frame of the Bodhi tree to appreciate the iconography, the material, and the quality of the art. This approach considers different audiences and makes it accessible to anybody without being didactic in its application. 

Along the second gallery’s back wall viewers encounter Stele with Buddhas and Bodhisattvas—a solitary Buddha dated to c. 1100 India, of either West Bengal or Bangladesh origin. Carved from a chlorite stone, it glitters and shines in the light, allowing devotees to experience the immediacy of this visual encounter. The representation of the Buddhist cosmos in the stupa and the three-dimensional mandala brings forth the idea of symbolic meaning that serves not only as a meditation guide but also as protection against negative forces. Stupas illustrate the earthly realm (through their base), as well as nirvana (the jeweled pinnacle), or the ultimate goal of cessation of death and rebirth. The three-dimensional mandala, in turn, represents a cosmological map of the universe. The symbolic meanings of these images serve not only as meditation guides but also as forms of protection against negative forces. It needs to be noted that this lotus mandala is meant to commemorate the Hindu god Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, even though mandalas are most commonly used for Buddhist symbolism. Visitors will note the confluence of Buddhist and Hindu symbols: at the left side of the Buddha is Lakshmi, a goddess of wealth, prosperity, fertility, and abundance, and on the right is Sarasvati, a goddess of education, creativity, and music. 

Another example of this interplay is the Lotus Mandala with Eight Mothers, from 18th-century Nepal, composed of a bronze cosmic diagram that features eight female deities, known collectively as the Ashthamatrika, which is deeply rooted in Hinduism. These Eight Mothers symbolize the connection between the divine and their maternal forces of creation. Another example is Railing Pillar: Female Deity, which also serves as a prototype within both Buddhist and Hindu contexts. 

The third and final gallery has two benches for visitors to sit down and relax, or meditate, and includes my other favorite object—Buddha Shakyamuni in Meditation, a solitary Buddha placed in the front of the gallery. A sculpture of a solitary Buddha dates to 6th-century Sri Lanka. Here, the Buddha manifests a feeling of deep meditation and invites visitors to partake in meditation as well.

Notably, this gallery provides a space for tranquility and serenity but also underscores the idea of cultural interplay and productive coexistence. Benevolent Beings explores the links between Hinduist and Buddhist traditions; their shared history, their shared liturgy, and the compassion and sublime attitudes they both value above all else. It’s a must-see exhibit for those who wish to engage in openness of religious and cultural interplay that transcends territorial boundaries, ideologies, and biases, presenting the spiritual as a vast and interconnected web imbued with wisdom for those who are willing to stop for a moment and take in what’s around them.

The post Charting the Artistic Interplay between the Benevolent Beings of Buddhism and Hinduism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Mitra Bishop Roshi is the founder of Mountain Gate-Sanmonji, a Rinzai Zen temple nestled high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico where she offers a uniquely American approach to practice. 

Her own training was more traditional: starting in the mid-1970s, she studied at the Rochester Zen Center with Roshi Philip Kapleau, and later spent four years at Sogen-ji in Okayama, Japan, training with the Rinzai teacher Shodo Harada Roshi. She urges students to address their buried trauma—using psychotherapy, if necessary—to deepen their Zen practice. 

Mitra Roshi also leads nonsectarian retreats based on Zen principles for women veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress, called Regaining Balance. She explores all this in her new book, Deepening Zen: The Long Maturation.

How would you characterize your teaching style? I don’t teach classic Eastern Zen. I teach a really American format, which is not something that a lot of Zen centers in America do. They still stick to the straight and narrow. What I’ve learned through working with students and my own observations studying at Sogen-ji and Rochester has shaped my way of teaching in probably a more radical way than that of most Zen teachers in America.

What did you hope to achieve with your new book? It’s for the dharma, and to let people know that there’s not just one way to do Zen practice—that people’s histories and experiences have to be taken into account. There is no one-size-fits-all Zen practice. That’s how we were taught in the old days, and I’ve seen so many people crash and burn because they didn’t get a chance to work with things in a way that would have enhanced their practice, taken them deeper, and helped to transform their whole lives in a positive way. There have been so many instances of misbehavior among Western and Eastern teachers who have trained in that way. They have had the straight and narrow [approach], and so they have shoved their issues aside, putting them in a drawer somewhere. There were issues in their personalities that they never had a chance to work with and clean up, so to speak. That is probably the greatest fault of most American Zen today. The emphasis on “just this”—there are very few people who can handle that.

