On “Taking the Ache Out of Attachment” by Ven. Thubten Chodron, Fall 2023:

I

found the article to be a very potent and evocative teaching. Venerable Thubten Chodron had us contemplate dying and what that might mean beyond the material world of grasping, holding, and clinging.

I was brought to the moment-to-moment ingredients of my life. I turned inward and leaned in, inquiring: What is here? Who am I? What am I becoming as I detangle attachments and loosen into no-self, no other?

It is all gray matter—not quite smoke and mirrors, but clouds. How do I grasp at clouds the way I grasp things that are tangible and seemingly real, and how can I ungrasp them if not by releasing the very notions themselves?

So as I turned toward my suffering, I saw it more clearly—the root of the cause, and the cause of the root. I embrace emptiness in formless form. This too is a practice in grief. Thank you, Venerable Thubten Chodron.

– Kissiah Young

As the summer went on, I found less and less room for my “things.” Reading Venerable Thubten Chodron’s article gave me some helpful clues to practice minimizing attachment and find more space to enjoy and use. Thank you

– Mary Martell

On “The Big Picture” by Anne C. Klein, Fall 2023:

Thank you Anne C. Klein for sharing your article in the Fall 2023 issue—I had a strong heart opening while reading it. I once had a similar “serendipitous glimpse of awakening,” and the idea of the present moment being perfect has continued to guide me ever since. Reading your article, I was reminded of the book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, in which the neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist expounds on the right-brain experience of direct unnamed wholeness and interconnectedness. It seems absolutely clear to me that he was talking about the very same “pristine awareness” described in Dzogchen. This noncoincidence points to an experience of awakening available here and now, for all beings. You just have to learn to notice, and your article reminded me of this.

– Sion Williams

On “The Problem of Shape” by Clark Strand, Fall 2023:

Clark Strand’s commentary in is a wonderful example of how a poem belongs equally to the poet and the reader. To me, a dragonfly is its wings. We do indeed go through life as if we were a wingless dragonfly. But if we open our eyes and flex our shoulders, our near-invisible, horizontal wings can carry us anywhere. And dragonflies never keep to a straight trajectory. Thanks also to Tricycle for its (horizontal) openness to this very American haiku.

– Mary Wilson

The winning haiku by Mariya Gusev in the Fall 2023 issue is magnificent. As is the accompanying art by Matthew Richardson. They made my day!

– Lois Rodenhuis

On “An Academic Like No Other” by Sarah Fleming, Fall 2023:

Thank you so much for this wonderful profile of Professor Robert Buswell. I chanced upon Dr. Buswell’s book The Zen Monastic Experience a few years ago and learned so much from it—and “unlearned” even more, given that most of my reading about Zen and Chan consisted of books by Western practitioners who had neither the scholarship nor the depth of practice of Professor Buswell. And while I’d had a little exposure to Korean Buddhism, I had no idea that for depth, profundity, and diversity it was fully the equal of the better-known Chinese and Japanese traditions.

I so appreciate Tricycle’s going out of its way to feature great scholar-practitioners, from Donald S. Lopez Jr. to Anne C. Klein to Dr. Buswell. Humble lay practitioners like myself, with no grasp of the primary languages, would have nothing to practice and no context for it were it not for these amazing teachers. Thank you, Sarah Fleming!

– Kevin Knox

♦

To be considered for the next issue’s Letters to the Editor, send comments to editorial@tricycle.org, post a comment on tricycle.org, or visit us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I am a grateful LWOP (Life Without Parole) convict at the California Correctional Institution who eagerly awaits each issue of Tricycle. Currently our world is very dysfunctional, and the devaluation of human life has sadly become normalized in mainstream society. I am so, so pleased to tell you about a group of men who have come together to become ambassadors of change at this institution. Our group is called Lives Worthy of Purpose. LWOP–condemned men attend our weekly motivational meetings to promote hope and positive change and living amends to those we’ve harmed in the past. We have a #LivesWorthyOfPurpose Facebook page that highlights the men, including myself, who have joined in solidarity to promote a non-violent, positive lifestyle. I personally have the teachings of Buddhism to thank for changing my life and shedding light on a world that requires empathy, compassion, and kindness to create balance as well as prosperity. There are good-quality men behind bars here who are working very hard at evolving into men who deserve a chance at freedom someday.

