Daisaku Ikeda, Buddhist philosopher and president of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), died from natural causes at his home in Shinjuku City, Tokyo, on the evening of November 15. He was 95.

Born in Tokyo to a family of seaweed farmers on January 2, 1928, Ikeda emerged from World War II with a firm resolve to work for peace. He became a member of the Soka Gakkai in 1947 after attending a talk by its second president, Josei Toda, whose revolutionary approach to Nichiren Buddhism had been forged during his imprisonment by the Japanese military government for resisting the war.

Inspired by Toda, Ikeda became a tireless advocate for nonviolence, mounting an international movement to eradicate nuclear weapons. He succeeded Toda as president of the Japanese Soka Gakkai in 1960, and became the president of the Soka Gakkai International in 1975. At the time of his death, the SGI had spread to 192 countries around the globe, with a combined membership of more than 12 million, making it the largest Buddhist lay movement in history.

The Soka Gakkai (“Value Creation Society”) began as a student-centered educational movement in the 1920s under the guidance of founding President Tsunesaburo Makiguchi. Makiguchi converted to Nichiren Buddhism in 1928, grounding his educational theory in the teachings of the Lotus Sutra. Imprisoned by the government along with his protégé Jose Toda in 1943, he was subject to harsh interrogation and died as a result of malnutrition the following year.

Daisaku Ikeda’s approach to Buddhism combined the optimism of Makiguchi’s Value Creating educational theory with Toda’s unshakable confidence in the power of chanting “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” (the title of the Lotus Sutra) to transform any situation. He founded four-year universities in Japan and America, published dialogues with philosophers, scientists, and civil rights activists, and supported humanitarian and social justice causes throughout the world.

A TIME magazine article written in 1975 hailed Ikeda as “The Super Missionary” and claimed, “His most consuming passion is the creation of an international people-to-people crusade against war.” Its authors clearly believed that his passion for peace had inherently political overtones, given that, at the height of the Cold War, he had made in-person appeals to Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. Even as a private citizen, Ikeda had worked to establish diplomatic relations where the efforts of governments had failed—a goal he described as a “great desire” for the happiness of all humankind.

Daisaku Ikeda leaves behind hundreds of published works, including scholarly books on Buddhism and The Human Revolution, his twelve-volume novel recounting the history of the Soka Gakkai. He is survived by his wife, Kaneko, and his sons, Hiromasa and Takahiro.

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Wes Nisker, a Buddhist teacher, award-winning broadcaster, comedian, counterculture figure, founding coeditor of Inquiring Mind, and author has died. He was 80 years old. 

Nisker was born in 1942 in Nebraska to Jewish immigrant parents. He attended the University of Minnesota and has said he first became interested in Buddhism after seeing Alan Watts speak there in 1965. He arrived in San Francisco in the 1960s, as he said in an interview with SF Gate in 2003, “too late” to join the beatniks—he was particularly inspired by Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder—so he was “assigned to the hippies instead.” “To this day, I consider myself a kind of mongrel bohemian, with a beatnik head and a hippie heart,” Nisker said in that interview. 

In the late 1960s and in the 70s, Nisker was heard on the San Francisco radio stations KSAN and later KFOG. It was on the former station that he coined a phrase that he is often remembered for: “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” His broadcasts combined news, commentary, music, and remixed audio; Nisker once said his news show was the only one you could dance to. Nisker was also known for his vox pop, or person on the street, interviews in the years leading up to television’s media takeover.

Nisker earned the moniker “Scoop” from activist Abbie Hoffman when Nisker was covering the Chicago Seven trial, when  a group of men were charged by the US government with conspiracy to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago 1968. 

Nisker studied with Asian and Western Buddhist teachers for years, and eventually started teaching too; he was a teacher at Spirit Rock, among other places. In 1971, Nisker attended S.N. Goenka’s first 10-day Vipassana retreat in Bodhgaya, India. Also in attendance were Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Ram Dass. In 1984, following the encouragement of Insight Meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, Nisker cofounded and coedited Inquiring Mind with Barbara Gates. The semiannual journal, “dedicated to the creative transmission of Buddhadharma to the West,” continued publishing articles, essays, poetry, and more until 2015. The full digital archive, with a regular column by Nisker, has been completed and is housed by the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies online. The journal remains available online, and in the days following Nisker’s death, the homepage included his poem, “Why I Meditate (After Allen Ginsberg).”

Gates, recalling her longtime friend and collaborator, said: “Wes was a wonderful interviewer. He liked to do interviews as a team with me and other dharma friends. His favorite interviewees included Gary Snyder, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Joanna Macy and Ram Dass, to name a few. He also loved poetry. He delighted in selecting poems for each issue of the Mind for a section we called “Poems and Not Poems.” April Fools Day was his favorite holiday. He was a playful punster.” 

In the early 2000s, Nisker performed as what he believed was the “world’s first Buddhist stand-up comedian.” A 2005 interview between Nisker and Andrew Cooper, Tricycle’s features editor, on the topic of being Buddhist and Jewish contains a number of zingers:

Which Jewish writer would you rather have as a dharma student, Marcel Proust or Franz Kafka? Oh, without hesitation I’ll take Kafka. You certainly wouldn’t have to explain the First Noble Truth to him, and furthermore, he already knows that he is part cockroach, something most Buddhists don’t understand until after many years of practice.

Following Nisker’s death, Cooper shared a memory of Nisker via email: “I remember once years ago walking around SF with him as we tried to have a conversation but every few steps someone who was obviously a good friend from somewhere would stop us to catch up a little. It was a little like walking with someone famous, but not really because there was in each stop something meaningful exchanged. I was at first frustrated by what I viewed as interruptions but eventually it clicked that I was watching something really cool in itself, one little bit of beauty after another.”

Nisker authored numerous books, including Buddha’s Nature: A Practical Guide to Enlightenment; The Essential Crazy Wisdom; If You Don’t Like the News … Go Out and Make Some of Your Own; The Big Bang, the Buddha, and the Baby Boom; Being Nature: A Down-to-Earth Guide to the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, and more.   

In 2016, Nisker was inducted into the 11th Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame.

Last winter, Spirit Rock celebrated Nisker’s 80th birthday, according to a remembrance disseminated by Jack Kornfield. “When one of your best friends and spiritual brothers dies, it’s hard to put into words all that it means. Sad and tender, hard to fathom and also a loving relief for his release from a deteriorating body,” Kornfield wrote. “He loved to invite awe of the cosmos, he opened windows into the ecological mysteries, he smiled at the absurdity of human society, and carried a playful endless enormous creativity and deep Dharma vision. And here’s one of the best things…..Wes was alway kind. What a beautiful thing to say of someone’s life!”

Tricycle published an excerpt from his last book, entitled “Making Friends with Death: A meditation for new beginnings” in the spring 2023 magazine. 

In an undated post on his website, called “The Practice of Geezing,” Nisker humorously and sincerely reflected on his body and mind growing older.

Wandering the hills of Northern California, I carry the realization that I will someday be leaving this place I love, forever. Never again will I see the great pines waving through the in-flowing fog, or the gnarled sculpture of the oaks standing firm; or smell the vibrant decay of the woods punctuated with the tang of fennel and eucalyptus—all of it will vanish, along with my senses themselves.

Nisker, who had been living with Lewy body dementia, was surrounded by friends when he died. Condolences continue to roll in on his Facebook page. Details on a service to follow.

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Wayne Shorter, the renowned jazz saxophonist and composer, passed away on March 2, 2023, at the age of 89. He is remembered and celebrated the world over for his nearly fifty years of dedicated Buddhist practice with Soka Gakkai International (SGI)—practice that profoundly influenced his creativity not only in music but in all other aspects of his life.