Zen practice is often associated with a distinctly masculine energy. As a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, do you bring a different, uniquely female perspective to the way you teach? Probably. Since I can’t transform into a male persona, I probably do. I understand trauma. I’ve had trauma—it took me a long time to work through it with a lot of psychotherapy—but I also was doing a lot of Zen practice at the same time. I recognize that trauma can impact your Zen practice. There are people who can’t do Zen practice effectively because they can’t remove themselves from dissociation. So that already was telling me something. 

Did you encounter that masculine approach in your own training? Rochester Zen Center was called “the boot camp of Zen.” And it was. Roshi Kapleau’s last teacher was Yasutani Roshi, who was from an old samurai family. It was all very dynamic and intense. Then I went to Sogen-ji, which was really different. You have this idea that with Japanese Zen you’re at the tip of a spear all the time. At Sogen-ji, while it was very strict, there was also a deep sense of compassion. I also saw over the time I was there that [the practice] is [more] flexible. 

There is no one-size-fits-all Zen practice.

In the book you often mention susok’kan (“extended breath”) practice. Could you describe that? It is the fundamental practice in Rinzai temples. We call it the “extended breath.” You are relaxed in your shoulders and belly, sinking deep within. You let yourself breathe out normally, and when you get to the point where you would automatically breathe back in, instead, you take it further out, focusing on your body. What it does is eliminate the possibility of thought. You cannot focus to that degree and also carry along other stuff. 

And as you go deeper— and I’ve added this aspect to it, because it’s important—you have a sense of openness to possibility, what Seung Sahn Sunim called “don’t-know Mind,” or Suzuki Roshi called “beginner’s mind.” It’s as if you’ve landed on some different planet that you’ve never heard of and you’re exploring what it is like to be there. There are no preexisting assumptions about it because it’s so different. For many people there’s a sense of yearning to return to “don’t-know what,” and you can put that sense of yearning to return also into that extended outbreath. It is extremely powerful and extremely effective for Zen practice, but this is where the whole thing about working with your history comes in. You cannot do it effectively if you are holding back in any way. And if you’ve been traumatized, you’re going to hold back. If you are dissociated, then it really is impossible. But it can be worked with, and this is what I’ve discovered both in my own practice early on and in working with students. I did a lot of psychotherapy all along the way, which helped a lot, and I gradually became aware of what was going on inside and was able to work with it. And, of course, the practice goes much deeper as a result of the work you do in psychotherapy.

Could you talk about the significance of kensho (seeing one’s true nature) versus what Torei Enji, the 18th-century Rinzai master, called “the Long Maturation”? Kensho is important. You can work on the Long Maturation from the get-go, but kensho helps you move toward it faster. It’s as though you’re finding your way up a mountain path in the pitch-black dark, and then there’s a flash of lightning, and suddenly you can see the path ahead. You have a much better sense of where you’re going and what you need to do. And that’s what kensho does. 

Most people who have kensho these days don’t have a very deep one. That’s why it’s so important not to stop there. A kensho will allow you to become more aware of your behavior, and then you have a choice. You can elbow it out of the picture, which is what traditional Zen practice will do, or you can choose to open to the bodily experience of that and explore it beyond words and release its hold on you. That is part of the Long Maturation. It’s becoming aware of our behavior patterns—all of them, not just the dysfunctional ones—and going down through the clouds to our true nature, which is unattached to anything. 

What led you to focus on serving women with trauma through Regaining Balance? My own history. Women veterans are at the bottom of the pecking order, and often out in the cold. There needs to be something that will help them. Our Regaining Balance retreats are pretty effective, because we’re teaching them ways to help themselves get grounded. Susok’kan is known to be very grounding, and there were other things that I did in my own trauma work that I felt were extremely helpful. We teach them the extended breath meditation. They do it twice a day for up to half an hour each time. They also go for a walk in the forest, which is also healing—to be in nature. 