– Respect, Scott D.

***

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tricycle is evolving with the times. As the print edition enters its thirty-third year of publication, there’s also growing interest in our posts on tricycle.org and our twice-monthly podcasts: Tricycle Talks with editor-in-chief James Shaheen, launched in 2017, and Life As It Is with James and Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg, launched in 2021. Here is some of the feedback we’ve received from our listeners. 

I have been listening to your podcasts for quite a while, and I enjoy the variety of subjects and topics that you discuss. I particularly like the interviews with the authors of articles featured in the current issue of Tricycle. I feel much more connected to the author, the article, and the message conveyed by the article after having listened to the author. That deepens the experience for me, and I am grateful.

– Dave Gerlits

On “Let Life Come to You” with Pico Iyer, Tricycle Talks, March 7, 2023:

I am 71, and for the first time in my life I took the opportunity to listen to an interview with someone who, through experience and knowledge, has provided me with a very enriching understanding of the wonderment of being human and the possibilities available to us all. I admire Mr. Iyer for exhibiting a “don’t-know mind” throughout his many world travels, and I certainly appreciate his ability to welcome inclusivity with all peoples and cultures.

– Randy Nelson

On “Tired of Pretending to Be Me” with Joseph Goldstein, Tricycle Talks, June 9, 2021:

While I invariably find your podcasts to be just as high-caliber and informative as the magazine as a whole, I wanted to say that Mr. Shaheen’s interview with Joseph Goldstein is not just a wonderful interview but one of the most lucid and useful Q&As on meditation practice I’ve ever experienced. Shaheen and Goldstein have real chemistry, and what a privilege to get a taste of Joseph’s lifetime of deep lay practice. Extremely inspiring. 

– Kevin Knox

You have to appreciate someone who can use Janis Joplin to illuminate deep principles.

Thank you for the explanation of No Self. After fifteen years of studying Mindfulness and never, ever coming close to understanding that concept, one sentence from Joseph and I get it—lack of self-centeredness. Every time Tricycle offers an article or podcast, there is always a little nugget to be mined.

– Sue Legree

♦

To be considered for the next issue’s Letters to the Editor, send comments to editorial@tricycle.org, post a comment on tricycle.org, or visit us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

One of the things I’ve noticed through the years is that Tricycle has been doing a better and better job of covering the various sects of Buddhism, and the Spring 2023 issue might be the best example yet, with wonderfully informative articles on the Nichiren and Pure Land [Jodo Shinshu] schools (“Knowing Nichiren” and “True Entrusting” [now titled “One Mess Within Oneness” on tricycle.org]).

Something that fascinates me is how so many people view their practice as the only valid one. I consider sitting meditation to be the most miraculous discovery of my life. But some years ago, when I was teaching at Duke University, one of my students told me about her grandmother, a Nichiren Buddhist who moved from Japan to America for cancer treatment. She faced her illness—and her eventual death—with complete equanimity and would wake up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to chant for two hours. I was in awe of that.

One evening she gathered her family and told them how grateful she was to have them and to have discovered Buddhism. She died later that night. The best spiritual practice is the one that you actually do.

–David Guy

Dear Editors,
I just wanted to express my appreciation for your inclusion of Nichiren Buddhist perspectives in the range of articles that you publish and events that you put on. I am always pleased to see work from teachers like Bishop Myokei Caine-Barrett [head of the Nichiren Shu Order of North America] or contributions from a more academic perspective like the recent interview with Professor Jacqueline Stone (“Knowing Nichiren,” Spring 2023).

I was especially pleased to see “You Can Get There From Here” by Mark Herrick in the Spring 2023 issue and would love to see more content that explores the range of Nichiren-inspired Buddhist practice in the West beyond the better-known Soka Gakkai.