When I first heard of his passing, I chanted the daimoku (the core practice of Nichiren Buddhism) with deep gratitude for his life, and in doing so realized that I wanted to ensure that people knew how much his artistry was fueled by his practice and how his practice infused his behavior as a human being.

Shorter’s practice inspired him to treat every day, every moment, as the proving ground on which to manifest enlightenment and inspire others to do the same. Whenever I had occasion to encounter Mr. Shorter at various SGI activities, he was always encouraging and humble in the way that only people confident in their intrinsic value can be. He always had this warm wit and relaxed courage shining in his way of being and speaking. As a longtime SGI member, I was honored to talk with several of Shorter’s family and friends about his resonant legacy—and his deep relationship with the dharma.

“I think the focal aim of his behavior, as a human being and as a musician, was to live this Buddhist philosophy so that it would inspire people through his behavior,” said Carolina Shorter, Wayne’s wife and an SGI Buddhist practitioner herself. “Buddhism is a practice where we believe that all of us are one, and we cannot be happy while someone else is suffering. And so it’s not about removing yourself from society. We are all together. Let’s all help each other in all kinds of ways.”

Carolina shared how she could feel this message in his music too. “He always aimed toward inspiring people to have courage, to get back in touch with their dreams even if it was a profound dream that had been forgotten.” For instance, in 2016, Shorter and fellow jazz musician and close friend Herbie Hancock penned “An Open Letter to the Next Generation of Artists,” in which they wrote:

You cannot hide behind a profession or instrument; you have to be human. Focus your energy on becoming the best human you can be. Focus on developing empathy and compassion. Through the process you’ll tap into a wealth of inspiration rooted in the complexity and curiosity of what it means to simply exist on this planet. Music is but a drop in the ocean of life.

As the poet Rumi says, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.” The ocean of Shorter’s life was filled with exquisite crescendos of achievement, including a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, the Kennedy Center Honors award, and several honorary doctoral degrees.

In 2008, the eminent music critic Ben Ratliff wrote that Shorter was “probably jazz’s greatest living small-group composer and a contender for greatest living improviser.” Over the course of his career, Shorter wrote over 200 compositions and recorded over 20 of his own albums, appearing on several dozens more as a member of other ensembles.

After spending the late 1950s serving as primary composer for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers—a longstanding group that was a proving ground for up-and-coming jazz players—Shorter joined Miles Davis’s legendary quintet in the 1960s and later cofounded the fusion band Weather Report as well as his own jazz quartet.

In addition to being a twelve-time Grammy-winning recording artist who made genre-defining contributions to the legacy of jazz, Mr. Shorter also actualized his own long-held profound ambition when he cowrote an opera, Iphigenia, at the age of 87, fulfilling a dream he had since he was 19. Coauthor of the opera, esperanza spalding, who became an SGI member herself after Wayne, Carolina Shorter, and Herbie Hancock introduced her to the practice, describes Shorter as a “combination muse, guide, mentor, and guru.”

Adin Strauss, General Director of the SGI-USA, shared his admiration for Shorter: “[He was] always moving forward in the spirit of what he termed ‘zero gravity’—a unique Wayne-ism that beautifully expressed Nichiren’s and the Lotus Sutra’s spirit of ‘from this moment forward,’” Strauss told me. “He was unbound by the fetters of the past—musically, culturally, or otherwise—always with eyes fixed on the future, confident that his Buddhist faith, the philosophy of Nichiren and Daisaku Ikeda, the mentor whom Wayne so cherished, and his own irrepressible energy would enable him to conquer any obstacle, including sickness and death. And that is indeed what he did.”

Carolina described how she, too, was in awe of Wayne’s unyielding courage and enthusiasm in the face of difficulty. She described him as having a childlike excitement for seeing how obstacles could be transformed as they chanted for wisdom to grow like a lotus flower from the mud of suffering.

She recalled reading a letter that they had received during the 2008 financial crisis describing their dire straits. Wayne clasped his hands in elation, stating, “I can’t wait to see what the surprise will be!”

Shorter’s practice inspired him to treat every day, every moment, as the proving ground on which to manifest enlightenment and inspire others to do the same.

On some level, she understood where he was coming from, because as a longtime practitioner herself, she was familiar with how SGI members would often congratulate one another on the loss of a job or some other difficulty out of confidence that good fortune would manifest through practice. Yet even with that awareness, Carolina held the letter up again for Wayne, saying, “I don’t think you understand,” to which he smiled and replied, “Oh, I understand. I understand clearly.”

“We always hear that the obstacles are actually the raw material with which you are going to build the palace of your Buddhahood,” Carolina said. “And I feel that. But Wayne literally lived that part of the practice.”

“Wayne went beyond transcending to transformation, transforming each hardship into a blessing,” said Nestor Torres, a friend, fellow musician, and SGI member. “It is one thing to overcome, another thing to transcend, and yet another to transform the difficulty into a blessing.”

Even when Wayne was told in hospice that his body was failing, he embraced the sufferings of illness and death with inimitable courage. Carolina said that when Wayne heard the news, he said, “Okay, so I guess it’s time for me to go get a new body and come back and continue the mission.”

“If that’s not the most incredibly profound understanding of how the sickness and death part of the four sufferings work, I don’t know what is,” Carolina told me. Wayne’s valiant spirit in the face of his own mortality reminded Carolina of a teaching from SGI President Dr. Daisaku Ikeda:

Illness can neither rob us of true happiness nor stop us from living a victorious life. Though one may be ill, this has no bearing on the inherent nobility, dignity, and beauty of one’s life.

Elaborating on this, Carolina said that “even in his illness, there were so many moments in the hospital where people would come up to him. I mean, they couldn’t believe how Wayne was dealing with his illness. He used to cite the phrase from President Ikeda’s guidance, ‘Faith is to fear nothing.’ And in this case, I think that the ultimate victory was his never-give-up spirit… His aim at every thought, with his work and with his behavior, including in the hospital, was so strongly aimed toward inspiring people to actually awaken to the greatness of their own lives.”

Indeed, Wayne could often be seen wearing a hat or T-shirt with the SGI motto “Never Give Up.” Although the phrase may seem to be one that simply cheers us on, it has a deeper meaning, as illustrated in the way Shorter lived. “Never Give Up” is a rallying cry, a call to our own greater self, a reminder that, of course, we can manifest more of our enlightenment. There are thousands of elegant solutions to any challenge; there is growth and possibility beyond our wildest dreams. “Never Give Up” means that we are determined to actualize the universe’s capacity to align with our determination to transform suffering into growth. It is an expression of resolve, of limitless determination to which the universe responds with limitless compassionate matching force that, in turn, compounds our life force.

“Never Give Up” is our rallying cry because it recognizes our own inestimable possibility as human beings and the reflection of that limitless possibility in the cosmos. We say it humbly because we know that there is so much more potential in ourselves and in the universe than we are tapping at any given moment, and we can—must—use our Buddhist practice and study to tap into more of that potential. It means that we have a humble awareness that there is always hope, there is always a possibility, and if there isn’t, we can create hope and possibility. We can, as African Americans say, “make a way out of no way.” This is in fact what African Americans did with the creation of the genre called jazz.

Jazz itself is a wisdom transmission about creative living. As a genre, it portrays the particular and otherwise inexpressible triumphs and challenges of Black musicians. According to eminent jazz musician Herbie Hancock, who describes Shorter as a best friend, “Even though the roots of jazz come from the African American experience, my feeling has always been that jazz really developed from a noble aspect of the human spirit common to all people—the ability to respond to the worst of circumstances and to create something of great value, or as Buddhism says, to turn poison into medicine.”

Through his music, his practice, and his relationships, Shorter continually transformed the sufferings of life into something creative and constructive. Olivier Urbain, director of the Min-On Music Research Institute in Tokyo recalled Shorter’s own words on the transformative potential of his music: “The music I am creating now has to deal with the unfamiliar; it has to be music that inspires people to consider negotiating with the unexpected instead of the familiar, with the unknown, to raise their life condition.”