And we teach them tools to help themselves de-stress. There’s a wonderful app called ArtRage. It’s aptly named and it’s quite excellent. You have a choice of background colors and textures, and different kinds of brushes, pens, pencils, palette knives, and so on. You use your finger to translate what’s going on in your body energetically to color in form. It’s not about making a pretty picture. It’s similar to journaling, which we also teach them. Handwriting descriptions of the energies in your body keeps you from getting hijacked by your amygdala [the part of the brain that regulates emotions]. And so you are able to begin to process some of those feelings without knowing what they are necessarily—they’re just uncomfortable. 

Our third tool is to go outdoors and focus in a particular direction—we do the cardinal directions—and you write down three words that describe something that you’re seeing within that view. You come back and turn those words into a sentence. Each sentence comes together to create a poem. Then we each contribute our sentences to a group poem. It teaches awareness, focus, and attention. 

♦

Deepening Zen: The Long Maturation by Mitra Bishop Roshi is available now through Sumeru Books.

The post Deepening Zen through Poetry and Psychotherapy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

¡Bienvenidos a nuestra nueva sección de Dharma en Español! Aquí en Tricycle reconocemos la importancia de seguir ofreciendo el dharma a los practicantes de una amplia gama de comunidades, y dado el creciente interés en el dharma en español, hemos puesto en marcha una nueva iniciativa para ofrecer enseñanzas originales y traducidas. Profesores de habla hispana de Latinoamérica y Europa han contribuido generosamente con charlas de dharma y prácticas que publicaremos en nuestra página web y en la revista, así como con artículos seleccionados de nuestra Sección de Enseñanzas. Esperamos que estos artículos cuidadosamente seleccionados les inspiren, desafíen y apoyen, y que también animen a todos aquellos que buscan la liberación a recorrer el camino de la práctica.  

No dudes en hacernos llegar tus comentarios o sugerencias. Nos encantaría saber de ustedes.

Welcome to our new Dharma in Spanish section! Here at Tricycle we recognize the importance of continuing to make the dharma available to practitioners across a wide range of communities, and given the increased interest in Spanish dharma, we’ve started a new initiative to offer ongoing original and translated teachings. Spanish speaking teachers from both Latin America and Europe have generously contributed dharma talks and practice pieces that we’ll be publishing in our website and print magazine, as well as selected pieces from our Teachings section. It’s our hope that these carefully curated offerings will inspire, challenge, and support you and encourage all those seeking liberation to walk the path of practice.  

Please don’t hesitate to reach out with your comments or suggestions. We’d love to hear from you.

***

El apego es un factor mental que hace que exageremos las buenas cualidades de un objeto, persona, idea, etc., o que proyectemos buenas cualidades que no existen. Esto nos lleva a desearlo y aferrarnos a él, considerándolo permanente, placentero y existente por sí mismo. Esta práctica nos ayuda a reflexionar sobre el apego y a trabajar con él.

Para empezar, pregúntate ¿A qué cosas, personas o emociones estoy apegado? ¿Cómo los veo cuando estoy apegado? Si esa persona o cosa existe tal y como se presenta a mi mente apegada, ¿por qué no todo el mundo la ve así? ¿Por qué a veces me siento diferente al respecto? ¿Cuál es una actitud más realista hacia el objeto de mi apego?

Ten en cuenta estas preguntas mientras continuamos nuestra exploración. Para eliminar el dolor del apego, es útil considerar primero sus desventajas. Por ejemplo, genera insatisfacción y frustración porque continuamente queremos más y mejores cosas, lo que nos impide disfrutar de lo que ya tenemos. Nos hace subir y bajar emocionalmente según tengamos o no el objeto de nuestro apego. Puede motivarnos a confabular, manipular y conspirar para conseguir lo que queremos. Bajo el hechizo del apego, podríamos actuar hipócritamente o con otras intenciones, lo que acaba dañando nuestras relaciones con los demás.

El apego puede llevarnos a actuar de forma poco ética para conseguir lo que queremos, a perjudicar a los demás y a aumentar nuestro propio sentimiento de odio y de culpa hacia nosotros mismos. En última instancia, hace que nos pasemos la vida persiguiendo placeres, ninguno de los cuales podremos llevarnos cuando muramos. Mientras tanto, nuestro potencial para desarrollar cualidades internas como el amor, la compasión, la generosidad, la paciencia y la sabiduría queda desaprovechado. De este modo, el apego bloquea eficazmente nuestra claridad e incluso nuestro potencial para despertar.