More broadly, I would welcome any contributions that illustrate how Buddhist practices can be so much more diverse than breath meditation and mindfulness, important as those practices are in their own right. Thank you.

With best regards,
John Crossland
Brighton, UK

“It was refreshing to see the sect and discipline that I follow receive some attention. Thank you for helping to educate others.”

As a Nichiren Buddhist practitioner, I was excited and pleased to read the interview with Professor Jaqueline L. Stone (“Knowing Nichiren,” Spring 2023). Nichiren Buddhism does not get the same media attention from Buddhist magazines as other traditions do—largely, in my opinion, as a result of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge. Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins conducted an exemplary interview, underscoring history, eradicating misnomers, and providing much-needed insight into the Daimoku. Please highlight Nichiren Buddhism in Tricycle more frequently, perhaps by interviewing practitioners.

It was refreshing to see the sect and discipline that I follow receive some attention. Thank you for helping to educate others. 

–Shundrea S. Trotty, MPA

Greetings,
I loved the article in the Spring 2023 issue on defilements as the path to awakening (“You Can Get There from Here” by Mark Herrick) and the interview with Jacqueline Stone (“Knowing Nichiren”). Both articles were excellent in providing insights on Nichiren Buddhism, a less-known lineage not often discussed in “mainstream” Buddhist circles. Nichiren Buddhism, particularly the Nichiren Shu lineage, has been around for over 750 years. This is a Buddhism that stresses equality and diversity. I would greatly appreciate if Tricycle could publish more articles on this very enlightened lineage of Buddhism.

With Gassho,
Nadine Shaw-Landesvatter

I really enjoyed Mark Herrick’s article on Nichiren Buddism and the Lotus Sutra (“You Can Get There From Here”). It is very interesting and informative. I look forward to seeing more articles by him.

–Kathleen Dinsmore 

In response to the Buddhism for Beginners article, “Is Buddhism a religion, a philosophy, or a way of life?”: It seems unnecessary to try to pin Buddhism down to one of these three categories since, in fact, it may be all three or just one, depending on the needs and perspective of the individual. For some, Buddhism may also be a psychology, [with] practice incorporated into a therapeutic approach. Buddhism may start out looking like one thing, say a philosophy, and later appear as a way of life and/or a religion. Despite not fitting the description of a religion using Judeo-Christian criteria, in many parts of the world Buddhism is undoubtedly a functioning religion that helps people through maintaining faith in the dharma and connects them through belonging to a sangha. Important rituals and practices help maintain and strengthen this faith, and provide people with important insights into how everything in the universe exists and how one fits into a network of relationships that is non-dual.

Maybe most importantly, as you suggest, Buddhism helps people cope with the obvious fact of suffering through a deep understanding of the four noble truths. I think the tenets of any religion should be open to question and to the test of one’s personal experience, regardless of what you call it.

-@davidtomlinson1804
on Instagram

♦

To be considered for the next issue’s Letters to the Editor, send comments to editorial@tricycle.org, post a comment on tricycle.org, or visit us on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

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I found myself returning to several of the articles in the recent Winter 2022 issue of Tricycle. The Buddhist concept of anatta, no-self, was discussed directly by Andrew Olendzki in his essay of the same title. Olendzki writes:

[No-self] goes beyond simply denying that a self exists. At the heart of the matter is how to regard the very word “exists.” According to Buddhism, phenomenological events do occur, but ontological entities do not underlie them. The functions associated with a self, such as thoughts and emotions, “exist” in the sense that they happen, but it is a projection of our language and imagination to say further that a solid entity, a spiritual essence, an unchanging substance or a transcendent energy therefore “exists” as something beyond these occurrences.

A stable substrate for our experience, a self, is “a projection of our language and imagination,” and nothing more.

In a similar fashion, Pema Chödrön ponders what passes through the transitions from lifetime to lifetime in her essay “What Goes through the Bardos?”:

We can’t locate or describe any stable element that lives through all our experiences…. There are just individual moments, happening one after another. What we think of as “consciousness” is fluid, more like a verb than a noun.