What Nichiren Daishonin refers to as magnificent “behavior as a human being” is manifest in the compassionate humility with which Wayne Shorter nurtured everyone around him. The fact that he continued to cultivate music to the last weeks of his life, developing a brilliant opera in his late 80s, signifies that when we use our Buddhist practice, we can actualize the real meaning of our appearance in this world and behave as  human beings who do not rest on our laurels, ever.

Up to the last moments of his conscious life, Wayne Shorter was chanting the mantra Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. When the doctors advised him that he would most likely not wake up after receiving the medicine he was being given, he asked Carolina to hand him his prayer beads so that he could chant, which he did until he drifted into sleep. Carolina describes how she, too, had fallen asleep many hours later, until a nurse came to tell her that his heart rate was slowing; it would not be long. Carolina grasped Wayne’s hand and began to chant for his joyful transition. Even after he passed peacefully, at 4:04 a.m., she continued chanting with him and holding his hand for the next four hours. She says she was thinking of the passage from “The Heritage of the Ultimate Law of Life” from Major Writings of Nichiren Daishonin:

For one who summons up one’s faith and chants Nam-myoho-renge-kyo with the profound insight that now is the last moment of one’s life, the sutra proclaims: ‘When the lives of these persons come to an end, they will be received into the hands of a thousand Buddhas, who will free them from all fear and keep them from falling into the evil paths of existence.’ How can we possibly hold back our tears at the inexpressible joy of knowing that not just one or two, not just one hundred or two hundred, but as many as a thousand Buddhas will come to greet us with open arms!

The twenty-fourth chapter of the Lotus Sutra describes bodhisattva Wonderful Sound as one who will propagate Buddhism eternally. Listening to his timeless music and chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo in communion with him, may we allow our lives to harmonize with bodhisattva Wayne Shorter’s eternally glorious, victorious life force.

This article originally appeared on tricycle.org as “The Glorious, Victorious Life of Bodhisattva Wayne Shorter” and has been edited for length.

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Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, a Tibetan scholar, Vajrayana master, and author of hundreds of books and commentaries on the dharma, died on June 4 at Thrangu Tashi Yangtse Monastery in Nepal. He was 91.

According to a statement on Thrangu Rinpoche’s website:

On June 4, the full moon day of the fourth Tibetan month, Saga Dawa—the sacred anniversary of the Buddha Shakyamuni, our incomparably kind teacher, passing into parinirvana—Rinpoche decided that he had completed his activity for this life. At 1:30 pm, he lay down in the same posture as the Buddha Shakyamuni had lain in when passing into parinirvana and then displayed the appearance of his mind dissolving into the undefiled, luminous dharma expanse and passing into peace. Immediately, Kyabje Lodrö Nyima Rinpoche offered Rinpoche a reminder of the tukdam meditation. 

Thrangu Rinpoche, whose full title is The Very Venerable Ninth Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, was one of the highest lamas in the Karma Kagyu tradition, one of the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism, headed by the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje (one of two claimants to the title). His legacy includes establishing monasteries, nunneries, and other Buddhist organizations throughout the East and West, as well as preserving key Tibetan texts following China’s invasion of Tibet. He also served as the 17th Karmapa’s personal tutor.

Born in Ralungda, a small village in eastern Tibet, in 1933, Thrangu Rinpoche was identified as a tulku, or the reincarnation of an enlightened teacher, when he was 2 years old. At the age of 5 he went to live at Thrangu Monastery. His studies at the then newly established monastic college focused on the writings of Mikyö Dorje, the 8th Karmapa, and other masters in the Karma Kagyu lineage, according to a biography published by Thrangu Rinpoche’s publishing house, Namo Buddha Publications. 

In 1958, Thrangu Rinpoche fled Tibet, fearing persecution from the People’s Republic of China, which had been occupying the area since the beginning of the decade and repressing Tibetans’ freedom, religion, and other ways of life. Thrangu Rinpoche’s group, which included Khenpo Karthar, Traleg Rinpoche, Zuru Tulku, and other monks from Thrangu Monastery, survived a treacherous, monthslong journey on horseback toward Lhasa, often going hungry and eating snow to stay hydrated. In March 1959, they continued traveling toward India, and spent more than a month at the Bhutanese border before being granted permission to cross into India. Thrangu Rinpoche was just one of an estimated 80,000 Tibetans who fled to India in the late fifties and early sixties.  

In the 1960s, Thrangu Rinpoche passed his geshe exams. (The geshe degree is often equated as a monastic doctorate degree, and training for these exams can take some two decades of study.) Following the successful completion of his exams, Thrangu Rinpoche was named abbot of Rumtek Monastery in the Indian state of Sikkim, and also the Nalanda Institute for Higher Buddhist Studies. 

In the mid-seventies, Thrangu Rinpoche began teaching in the West, and eventually founded monasteries, nunneries, and dharma centers in Tibet, Nepal, India, Bhutan, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada, and throughout the United States and Europe. Notable projects include building a monastery, and later monastic college, at Namo Buddha in Nepal (Thrangu Tashi Yangtse Monastery); a nunnery near Swayambhunath, Nepal (Thrangu Tara Abbey); and the Vajra Vidya Institute in Sarnath, India, close to the site where the Buddha gave his first sermon, at Deer Park. There are nearly 1,000 monks and nuns in Thrangu Rinpoche’s sangha who are offered equal opportunities to study, according to his website. (Women were first allowed to take the geshema, or doctorate, exams in 2012.) Thrangu Rinpoche established Thrangu Monastery Canada in Richmond, British Columbia, in 2010, which is his North American seat, and Crestone, Colorado’s Vajra Vidya Retreat Center in 2001. 

He also worked to rebuild Thrangu Monastery, where he spent his early years before fleeing Tibet, first following its destruction in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and then following a massive earthquake in 2010 that destroyed the complex again and killed dozens of monks.

Thrangu Rinpoche was known for making complex teachings accessible for students and preserving Tibetan texts nearly lost during the Chinese invasion. He published extensively, authoring hundreds of commentaries. His books include The Mahamudra Lineage Prayer: A Guide to Practice; Advice from a Yogi: An Explanation of a Tibetan Classic on What Is Most Important (read an excerpt here); Tilopa’s Wisdom: His Life and Teachings on the Ganges Mahamudra; Naropa’s Wisdom: His Life and Teachings on Mahamudra; and Vivid Awareness: The Mind Instructions of Khenpo Gangshar.

Thrangu Rinpoche’s humanitarian projects include the building of a boarding school for 500 students from remote Himalayan villages in Kathmandu. In 2021, as Nepalese people suffered from COVID-19, as well as  floods and landslides, monks and volunteers from Thrangu Monastery donated 200 oxygen concentrators to the Nepalese government and distributed nonperishable food packages to families in need in Kathmandu’s slums and other areas.

Thrangu Media’s Facebook page contains details about ceremonies honoring Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche. 

As is traditional, there will be forty-nine days of practice, and His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa has instructed us to begin with the Akshobya practice. A mandala of the Buddha Akshobhya has been arranged in the main shrine hall of Namo Buddha’s Thrangu Tashi Yangtse Monastery with many offerings and pictures of our precious guru, and over four hundred monastics are practicing the puja, headed by the Venerable Zuri Rinpoche, Venerable Lodro Nyima Rinpoche, Choje Lama Wangchuk, and Venerable Tulku Damcho Rinpoche.

In addition, on the evening of June 8th, monks and students gathered online and in person with His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa and the Gyalwang Drukpa to recite aspirations, including the “The Short Vajradhara Prayer,” “Calling the Guru from Afar,” and prayers for Rinpoche’s swift rebirth. This puja will continue daily until the forty-ninth day after Rinpoche’s parinirvana.