Otro subproducto del apego es la ira. Cuando estamos fuertemente apegados a algo, nos decepcionamos y nos enfadamos si no lo conseguimos o si nos lo quitan una vez que lo tenemos. Piensa en un ejemplo de tu vida en el que haya ocurrido esto. Luego examína: ¿Por qué me enfado? ¿Qué relación hay entre mis expectativas y mi enfado? ¿Qué esperaba de la persona, cosa o situación que no tenía o no hacía? ¿Eran realistas mis expectativas? ¿El problema estaba en esa persona o cosa, o en que yo pensaba que la persona u objeto tenía cualidades que no tenía? ¿Cuál es una visión más realista de esa persona, cosa o situación? ¿Cómo afecta esta nueva visión a cómo me siento y me relaciono con ellos?

El apego nos hace temer no conseguir lo que queremos o necesitamos, y perder lo que tenemos. Piensa en ejemplos de tu vida en los que esto haya ocurrido.

Entonces pregúntate: ¿Realmente necesito esas cosas? ¿Cuál es el peor escenario si no las consigo o las pierdo? Incluso si las tuviera, ¿me quedaría completamente sin herramientas para manejar la situación, o hay cosas que puedo hacer para afrontarla con eficacia? ¿Qué pasaría si renunciara a sentir apego por esa persona o cosa? ¿Cómo sería mi vida?

Cuando se trata de relaciones, el apego puede llevarnos a la codependencia, provocando que permanezcamos en situaciones perjudiciales por miedo al cambio. Reflexiona: ¿A qué estoy apegado que me hace permanecer en esa situación? ¿Merece la pena aferrarse a eso? ¿Es en realidad tan maravilloso como mi apego cree que es? ¿Qué pasaría si dejara de estar apegado a ello? ¿De qué herramientas internas y externas dispongo para afrontar la situación?

Que no es realista esperar que los objetos externos sean una fuente duradera de felicidad.

Contempla las desventajas de estar apegado a esas personas, cosas, experiencias de tu vida a las que te aferras con fuerza. Piensa en la naturaleza transitoria del objeto de tu apego y comprueba si puedes aceptar que el cambio es la naturaleza misma de la existencia. Recuerda que no es realista esperar que los objetos externos sean una fuente duradera de felicidad. Reflexiona sobre el hecho de que, al soltar nuestro apego, podremos disfrutar de nuestra salud, de nuestras relaciones, de la riqueza que podamos tener cuando el objeto o persona esté ahí, y estar tranquilos cuando no esté.

A continuación, consideraremos algunos antídotos contra el apego. La principal actitud que hay que cultivar es la del equilibrio: eliminando nuestras exageraciones y proyecciones, podemos ser más equilibrados en nuestras relaciones con las cosas que queremos o necesitamos. Libres de aferramiento y compulsividad, podemos implicarnos y preocuparnos de forma saludable. Los puntos que figuran a continuación están pensados para una reflexión repetida. La comprensión intelectual por sí sola no produce la fuerza necesaria para detener los patrones destructivos.

Reflexionar sobre nuestra mortalidad nos ayuda a ver con claridad lo que es importante en nuestra vida. Tómate un momento para imaginar que estás muriendo. Visualiza realmente dónde estás, cómo estás muriendo, las reacciones de tus amigos y familiares. ¿Cómo te sientes? ¿Qué pasa por tu cabeza? Luego pregúntate: Dado que algún día moriré, ¿qué es importante en mi vida? ¿Qué me hace sentir bien haber hecho? ¿De qué me arrepiento? ¿Qué quiero hacer y evitar hacer mientras viva? ¿Qué puedo hacer para prepararme para la muerte?

Contempla la naturaleza cambiante del cuerpo, desde el feto hasta el bebé, el niño, el adulto y el anciano. Algunas preguntas que puedes utilizar son ¿Está mi cuerpo compuesto de sustancias puras? ¿Es intrínsecamente bello? Después de la muerte, ¿en qué se convertirá mi cuerpo? ¿Merece la pena apegarse a él? ¿Existe alguna esencia inherente que sea mi cuerpo? ¿Soy yo mi cuerpo? 

No hay duda de que debemos cuidar nuestro cuerpo, mantenerlo limpio y sano, porque es la base de nuestra preciosa vida humana. Protegiéndolos con sabiduría pero sin apego, podremos practicar el dharma y beneficiar a los seres vivientes.