Our consciousness, our “self,” is not some entity that could be distinguished apart from the flow of our experience.

This deconstruction of the self seems to be contradicted by Yoshin David Radin’s essay “Left Foot, Right Foot.” In that essay, Radin writes:

There is something constant through all these years, and that is the light that is illuminating you. Once you enter the spiritual path, your life is no longer about fulfilling your individuality, that is an impossible thing….

There is within you that which is beyond birth and death, beyond success and failure. It just knows that you are, and it is…. [Y]ou should realize that within you is that which is eternal, which is unaffected, which is present within all things as the core of their being, and which is pure spirit, completely nonmaterial.

How do you become aware of the inner illumination? How do you become aware that there is a deeper knower? The path will always be in the present moment.

It seems there is something “constant,” “eternal,” “pure spirit” that is “completely nonmaterial.” What is someone struggling with the Buddhist concept of anatta to do with this? Is there a self or isn’t there? Is it, as Yoshin David Radin’s article seems to suggest, that we discard a “false” self to discover a “true” self?

What is someone struggling with the Buddhist concept of anatta to do with this? Is there a self or isn’t there?

While looking around for comments by other Buddhist teachers on this subject, I found, in the Spring 2014 issue, the short article “There Is No Self,” by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. He writes:

“There is no self” is the granddaddy of fake Buddhist quotes. It has survived so long because of its superficial resemblance to the teaching on anatta, or not-self, which was one of the Buddha’s tools for putting an end to clinging. Even though he neither affirmed nor denied the existence of a self, he did talk of the process by which the mind creates many senses of self—what he called “I-making” and “my-making”—as it pursues its desires.

In other words, he focused on the karma of selfing. Because clinging lies at the heart of suffering, and because there’s clinging in each sense of self, he advised using the perception of not-self as a strategy to dismantle that clinging. Whenever you see yourself identifying with anything stressful and inconstant, you remind yourself that it’s not-self: not worth clinging to, not worth calling your self. This helps you let go of it. When you do this thoroughly enough, it can lead to awakening.

As Leigh Brasington told Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar in their article “The Richest Vein in All of Buddhism”: “the Buddha wasn’t doing metaphysics; he was a phenomenologist.”

So where does this leave someone stuck at the contrasting comments by Andrew Olendzki, Pema Chödrön, and Yoshin David Radin? If we accept that all discussion is phenomenological and not metaphysical, I guess we’re fine. But has all discussion been only phenomenological? It certainly appears that Olendzki, Chödrön, and Radin are making metaphysical claims. Olendzki says no “ontological” entity underlies our thoughts and emotions. Pema Chödrön suggests there is no “stable element” throughout all of our experiences. David Radin, in contrast, says there is something “constant” through our years on the spiritual path. Have these three teachers gone beyond the foundational phenomenological claims of the Buddha to practice metaphysics?

I asked one of my teachers, Jon Yaffe, about this. His usual insightful comment was that this was why he preferred using “not-self” instead of “no-self.” He also remarked that he didn’t see phenomenology and metaphysics as dualistically opposed endeavors of the mind. I liked that, but it’s so easy to get confused, to skip past meditation’s invitation to see the dukkha caused by the mind’s activity of “selfing” and think that what’s happening instead is a debate about the ultimate structure of reality.

—Brian Wohlin

I am grateful for your commentary and coverage of the assisted dying topic, including Sarah Fleming’s review of This Is Assisted Dying by Dr. Stephanie Green (“The End of Suffering,” Fall 2022).

From any perspective, Buddhist or otherwise, this is a compelling, complex and conflicted discussion.

An important omission in your articles, however, is the 2021 change in Canadian legislation that permits death to be facilitated without the previous qualification that death be “reasonably foreseeable.” Regardless, many people still simply default to a person’s choice in this matter, preferring to uphold the principle of autonomy over all else in making the decision to end a life. Herein lies a highly contested political and ethical topic.