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Legendary soul singer Tina Turner, known for her electrifying live performances, died in her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, on Wednesday, May 24. She was 83 years old. 

“With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model,” said Bernard Doherty, Turner’s publicist, who did not share a cause of death. According to the New York Times, Turner suffered a stroke and was also battling other illnesses, including kidney disease, in recent years. 

Born Anna Mae Bullock in 1939 in Brownsville, Tennessee, Turner first took the stage at a club in East St. Louis where she used to go to hear Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm. Drummer Eugene Washington invited her to sing one night, and the rest is history. The band became the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in 1960 and Ike and Tina romantic partners until they later divorced in 1978. After a few years out of the spotlight, Turner soared in popularity with the 1984 hit album Private Dancer, and she became one of the most successful solo artists of all time.

Turner was also a practitioner of Nichiren Buddhism, which she says  changed her life when she started practicing in 1973. As former senior editor at Tricycle and the editor of the Tricycle Haiku Challenge Clark Strand wrote in an interview with Turner in 2020, “Tina has overcome domestic abuse, discrimination, professional setbacks, life-threatening illness, and devastating personal loss. Throughout it all, she has credited her practice of Nichiren Buddhism as the source of her hope for a better world and her determination to overcome every obstacle in her life.”

Speaking about how chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo helped her during a time of personal crisis, Turner said, “Not long after I started chanting, I began to see that the power I needed to change my life was already within me.” In her interview with Strand, Turner also spoke about why, as a musician, she was drawn to chanting; how she still holds on to the Baptist influences of her childhood; and how to approach the divisiveness of our times. 

“Buddhism has taught me that hidden inside of our challenges are the lessons we must learn in order to break through to a better life. As hard as that might be to grasp in the midst of difficult times, when we can see our problems from that perspective, things naturally change. Then even the impossible becomes possible.” 

Read Tricycle’s full interview with Tina Turner here.

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Jules Shuzen Harris Roshi, a Soto Zen priest who founded the Soji Zen Center in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, died on May 8 at his home in Lansdowne, near Philadelphia. He was 83 and had suffered from “a prolonged period of complicated health issues,” according to a statement by John Ango Gruber Sensei, his dharma heir. A dharma successor of Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, abbot of the Village Zendo in New York City, Shuzen Roshi was a member of the White Plum Asanga established by Taizan Maezumi Roshi and part of the Zen Peacemakers sangha founded by Bernie Tetsugen Glassman Roshi, as well as a member of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association and American Zen Teachers Association. He had been a Zen Buddhist practitioner for more than 40 years. 

A dedicated and much-loved dharma teacher, Shuzen Roshi had, despite ill health, continued “showing up, week after week, to sit with us, chant with us, see students in interviews, and offer the teachings of the Dharma in both his words and his example,” Ango Sensei said. 

“How did he do it?” Roshi Enkyo mused. In a message to Tricycle, she wrote:

Shuzen Roshi embodied the intimate teachings of Zen practice. He just naturally expressed the spirit and wisdom of Zen. We sat together, laughed together, and always, the Dharma emerged from his being. He manifested the joy of forms in Zen practice, as well as a longtime devotion to the disciplines of Japanese fencing and sword.

As a longtime psychotherapist and educator, Shuzen Roshi brought contemporary skills to his many years of Zen study. He dedicated his life to teaching Zen, to serving those who practiced with him, using all the tools he had honed in his many years of a life that truly expressed the compassion and wisdom of contemporary Zen practice. We will miss his intelligence and compassion—and his great heart!

Shuzen Roshi was born Jules Harris on December 6, 1939 in Chester, Pennsylvania. In a piece on gratitude posted on Tricycle’s website, he reflected on his family: 

I am ever grateful to my paternal grandmother who taught me discipline and the meaning of hard work. I am filled with deep admiration for my father who became wiser as I grew older. I still hear his voice saying, “Watch what people do, not what they say.” His homily informs me daily that Zen is a verb.

Harris earned a doctorate in education from Columbia University, with a concentration in applied human development. As a psychotherapist, he “found creative ways to synthesize Western psychology and Zen to achieve dramatic results with his patients,” a biography on the Soji Center website states. As a black belt in Kendo (Japanese fencing) and a fourth-degree black belt in Iaido (drawing and cutting with a Samurai sword), he focused on the relationship between Zen and the martial arts, and founded swordsmanship schools in Albany, New York and Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Shuzen Roshi had circled around Buddhism until he met Maezumi Roshi at a retreat in Vermont. Maezumi sent him to Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, where he practiced under John Daido Loori Roshi. In 1998, he moved to Salt Lake City to study with Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshi, abbot of the Kanzeon Zen Center, receiving denkai (transmission of the precepts) from Genpo Roshi in May 2002. 

After moving back East in 2004, Shuzen Roshi founded the Soji Zen Center in 2005 as a place, he said, “where people can go to slow down, meditate, and learn about the healing qualities of the mind. We all agree that training the body through exercise and diet is beneficial, but rarely in Western society do we focus on awakening the healing energies in our brain.” In the White Plum tradition, Soji combines elements of both Soto and Rinzai Zen, incorporating Soto meditation and Rinzai koan study. 

In August 2006, Shuzen Roshi received hoshi—the rank of dharma holder—from Roshi Enkyo in a ceremony at the Grail, the Village Zendo’s summer retreat center in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York. In 2007, he received shiho—full ordination as a sensei—from Roshi Enkyo. Then, in December 2019, he received inka (dharma transmission) from her, becoming a roshi and Roshi Enkyo’s second dharma heir. 

In his book Zen Beyond Mindfulness: Using Buddhist and Modern Psychology for Transformational Practice, published in 2019, Shuzen Roshi outlined what he saw as the two main challenges facing American Buddhists today. One is “‘spiritual bypassing”—using what he called “pretend enlightenment”—to avoid dealing with psychological issues. The other is “settling for secularized forms of Buddhism or mindfulness that have lost touch with the deeper philosophical and ethical underpinnings” of the tradition. The solution he proposed blends rigorous meditation practice, intense study of Buddhist psychology, and a psychotherapeutic technique called “Mind-Body Bridging.” In an article for Tricycle, Shuzen Roshi explained why meditation practice alone could not resolve anger and psychological insight also was needed: “Meditation enables us to see the transparency of our anger, and this is a good start, but we can still remain blinded to the mechanics of our anger.”

Shuzen Roshi’s syncretic approach drew praise from Buddhists and mental health experts alike. “Dr. Harris clearly has a love affair with truth and the potentiality of human individual evolution,” observed Conrad Fischer, MD, program director of the Brookdale Hospital Medical Center. Gerry Shishin Wick Roshi, abbot of Great Mountain Zen Center in Berthoud, Colorado, called Zen Beyond Mindfulness “a significant contribution” to the dialogue between Buddhism and Western psychology that could help Zen students “dissolve emotional and psychological barriers to deepening their meditation practice.” Roshi Enkyo, in her foreword to the book, wrote, “I can’t think of a more qualified and appropriate person to take on the task of developing a contemporary technique for using mindfulness as a path of self-discovery and peace.” Publishers Weekly, an authoritative voice in the book world, called Zen Beyond Mindfulness “a refreshing alternative to the profusion of mindfulness literature.” 

Roshi Shuzen was among the small group of Black Zen teachers in America today and one of the only roshis—a responsibility he took very seriously. He was a tireless worker and even as his health waned, he insisted on maintaining a full schedule. The day before he died, he held private meetings with thirteen students. “He never gave up,” Brenda Jinshin Waters, a member of the Soji board of directors, recalled. “He wanted to make the dharma available to everyone, regardless of race, color of skin, or socio-economic status.”