A menudo nos aferramos a nuestras ideas sobre cómo deben hacerse las cosas, a nuestras opiniones sobre quiénes son los demás y qué deben hacer, a nuestras creencias sobre la naturaleza de la vida. Luego nos enfadamos cuando los demás no están de acuerdo con nuestras ideas. Pregúntate a sí mismo: Cuando alguien critica mis ideas, ¿me está criticando a mí? ¿Es correcto algo sólo porque yo lo creo? ¿Qué pasaría si yo viera las cosas como las ve la otra persona? ¿Cómo puedo liberarme del miedo a perder poder o a que se aprovechen de mí?

Si vemos defectos en las ideas del otro, podemos expresarlos de forma amable, sin ponernos a la defensiva de nuestras propias opiniones. Imagínate hablando con firmeza y claridad para exponer tus opiniones, pero sin ponerte a la defensiva. Recuerda que debes seguir abriéndote a una visión más amplia.

Imagina que recibes toda la aprobación y elogios que siempre has deseado. Imagina que la gente te dice o reconoce todas las cosas que siempre has deseado que te digan. Disfruta de las buenas sensaciones que esto te puede producir. Luego pregúntate: ¿me hará realmente feliz de forma duradera? ¿En qué me benefician los elogios, la aprobación o la buena reputación? ¿Previenen enfermedades o alargan mi vida? ¿Resuelven realmente el problema del odio a uno mismo y la culpa? ¿Purifican mi karma negativo o me acercan a la liberación o la iluminación? Si no es así, ¿merece la pena estar apegado a ellos?

Para desarrollar nuestro sentido de estar interconectados con todos los demás y ser receptores de mucha bondad por su parte, contempla la ayuda, el apoyo y el ánimo que has recibido de amigos o seres queridos. Reconócelos como actos de bondad humana. Reflexiona sobre los beneficios que has recibido de tus padres, parientes y profesores: los cuidados que te dieron cuando eras joven, la protección, la educación. Todos los talentos, habilidades y destrezas que tenemos ahora se los debemos a las personas que nos enseñaron y formaron.

Piensa en toda la ayuda que has recibido de extraños: la casa que habitas, la ropa que vistes, los alimentos que comes, todo lo hicieron personas que no conoces. Sin sus esfuerzos, no podrías sobrevivir. Luego reflexiona sobre los beneficios que has recibido de personas con las que no te llevas bien y de personas que te han hecho daño. A través de sus acciones, nos dan la oportunidad de desarrollar la paciencia, la tolerancia y la compasión, cualidades esenciales para progresar en el camino.

El amor es el deseo de que los demás tengan felicidad y las causas de la felicidad. Empieza por desearte a ti mismo que estés bien y seas feliz, no de forma egoísta, sino porque te respetas y cuidas de ti mismo como uno de tantos seres vivientes. Extiende gradualmente este amor a amigos, extraños, personas difíciles y a todos los seres. Para cada grupo de personas, piensa en individuos concretos y genera amor hacia ellos. Luego, deja que ese sentimiento se extienda a todo el grupo.

Piensa, siente, imagina: “Que mis amigos y todos los que han sido amables conmigo tengan felicidad y sus causas. Que estén libres de sufrimiento, confusión y miedo. Que tengan corazones tranquilos, pacíficos y plenos.”

Genera los mismos sentimientos hacia gente desconocida. Extiende el sentimiento a quienes te han hecho daño o son difíciles. Reconoce que hacen lo que te parece censurable porque están experimentando dolor o confusión. Qué maravilloso sería que fueran libres.

Como conclusión, reconoce que el apego es tu enemigo. Solemos pensar que el apego es nuestro amigo, pero cuando observamos detenidamente nuestra experiencia, empezamos a ver cómo el aferrarnos a las cosas destruye en realidad nuestra paz mental y destruye nuestra felicidad. Y cuando vemos esto, entonces eso nos da algo de energía para querer contrarrestar nuestro apego y no sólo seguirlo ciegamente.

Este artículo se basa en una meditación guiada que la Venerable Thubten Chodron suele dirigir en sus retiros.

♦

This article previously appeared in Tricycle’s Fall 2023 issue as Taking the Ache Out of Attachment.

The post Práctica: Quitar el dolor del apego appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.