How is “choice” to be considered if, in the absence of adequate income, housing, mental health services, and pain relief amid government spending cuts, we offer instead a quick and cheap death? What is the Buddhist perspective on the thorny questions emerging out of the politics of death facilitation, or “deliveries,” as Dr. Green prefers to use in describing her work? And what is “choice” anyway, if not laden with context and more?

The challenges to the new Canadian legislation are not theoretical. The case of Toronto resident Michel Fraser is illustrative in the extreme, i.e., doctor-facilitated death when it is not reasonably foreseeable.

I think there is much more to be said on the Buddhist ethics of assisted dying. Tricycle’s segue into the topic is a good start.

Respectfully,
Douglas J. Cartan

I’ve been reading Tricycle since the early nineties, almost since it began, and I thought “The Invention of Nothing” (Winter 2022) by C. W. Huntington Jr. (1949–2020) was the most brilliant article I’ve ever seen in the magazine. I immediately searched the archives for other things he had written and bought his latest book. Thank you so much for printing it.

—David Guy

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Reading Ayya Khema’s “There’s No Need to Be Busy” (Fall 2022) was akin to finding the missing piece to a puzzle. Funny enough, the afternoon I discovered the article, I was contemplating whether my feelings of self-worth would be more complete if I were able to catapult myself into action and get things rolling.

My intuition told me to enjoy the peace, contentment, and relaxation of my last day off before returning to work. Yet I felt an equal pull in the opposite direction, that “I should be doing.” As though my self-dignity were at stake. I was in a mini tug-of-war between my thoughts and emotions. I feel the pressure to remain active from my family members, who are understandably motivated to see to it that I remain active and healthy. I scrolled down to see the title of this article and it was an “Ahhh . . . What have I discovered here!?” moment. It seems like Tricycle is always there to refocus me!

Like the author says, it is obviously not possible to live without activity and work. This article simply acknowledges that there should be time for restoration and relaxation in the midst of worldly activity.

That the hustle and bustle of Western society is unhealthy is very true in my case (and no doubt is true for many of my fellow Buddhists as well). This article has reassured me that I don’t have to feel guilty about that. When it’s appropriate, I can be content with things “just as they are.”

Buddha Smiles,
Colin

I want to pick up just one crucial point among many made by Bhikkhu Santi in his incisive and courageous critique of the Ajahn Chah Thai Forest lineage (“Putting Away the Books,” Fall 2022): that “seeing things as they really are” beyond any conceptual teaching or model—the very goal of that tradition’s meditation project—is in fact not possible.

Bhikkhu Santi writes that it was reading material outside the narrow range approved of by his seniors that eventually led him to see this: “I couldn’t take any lens—traditional, Buddhist, modern or other—as transparent, as a means to somehow ‘direct’ experience. I thus renounced the illusion of ‘seeing things as they are,’ along with any accompanying source of authority that claimed to transcend interpretive frameworks.”

Since this misconception is so fundamental to virtually every tradition, its revelation is a veritable bombshell in its ramifications for Buddhist teaching. It’s absolutely crucial for every Buddhist to understand and come to terms with it, so central is it to the Buddhist path.

To do so requires great courage and integrity, especially in a monastic setting such as Bhikkhu Santi’s, so radically undermining is it of the very heart of the traditional teaching. One is left forced to reassess one’s entire spiritual project all alone, bereft of the support of one’s sangha and the comfort of that traditional illusion.

“The truth we are after in our Buddhist practice is what works to liberate our heart-mind from dukkha.”

No wonder it’s traditionally been so fiercely and consistently denied. In this sense the saying attributed to Barbara Tober is apt: “Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.”

It’s most conspicuous perhaps, this radical misconception, in the Zen koan system, where “right” answers are called for to “pass” the koans.

Another independent thinker who came to a hard-won realization similar to that of Bhikkhu Santi is Dagmar Apel, as she relates in her wonderfully thought-provoking and insightful memoir Buddha’s Flower–Newton’s Apple. Reflecting on her kensho and its implications, she eventually realized “that we always become aware of an experience according to a description, an explanation or a label . . . and this includes the experience of enlightenment.”