♦

For a look at Jules Shuzen Harris’s daily routine, see “A Day in the Dharma” in the Spring 2019 issue of Tricycle.

Correction: This article originally said that Jules Shuzen Harris moved to Salt Lake City in 1999, but he actually moved in 1998.

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Rigdzin Shikpo, a Tibetan Buddhist master in the Nyingma tradition and the head of the Longchen Foundation lineage, an international community of teachers and practitioners in the Mahayana Dzogchen (Maha Ati) tradition, died on April 28, 2023, at his home in Oxford, UK, where he lived with his partner, Sally Sheldrake. He was 88. At his death, Rigdzin Shikpo had practiced Buddhism for more than sixty years. 

A statement issued by the Longchen Foundation said that Rigdzin Shikpo had “worked tirelessly for the good of others and with enormous care painstakingly crafted a system of teachings and practices unique to the Longchen Foundation yet authentically rooted in the great Tibetan lineages he received from his many teachers.” A “meditator’s meditator,” he was admired as a brilliant scholar and scintillating teacher whose direct approach was well suited to Western students.

Born Michael Hookham on April 10, 1935, Rigdzin Shikpo grew up in Dalston, East London. He was interested in Buddhism from a young age, and later, while working as a physicist and mathematician, studied with Theravada monks for nine years and was closely associated with the Buddhist Society in London. In 1965, he met the Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who became his root teacher. At the time Trungpa Rinpoche, who had fled Tibet during the Chinese takeover in 1959, was studying at Oxford University. 

Trungpa Rinpoche entrusted Rigdzin Shikpo with some of the highest Nyingma teachings, and together they translated key Dzogchen texts and Mahayana sutras from Tibetan into English. Meanwhile, Rigdzin Shikpo also studied with Chögyam Trungpa’s teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, a celebrated meditation master and scholar who was a lineage holder in the Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelugpa traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. 

In 1965, Khyentse Rinpoche and Chögyam Trungpa established the Longchen Foundation to train practitioners in Dzogchen and appointed Rigdzin Shikpo as director. Longchen, named after the great Nyingma master Longchen Rabjam, integrates Mahayana and Dzogchen teachings in a path of training for Westerners. 

After Chögyam Trungpa moved to the United States to teach in 1970, Rigdzin Shikpo continued to study with him, making periodic trips to America. At Khyentse Rinpoche’s direction, he also took further instruction in Dzogchen from Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, one of Khyentse Rinpoche’s students. (Following the deaths of Trungpa Rinpoche in 1987 and Khyentse Rinpoche in 1991, Khenpo Rinpoche became Rigdzin Shikpo’s main teacher.)

In 1990, Rigdzin Shikpo began a traditional three-year retreat under the guidance of Khenpo Rinpoche. Upon its conclusion, he was given his dharma name: Rigdzin (“awareness holder”) and Shikpo (“beyond concepts”). 

Though Rigdzin Shikpo was a lineage heir to Chögyam Trungpa and they had a strong teacher-student relationship, he was not part of the Shambhala community. In her book Luminous Emptiness, Francesca Fremantle, a teacher in the Longchen mandala (community), wrote of Rigdzin Shikpo:

With a deep knowledge of Buddhism he has an extraordinary gift for expressing it in vivid and poetic ways and for creating links to many aspects of Western culture. Above all, he has an attitude of complete devotion, so that his mind has become one with the guru. Listening to him talk about dharma, I often feel as though Trungpa Rinpoche is speaking through his voice. Without him I would never have gained the experience or the confidence to write about these profound teachings . . . [Rigdzin Shikpo] answered my innumerable questions with endless patience and interest.

Rigdzin Shikpo frequently taught in Oxford and traveled once or twice a year to Germany to teach. He also had a small center on the Llyn Peninsula in northwest Wales for senior students. The Longchen Foundation has local groups in London, Bristol, and Oxford run by Rigdzin Shikpo’s students and virtual groups that reach sangha members in Europe, Canada, Mexico, India, and the US. Among the teachers and meditation leaders is Sally Sheldrake, Rigdzin Shipo’s partner, known as the “Mother” of the Longchen mandala. The Longchen, or “Indestructible Heart Essence,” path of training developed by Rigdzin Shikpo takes students through a progression of “gates” from the foundational Path of Freedom and the Lion’s Roar program, which introduces formless meditation, to advanced training in Dzogchen. 

Well-versed in Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhism, as well as Dzogchen, Rigdzin Shikpo translated scholarly works and also wrote books for a wider audience. His best-known book is Never Turn Away: The Buddhist Path Beyond Hope and Fear, which encourages readers to embrace all life experiences and not shirk possibilities—an approach, he said, that might be called “the path of embarrassment.” 

In her editor’s preface to his book Openness Clarity Sensitivity, Lama Shenpen Hookham (née Susan Kathryn Rowan), spiritual director of the Awakened Heart Sangha in North Wales, summed up his teaching style: 

Rigdzin Shikpo has found a way of talking us through our self-doubt and hesitations, opening the way for us to relate properly to the teachings of the great Dzogchen Gurus of the Kagyu-Nyingma Tibetan Buddhist tradition. . . . [He] concentrates on helping us to connect to the immediacy of our ordinary experience. Every now and then, however, he makes a sudden leap and we catch a tantalizing glimpse of some vaster vision, a sense that we are being led on a profound and even perhaps a shocking new perspective on reality.

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“The purpose of the appearance in this world of Shakyamuni Buddha, the lord of teachings, lies in his behavior as a human being”  

—“The Three Kinds of Treasure,” The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin

Wayne Shorter, the renowned jazz saxophonist, prolific composer, and dedicated Buddhist practitioner, passed away on March 2, 2023, at the age of 89. July 2023 would have marked fifty years of Shorter’s practice of Nichiren Buddhism as a member of Soka Gakkai International (SGI). His practice inspired him to treat every day, every moment, as the proving ground on which to manifest and enjoy his own enlightenment and inspire others to do the same. Shorter’s decades of practicing Nichiren Buddhism profoundly influenced his creativity in music and all other aspects of his life. 

Deeply inspired by his life and legacy, I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, the core practice of Nichiren Buddhism enacted by millions of SGI members worldwide, with profound gratitude for his life. In doing so, I realized I wanted to write an article about him to ensure that people knew how much his extraordinary artistry was fueled by his practice, and how his practice infused his behavior as a human being. Whenever I had occasion to encounter Mr. Shorter at various SGI activities, he was always encouraging and humble in the way that only people confident in their intrinsic value can be. He always had this warm wit and relaxed courage shining in his way of being and speaking. As a longtime SGI member, I was honored to talk with several of Shorter’s family and friends about his resonant legacy—and his deep relationship with the dharma.

“I think the focal aim of his behavior, as a human being and as a musician, was to live this Buddhist philosophy so that it would inspire people through his behavior,” Carolina Shorter, Wayne’s wife and a SGI Buddhist practitioner, told me. “Buddhism is a practice where we believe that all of us are one, and we cannot be happy while someone else is suffering. And so it’s not about removing yourself from society. We are all together. Let’s all help each other in all kinds of ways.” 

Carolina shared how she could feel this message in his music, too, stating, “He always aimed toward inspiring people to have courage, to get back in touch with their dreams even if it was a profound dream that had been forgotten.” For instance, in 2016, Shorter and fellow jazz musician and close friend Herbie Hancock penned “An Open Letter to the Next Generation of Artists,” in which they write: 

You cannot hide behind a profession or instrument; you have to be human. Focus your energy on becoming the best human you can be. Focus on developing empathy and compassion. Through the process you’ll tap into a wealth of inspiration rooted in the complexity and curiosity of what it means to simply exist on this planet. Music is but a drop in the ocean of life. 