This fact by no means negates the value of the experience; it merely changes, or refines, its meaning. It reminds us that the truth we are after in our Buddhist practice is not objective, factual truth, it’s what works to liberate our heart-mind from dukkha and its causes (at the same time not contradicting objective, factual truth). Whatever that might be for us, it will inevitably arise from, inextricably depend on, and be the particular fruit of a conceptual model, there’s no getting away from it. To see things “as they really are,” beyond and independent of any view, would require objective verifiability, impossible given the intrinsically subjective nature of such experience.

—Gordon Benson

Konda Mason and Tara Brach spoke a lot about veganism in “The Myth of Separation” (Fall 2022), but when it comes to the consumption of meat, intention is what is truly important. Alaskan Inuits and desert dwellers like the nomadic Bedouin live on animal-based foods out of necessity due to the lack of plants in their environments. Many indigenous peoples also rely on animals. Veganism itself is somewhat of a myth because many of the plants they consume in their diet house tiny insects, and in general the vegan lifestyle is only accessible to privileged communities. Most vegans I know are very loving, but in some cases the adherence to the diet can become extreme.

—Allen Howell

Tricycle editor responds:

Konda Mason and Tara Brach were not proselytizing for what you might call “extreme” veganism—rather, they were making a case for a mindful push toward “ethical eating,” which Brach defines as “eating that causes as little harm as possible to other beings, to the earth, and to our own bodies.” I understood their interview as an open invitation to be more aware of the (often unconscious) dietary choices we make and the impact those choices can have. As Brach says when asked about eating meat in moderation:

“When I invite people into this inquiry [of ethical eating], I’m talking about going in the direction of increasingly plant-based eating. . . . This is a difficult domain, because it so easily brings up defensiveness, guilt, and anger. So it’s crucial for authentic open dialogue to step beyond judgment. Judgment only creates more separation. This is about inviting all of us to look honestly at our own behavior and our own impact.

     Regarding your point about intention, Mason says later in the interview:

“I want to note that in many spiritual traditions a large part of how people practice involves sacrificing animals. We are not equating the cruelty of industrial meat production with these sacred rituals. Nor are we saying that people whose only available food source is animals should not feed themselves the way they do. However, these are exceptions, not the rule. Mostly, humans eat meat unconsciously, which supports the inhumanity we are speaking about.”

I am an avid meat-eater myself, and as much as I enjoyed this article, I doubt that any interview would halt my flesh cravings—but a sound argument is a sound argument, and that is what Mason and Brach provided. I think we could all benefit from eating a little more mindfully, and I don’t think that the fact that insects live on plants discredits their argument for ethical eating any more than the fact that microorganisms live in tap water.

—Daniel Ilan Cohen Thin,
Managing Editor

Corrections: “The Jhana Underground” (Fall 2022) incorrectly identified a Theravada monk who participated in the historic 2009 ordination of women monastics as bhikkhunis. That monk was Ajahn Sujato, not Ajahn Sumedho. Jeanne Corrigal’s October Dharma Talk was printed with the wrong title and description. The correct title is “Closer Than We Think: Gentle Reflections on Death.” The Dharma Talk will explore ways that a balanced reflection on death can support wise and diverse action in three circles: with ourselves, with our close community, and globally, with all beings, in the climate crisis. Incorrect birth and death dates were printed for Ajahn Chah (1918–1992) and Rick Fields (1942–1999).

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I have been an avid consumer of Tricycle’s digital archive ever since a friend gifted me a subscription. I usually love the content, but Matthew Gindin’s “The Middle Way of Sobriety” (Trike Daily, May 2021) troubles me. I contacted the author directly to try to understand the intent behind the article. But I couldn’t escape the need to write to you all as well. Though the article has a caveat that it does not apply to substance use disorders, some of those with said “disorders” are in denial and refuse to give up the high. For them, the article could serve as “license” to use. As someone who, like the author, eschewed rule-following until it bit me in the proverbial rear end, I know there are consequences when it comes to intoxicants. As Thich Nhat Hanh said in a 1995 Tricycle interview, the precept to refrain is for the protection of self and others, including protection from DUI or the risk of violence against family, friends, or coworkers. The answer to the challenges of contemporary society won’t be found in giving ourselves an occasional and hopefully not disastrous (though we’ll never be able to know for sure in advance) “release valve” in the form of an intoxicant. But it might be found by using Buddhism to act as sober micro-peace emissaries in our daily lives.

Thanks in advance,
B.

Matthew Gindin responds:

Hi B.,

Thank you for reaching out to express your concerns about the article. I certainly sympathize with your concerns. As I write in the article, alcohol is “a relationship better not cultivated” that does untold social and personal harm, and its use conflicts with the ideal of mental sobriety I argue in favor of.

I take you to be saying you were troubled by my suggestion that immediate, total abstention might not be the path for everyone. You feel that abstention is the only proper standard, in line with the traditional Buddhist ideal in many lineages.

The argument in my article could be summed up this way: “We should strive not to intoxicate ourselves with alcohol or anything else, but in practice many of us do in fact do so. How do we get from here to there?”

What I counsel in the article is that we begin with being honest about when and how we are self-medicating with alcohol or other quick fixes and begin taking what steps we can to make healthier choices. As I wrote there, sometimes one can mindfully watch the urge vanish and find that one is more free than one thought, but sometimes realistic, humble baby steps are better than an idealistic black-and-white position. As tempting as such a stand is, in practice it can actually be counterproductive. It can lead to people abandoning the precept altogether—which is common in Buddhist circles, at least in the West—or to repeated crash-and-burn episodes as one tries to maintain absolute purity.

What I try to suggest in the article is a way to know our limitations and gently free ourselves. While some may take that approach as license to drink, that would be contrary to the intent of the article. In fact I’m happy to say I received a number of letters from people telling me that the article helped inspire them to new efforts to be free of alcohol and other intoxicants. That was my intention: to remind people why we want to be free of intoxication and to inspire them to try to move in that direction, even if total abstention is not a realistic stance as of yet.

It is worth repeating that the article is not meant for people struggling with serious substance abuse disorders, who need to seek support and medical treatment. In that respect, it is no different from teachings that counsel immediate renunciation of all intoxicants.

Yours in the dharma,
Matthew 

I have never been more disappointed in Tricycle than I was when I read the article “Drips on a Rock” [on Shannon Watts’s campaign against the gun lobby] in the Spring 2022 issue.

I’ve thought about it a lot. I thought of unsubscribing to Tricycle, but I get so much value from it that I don’t consider that an option. However, the article did convince me that I can no longer consider myself a Buddhist in America.

Why? To me, it appears that Buddhism in America is for all practical purposes entirely captured by and a subsidiary of the political Left. To me, this is analogous to how Buddhism in Japan was captured by Japanese nationalism prior to World War II.

As a Libertarian, I have long been troubled by how Buddhist teachers use their platform to promote their own political beliefs and denigrate those with whom they disagree. It has taken me decades to get clear about this and be able to distinguish when they are promoting timeless wisdom and when their own beliefs (and possibly even anger and hatred) slip into the mix. To me, “Drips on a Rock” epitomized good/evil thinking.

—Paul Norris,
San Francisco

James Shaheen responds:

Thank you for taking the time to write. I’m happy to hear that you find value in the magazine and that you will continue to subscribe. In an increasingly polarized world, a willingness to engage with positions you find problematic or even offensive is laudable and rare.

Shannon Watts is a leading voice in the national conversation around gun violence. She also happens to have a Buddhist practice. As the editor of a Buddhist magazine, I am naturally interested in how her practice inspires and sustains her work.

Our aim from the beginning has been to provide teachings that help one navigate samsara.

You may not agree with Watts’s politics or mine—and yes, most (but not all) of our contributors skew liberal—but beyond the politics of this issue we share a genuine desire to end the horrific violence that has led to so much despair. That is certainly a place where we can meet.

Our aim from the beginning has been to provide teachings that help one navigate samsara with some degree of equanimity and compassion. As you no doubt know, people who find themselves at odds have abandoned one another over disagreements of far less consequence. Thank you for sticking with us.