As the poet Rumi says, “You are not a drop in the ocean, you are the ocean in a drop.” The ocean of Shorter’s life was filled with exquisite crescendos of achievement: a 1998 NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship; a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2015; a Guggenheim fellowship in 2016; in 2017, the Polar Music Prize; in 2018, the Kennedy Center Honors award. Honorary doctoral degrees were conferred on him by Berklee College of Music, NYU, and the New England Conservatory. Shorter recorded over twenty albums and wrote over 200 compositions, with “mastery (in) knocking down the wall between jazz and classical [music],” according to the New York Times. After serving as primary composer for Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the late 1950s, he joined Miles Davis’s quintet in the 1960s, later cofounded the fusion band Weather Report and his own jazz quartet, and toured and performed with many notable talents. In 2008, music critic Ben Ratliff wrote that Shorter was “probably jazz’s greatest living small-group composer and a contender for greatest living improviser.”

In addition to being a twelve-time Grammy-winning recording artist who made genre-defining contributions to the legacy of jazz, Mr. Shorter also actualized his own long-held profound ambition when he cowrote an opera, Iphigenia, at the age of 87, fulfilling a dream he had since he was 19. Coauthor of the opera, esperanza spalding, who became an SGI member herself after Wayne, Carolina Shorter, and Herbie Hancock introduced her to the practice, describes him as a “combination muse, guide, mentor, and guru.”

Adin Strauss, General Director of the SGI-USA, shared his admiration for Shorter’s musical brilliance and how he always maintained high spirits, even throughout the last five years of his life as he challenged and conquered one massive, life-or-death health obstacle after another. “[He was] always moving forward in the spirit of what he termed ‘zero gravity’—a unique Wayne-ism that beautifully expressed Nichiren’s and the Lotus Sutra’s spirit of ‘from this moment forward,’” Strauss told me. “He was unbound by the fetters of the past—musically, culturally, or otherwise—always with eyes fixed on the future, confident that his Buddhist faith, the philosophy of Nichiren and Daisaku Ikeda, the mentor whom Wayne so cherished, and his own irrepressible energy would enable him to conquer any obstacle, including sickness and death. And that is indeed what he did.”

Carolina described how she, too, was simply in awe of Wayne’s unyielding courage coupled with enthusiasm in the face of serious difficulty. She described him as having a childlike excitement for seeing how obstacles could be transformed as they chanted for wisdom to grow like a lotus flower from the mud of suffering. One major challenge they faced occurred when the Shorters were hit hard financially during the 2008 global economic crisis. When Carolina read a letter they had received describing their dire straits, Wayne clasped his hands in elation, stating, “I can’t wait to see what the surprise will be!” On some level, she understood where he was coming from, because as a longtime practitioner herself, she was familiar with how SGI members would often congratulate one another on the loss of a job or some other difficulty out of confidence that good fortune would manifest through practice to overcome the difficulty. Yet even with that awareness, Carolina held the letter up again for Wayne, saying, “I don’t think you understand,” to which he smiled and replied, “Oh, I understand. I understand clearly.”  

Reflecting on this, Carolina said, “We always hear that the obstacles are actually the raw material with which you are going to build the palace of your Buddhahood. And I feel that. But it is very interesting to me how Wayne literally lived that part of the practice.” 

“Wayne went beyond transcending to transformation, transforming each hardship into a blessing,” said world-renowned flutist Nestor Torres, a friend and fellow SGI member for more than forty years who also performed with Shorter. “That is what I feel differentiates us, who practice Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism within the Soka Gakkai; that it is one thing to overcome, another thing to transcend, and yet another to transform the difficulty into a blessing.”

Even when Wayne was told in hospice that his body was failing, he embraced the sufferings of illness and death with inimitable courage. Carolina shared that when Wayne heard the news, he said, “Okay, so I guess it’s time for me to go get a new body and come back and continue the mission.”

“If that’s not the most incredibly profound understanding of how the sickness and death part of the four sufferings work, I don’t know what is,” Carolina told me. Wayne’s valiant spirit in the face of his own mortality reminded Carolina of a teaching from SGI President Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, in which he states: 

Illness can neither rob us of true happiness nor stop us from living a victorious life. Though one may be ill, this has no bearing on the inherent nobility, dignity, and beauty of one’s life.

Elaborating on this, Carolina shared that, “even in his illness, there were so many moments in the hospitals and everything where people would come up to him. I mean, they couldn’t believe how Wayne was dealing with his illness. He used to cite the phrase from President Ikeda’s guidance, ‘Faith is to fear nothing.’ And in this case, I think that the ultimate victory was his never-give-up spirit… His aim at every thought, with his work and with his behavior, including in the hospital, was so strongly aimed toward inspiring people to actually awaken to the greatness of their own lives.”

Indeed, Mr. Shorter could often be seen wearing a hat or T-shirt with the SGI motto “Never Give Up.” Although the phrase may seem to be one that simply cheers us on, it has a deeper meaning, as illustrated in the way Shorter lived. Never Give Up is a rallying cry, a call to our own greater self, a reminder that, of course, we can manifest more of our enlightenment. There are thousands of elegant solutions to any challenge; there is growth and possibility beyond our wildest dreams. “Never Give Up” means that we are determined to actualize the universe’s capacity to align with our determination to transform suffering into growth. It is an expression of resolve, of limitless determination to which the universe responds with limitless compassionate matching force that, in turn, compounds our life force. “Never Give Up” is our rallying cry because it recognizes our own inestimable possibility as human beings and the reflection of that limitless possibility in the cosmos. We say it humbly because we know that there is so much more potential in ourselves and in the universe than we are tapping at any given moment, and we can—must—use our daimoku (our chanting practice) and Buddhist study to tap into more of that potential. It means that we have a humble awareness that there is always hope, there is always a possibility, and if there isn’t, we can create hope and possibility. We can, as African Americans say, “make a way out of no way.” This is in fact what African Americans did with the creation of the genre called jazz.  

Jazz itself is a wisdom transmission about creative living. As a genre, it portrays the particular and otherwise inexpressible triumphs and challenges of Black musicians. According to eminent jazz musician Herbie Hancock, who describes Shorter as a best friend, “Even though the roots of jazz come from the African American experience, my feeling has always been that jazz really developed from a noble aspect of the human spirit common to all people—the ability to respond to the worst of circumstances and to create something of great value, or as Buddhism says, to turn poison into medicine.”

Through his music, his practice, and his relationships, Shorter continually transformed the sufferings of life into something creative and constructive. Olivier Urbain, director of the Min-On Music Research Institute in Tokyo, Japan, recalled Shorter’s own words on the transformative potential of his music: “Shorter said, ‘The music I am creating now has to deal with the unfamiliar; it has to be music that inspires people to consider negotiating with the unexpected instead of the familiar, with the unknown, to raise their life condition.’”  

What Nichiren Daishonin refers to as magnificent “behavior as a human being” is manifest in the compassionate humility with which Wayne Shorter nurtured everyone around him. The fact that he continued to cultivate music to the last weeks of his life, developing a brilliant opera in his late 80s, signifies that when we use our Buddhist practice, we can actualize the real meaning of our appearance in this world and behave as human beings who do not rest on our laurels, ever. 

Up to the last moments of his conscious life, Wayne Shorter was chanting the mantra Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. When the doctors advised him that he would most likely not wake up after receiving the medicine he was being given, he asked Carolina to hand him his prayer beads, which he always kept nearby, so that he could chant, which he did until he drifted into sleep. Carolina describes how she, too, had fallen asleep many hours later, until a nurse came to tell her that his heart rate was slowing; it would not be long. Carolina grasped Wayne’s hand and began to chant for his joyful transition. Even after he passed peacefully, at 4:04 a.m., she continued chanting with him and holding his hand for the next four hours. She says she was thinking of the passage from “The Heritage of the Ultimate Law of Life” from Major Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, where he says,

For one who summons up one’s faith and chants Nam-myoho-renge-kyo with the profound insight that now is the last moment of one’s life, the sutra proclaims: ‘When the lives of these persons come to an end, they will be received into the hands of a thousand Buddhas, who will free them from all fear and keep them from falling into the evil paths of existence.’ How can we possibly hold back our tears at the inexpressible joy of knowing that not just one or two, not just one hundred or two hundred, but as many as a thousand Buddhas will come to greet us with open arms!

The twenty-fourth chapter of the Lotus Sutra describes bodhisattva Wonderful Sound as one who will propagate Buddhism eternally. Listening to his timeless music and chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo in communion with him, may we allow our lives to harmonize with bodhisattva Wayne Shorter’s eternally glorious, victorious life force.  

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Lama Thubten Zopa Rinpoche, a revered Tibetan Buddhist teacher, scholar, and beloved meditation master widely known as the cofounder and spiritual director of the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), died Thursday, April 13, at 9:30 a.m. Nepal time, at Karuna Hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal. He was 76.

A public notice posted on the FPMT website just after his death announced:

Rinpoche had been up in the mountains in the Tsum Valley since Monday and had to be brought down urgently as [he] was experiencing altitude sickness.

On arrival back in Kathmandu this morning, Rinpoche stopped breathing. The main doctor at Karuna Hospital tried for some time to revive Rinpoche but that was not successful. 

The notice further stated that following his death, Lama Zopa had returned to Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu, where prayers and pujas were being offered for him. Along with FPMT, Kopan was cofounded by Lama Zopa and his close teacher and collaborator Lama Thubten Yeshe. 

Established in 1975 by Lama Zopa and Lama Thubten Yeshe, FPMT is described on its website as “an organization devoted to preserving and spreading Mahayana Buddhism worldwide by creating opportunities to listen, reflect, meditate, practice, and actualize the unmistaken teachings of the Buddha and based on that experience spreading the Dharma to sentient beings.” A vast international network, FPMT includes dharma centers, humanitarian and educational services, and myriad projects ranging from food banks, hospitals, senior centers, schools, and animal liberation efforts to dharma programs and text translation. 

Lama Zopa was born Dawa Chotar in the Mount Everest region of Thangme, Nepal, in 1946. His father died when he was very young, and his mother struggled to provide for the boy and his siblings. Though he became a distinguished member of the Gelugpa school, when he was 3 or 4 years old—sources vary—he was recognized as a tulku, the reincarnation of a prominent Nyingma yogi, the Lawudo Lama Kunsang Yeshe, who had meditated for twenty years in a cave near Lama Zopa’s birthplace. 

At age 4, Lama Zopa was sent to Rolwaling Monastery, close to Nepal’s border with Tibet. In an autobiography posted in the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, Lama Zopa described his early life and said, “I was very naughty at that time and only wanted to play, so I wouldn’t stay in the monastery.” Stay he did, however. And when he was 7 or 8, after reading the life story of the Buddhist saint Milarepa, he felt “a strong desire in [his] heart to be a really good practitioner by finding an infallible guru like Marpa, just as Milarepa had.”

At age 10, Lama Zopa was taken by his uncles on a pilgrimage to Tibet. He refused to return home, saying he wanted to study the dharma, and he remained at the monastery of a Gelugpa tulku, Domo Geshe Rinpoche. He described those years in a memoir, The Door to Satisfaction. 

When the Chinese occupied Tibet in 1959 and “the threat of torture was imminent,” he later wrote, Lama Zopa fled to Bhutan and then to a Tibetan refugee camp in Buxa Duar, in West Bengal, India. A British concentration camp in World War II, the Indian government had allowed the Tibetan Government-in-Exile to use it to house monks from the Sera, Ganden, and Drepung Monasteries in Tibet who wanted to continue their studies. After six months in which he went to Delhi, contracted tuberculosis and smallpox, and studied English at Freda Bedi’s school for incarnate tulkus, Lama Zopa returned to Buxa, where he studied meditation with Geshe Rabten Rinpoche and found his root guru, Kyabje Trijang Rinpoche. It was at Buxa that Lama Zopa met his teacher and collaborator Lama Yeshe. Thereafter their lives were intertwined until the elder lama’s death in 1984. 

During a visit to Ghoom Monastery in Darjeerling, India, in 1967, Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe met their first Western student, Zina Rachevsky. Rachevsky—variously described as a Russian-American-French socialite and sometime actress—had mistakenly thought Lama Zopa was Domo Geshe Rinpoche, whom she had come to see. Nonetheless, she and Lama Zopa became fast friends, and, at Rachevsky’s request, he and Lama Yeshe spent nearly a year teaching a small group at her home. After a visit to Dharamsala, where the Dalai Lama ordained Rachevsky as a novice nun, the three went to Kathmandu, where they established Kopan Monastery. In 1971, Lama Zopa held the first of what became his famous annual lamrim (“stages of the path”) course, still offered every November at Kopan. 

The following year, Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe founded the Mount Everest Center for Buddhist Studies in Lawudo, Nepal, and in India, they opened the Tushita Meditation Centre in Dharamsala. Initially intended as a retreat center for advanced students, it was later opened up to practitioners at any level, and the ten-day Introduction to Buddhism course instituted by Lama Zopa remains a popular offering.

In 1974, Lama Zopa and Lama Yeshe began traveling internationally to establish dharma centers, and there are now more than 140 FPMT affiliates in thirty-four countries. Upon Lama Yeshe’s death in 1984, Lama Zopa assumed spiritual direction of FPMT. Until his death, he was actively involved in executing his “vast visions” for FPMT, which grew out of a series of ideas he jotted on colored Post-it notes during a retreat in May 2007. 

Despite his non-stop schedule, Lama Zopa found time to write thirteen books. With titles like Patience, How to Be Happy, The Door to Satisfaction, Transforming Problems into Happiness, and The Four Noble Truths: A Guide to Everyday Life, his most popular books are notable for their accessibility, translating traditional Buddhist teachings into practical wisdom for day-to-day living. One of those books is, appropriately, How to Face Death Without Fear, a guide to the process of dying and after-death spiritual care. These and Lama Zopa’s other books and commentaries published by Wisdom Publications, an affiliate of FPMT, are used by practitioners worldwide.

For thousands of followers, Lama Zopa was not just a dharma teacher but also a trusted advisor. Even those with little connection to Buddhism were beneficiaries of his down-to-earth advice. “It is a blessing that we still have a vast collection of his recommendations, carefully preserved by the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive in the Online Advice Book,” said Michael Lobsang Tenpa, a longtime student and former monk, who translated Lama Zopa’s teachings into Russian. “In addition to public teachings, he gave personal practice advice, including prescribing personalized lists of practices for people to follow, depending on their inclinations.”

Lama Zopa’s boundless energy was well known, hardly slowed by a stroke in 2011. Khandro Kunga Bhuma , a teacher and one of the oracles serving the Central Tibetan Administration, who frequently traveled and taught with Lama Zopa, noted that he was extremely skillful in resting in the mind of clear light while at the same time performing the vast activities of a bodhisattva 24/7. His generosity was legendary. “He would never travel without several suitcases containing scriptures and sacred objects meant to bless all beings his plane would fly over,” Lobsang Tenpa said. “Even just weeks before his passing, Rinpoche would go to the Boudhanath Stupa in Kathmandu late in the evening to do circumambulations, blessing all he met and generously sharing teachings with everyone who was willing to listen.”

It’s hard to imagine the magnitude of Lama Zopa’s impact on tens of thousands of people around the world, Robyn Brentano, a longtime student, said. She defined his charisma this way: “The source of Lama Zopa Rinpoche’s spiritual power is his boundless compassion for all living beings, integrated with his profound knowledge of the Dharma and skill in teaching ways to transform our hearts and minds. He is a great yogi who lived in a continual state of bliss, and he induced that sense of joy and connection in all who came into his presence. He was so attuned to the needs and aspirations of individual students that his advice always hit home and opened pathways to inner development and liberation.”

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Clinical psychologist Jack Engler, PhD, widely acknowledged for his seminal work in linking Buddhist practice and Western psychology, died on March 12 in Framingham, Massachusetts. He was 83. 

Armed with a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Chicago and intense study with the Theravada Buddhist masters Anagarika Munindra and Dipa Ma, Engler had a long and storied career as a psychotherapist in private practice and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, as well as a Vipassana practitioner and occasional meditation teacher with strong ties to the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, both in Barre, Massachusetts. In bridging the worlds of Western psychodynamic thinking and Buddhist practice, Engler will forever be remembered for his pithy summation of the development of the self and its relinquishment: “You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.” 

No mere throwaway line, it emerged from his clinical work as a therapist and his experience teaching Buddhist psychology and Vipassana meditation. He first included that observation on self and non-self in an article published in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology in 1984. After the article was reprinted two years later in Transformations of Consciousness: Conventional and Contemplative Perspectives on Development, a book Engler co-authored with Ken Wilber and Daniel P. Brown, the “epithet,” as he later called it, became a trope. His thesis on what he saw as “two great arcs of human development”—one leading to the individuated self, the other to a contemplative or transpersonal stage beyond it—garnered “a fair amount of criticism and notoriety from friends and colleagues for its developmental position,” he later acknowledged. His response to his critics and an effort to clarify his meaning was “Being Somebody and Being Nobody: A Re-examination of the Understanding of Self in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism,” a chapter in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, edited by Jeffrey D. Safran and published in 2003.

Born June 19, 1939 in Boston, Engler was raised Catholic in Tenafly, New Jersey. His lifelong spiritual quest began in his undergraduate years at the University of Notre Dame, when he and fellow students spent Christmas vacations at Thomas Merton’s Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. “The mystique grew on me—the shield of being in the monastery,” Engler later said in an interview for a documentary about IMS. “By the time I graduated in 1972, I was certain I wanted to become a monk.”

He spent the summer after graduation visiting monasteries in Europe to decide what order to join. After meeting Dom John Eudes, then Merton’s director of vocation, in Belgium, he chose the Trappists: “because,” he said, “of my perfectionist, gotta do the hardest, most challenging, most rigorous thing. If I didn’t do that, I would never know if I was capable of what I thought I was capable of.”

Despite his determination, his time as a Trappist monk was short. When Merton told him “You don’t belong here,” “it was probably the worst moment in my life,” Engler recalled. Merton steered him to the Oratory, an order in Pittsburgh founded by “a remarkable Christian saint.” Sent to Europe for theological study, Engler did a novitiate year in England and then spent four and a half “miserable” years in Germany. After finishing his degree at Oxford, he returned to the US where he taught at several universities. 

Teaching psychology and Buddhism at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was a turning point. “I didn’t know anything about Buddhism,” Engler said. But this first brush with the dharma opened his mind, and he enrolled in the University of Chicago for a PhD in clinical psychology. He was searching for a thesis topic when another life-changing event occurred. One night in South Chicago, his car suddenly swerved off the street, and he found himself in the parking lot of the Vivekananda bookstore. He knew nothing about Vivekananda but bought one of the few titles in the store in English—The Heart of Buddhist Meditation by the German-born Theravada scholar-monk Nyanaponika Thera. After reading it that night, he told his then-fiancée, “This is it! This is what I’ve been looking for, for twenty years!” She had just returned from a junior year in India and persuaded him to spend a year there. 

Awarded a Fulbright to study in India, Engler stopped first at Naropa in Boulder, Colorado, where he met Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg, who had just founded IMS. Joseph encouraged Engler to take their first three-month course. Joseph, Jack, and Sharon talked so much about their Vipassana teachers, Munindra and Dipa Ma, that Engler arranged to study with Munindra in India. After an arduous journey to Bodh Gaya, he finally met Munindra. “I’ve come a long way,” Engler told him, “and I’m completely, one-hundred percent in on this practice. Tell me what to do.” Munindra’s response: “How are your bowel movements?” His father was an ayurvedic doctor, and Munindra was knowledgeable about such matters. Still, “the first three or four weeks that’s all we talked about,” Engler recalled. 

He found in Munindra a warm and loving teacher—very accepting, very gentle, and yet sharp. “I did not want someone who was as uptight and strict and punitive with himself as I was,” Engler said. One day as they were walking together, Engler begged, “Tell me about the dharma, please. I’ve been waiting.” “The dharma?” Munindra said. “You want to know about the dharma? The dharma means living the life fully.” 

Engler’s field work for his PhD—studying the effects of meditation on practitioners—involved administering standard projective psychological tests like the Rorschach. Munindra and Dipa Ma agreed to be subjects. But as psychiatrist and author Mark Epstein recalled, “They just used [the tests] as teaching opportunities, turning the Rorschach into a description of the clinging self and its evolution through the dharma. They couldn’t stop themselves.” 

Jack Kornfield related an exchange between Engler and Dipa Ma in which he told her that “getting rid of” greed, anger, and ignorance sounded “very grey.” “Where’s the juice?” Engler asked. “Oh, you don’t understand!” Dipa Ma said, laughing. “There is so much sameness in ordinary life. We’re always experiencing everything through the same set of lenses.” Without greed, anger, and delusion, however, “every moment is new. Life was dull before. Now, every day, every moment is full of taste and zeal.” (Excerpts from more of Engler’s conversations with Dipa Ma appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Tricycle.)

After he returned to the US, Engler was invited to become a board member at IMS. He remained active there and at the Barre Center for many years. He was particularly supportive of the structure at IMS, which unlike many meditation centers, is collaborative, with the teachers on an equal footing and no guru at the top of a hierarchy. “That gave the institution an integrity in facing issues that would come up in the future,” Engler said.  

In Boston, Engler opened a private practice that he maintained for many years, and he served as a supervising psychologist and instructor at the Harvard Medical School. Well known for his approach to depth psychology that drew on both Western psychoanalytic and Buddhist concepts, he published papers in journals, contributed chapters to books, and co-authored The Consumer’s Guide to Psychotherapy with Daniel Goleman. In 1989 he was invited to sit on a panel on “Transformations of Consciousness” with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

“What made Jack special,” Mark Epstein said, “was that he was very sophisticated in Western psychodynamic thinking, not superficial at all. Very thoughtful but also deeply experientially involved in Buddhism. He was really wrestling with the questions that come up.”

Engler’s results were often surprising. In his study of the effects of Vipassana meditation on beginners, average meditators, and advanced practitioners, he found that even in the advanced meditators, practice led to no diminution of inner conflict. The difference was that the advanced meditators were more willing to acknowledge it. “To have that documented was very important,” Epstein said.

An accomplished sailor and passionate golfer, Engler is also remembered for his sense of humor and gift for storytelling. He was “funny in an inspiring sense,” said Ed Hauben, a close friend and dharma brother for forty years. They served on the IMS board together, and Hauben recalled a visit to IMS from Dipa Ma in which she told board members their service was fortuitous and would assure them a place in the heavenly realms. “With his bodhisattva nature, I’m sure Jack’s there,” Hauben said, “taking care of everyone.”

Engler is survived by his wife, Renée DeYoe; his daughter, Gaelen; son, Ian; son-in-law Gerben Scherpbier; and son-in-law Jake Frerk.

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For Tricycle Editor-in-Chief James Shaheen’s interview with Jack Engler, click here.

The post Jack Engler, PhD, Psychotherapist and Longtime Vipassana Practitioner, Has Died  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.