—James Shaheen,
Editor-in-Chief

I can’t thank Mark Epstein enough for his article in the new summer edition of Tricycle, “How Meditation Failed Me.” I have been a Buddhist and meditator for over fifty years and a lifelong stutterer. Your description of sitting in the classroom at the beginning of the year and anxiously waiting your turn to say your name hit home. I had the same experience and anxiety each year growing up in Queens and going to PS 145. It was like you were telling my story. I was relieved to hear I wasn’t alone, having had that challenge. Perhaps my following the dharma and being a stutterer have been intricately connected. Thank you so much for the excellent and brave piece you wrote. It was healing for me in so many ways.

—Stanley

♦

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As a college Buddhist chaplain, I always had trouble justifying and explaining to students Buddhism’s apparent end goal of humans ceasing to exist by virtue of no longer being reborn. Bernat Font-Clos (“The New Tradition of Early Buddhism,” Winter 2021) clarifies the dissonance I’ve felt as a Theravada practitioner who is also life-affirming, who believes it’s possible and important to appreciate life’s pleasantness rather than shy away for fear of succumbing to attachment.

Yes, dukkha is cooked into the batter, but it’s not every ingredient. For the first five years of our marriage my wife and I so wanted children; instead we experienced unexplained infertility, two rounds of IVF, and a miscarriage of twins followed a year later by the stillbirth of our daughter.

These years also ushered in their own blessings—it was not complete dukkha. We somehow conceived naturally in early 2021 and welcomed our son Cedar into the world this past November. I’m grateful every day for this gift of life and fatherhood. And, if I’m honest, taking care of this little being is also the biggest source of suffering in my life these days (sleep deprivation, loss of self-care routines, etc.). This has been a powerful teaching for me: that our deepest chapters of dukkha are not without joy, and that our greatest joys are likewise not free from challenge.

Font-Clos carves out important space for critical commitment to both early Buddhism and appreciation of life, and in turn for dukkha to be a thread of one’s experience rather than experience itself.

— Harrison Blum, MDiv, M.Ed.
Director of Religious & Spiritual Life, Amherst College

I wanted to speak up about an article that I read recently about how life “is a dreamlike illusion” or “a mirage” and that we should “let go and rest” (“Freedom from Illusion,” Winter 2021). I have struggled massively with my mental health over the last year and as such have taken a deep dive into Buddhism and regularly read Tricycle. I don’t believe there was any ill intention, but as someone who at times struggles to get through the day without wondering if life is even worth living, I found this article triggering. I understand the message in it, but to say that this is all a dream, an illusion, and a mirage is frankly damaging to someone who struggles to find reasons to live.

I’ve heard that as we progress on the path toward enlightenment we can start to use pain and suffering as grace to help transcend that suffering. Maybe when we achieve that we might share the viewpoint that you published, but for the vast majority of us who are not there yet—and especially those of us who struggle to find real meaning in this “illusion”—hearing that life is a dream does a lot more harm than good. It doesn’t look into the nature of reality, the impermanence of the lives we have been given, the importance of karma, our speech, and actions—to me, it just dismisses our actual human experiences.

I am not attacking anybody; I just wanted to send this letter to bring awareness to how such a statement could be perceived by someone who struggles with their mental health.

—Ryan Morse

Pema Düddul responds:

When we read or hear that the Buddha instructs us to view the world as an illusion or like a dream, there is a common, and perhaps understandable, mistake we make. We think this means that nothing is real or that nothing matters, that there is no purpose to life. This mistake can cause us to feel demotivated and can even lead to despair.

We can easily see the error of this kind of thinking for ourselves by simply analyzing the nature of illusions and dreams. An illusion is not a hallucination. A hallucination is an experiencing of something that is not there, that is not real, whereas an illusion is a misperceiving of something that is actually there for something that it is not. An obvious example is when someone lost in a desert mistakes heat haze on the horizon for a distant lake. The lake is a mirage, a trick of the eye, but the heat haze is real. The essence of an illusion is therefore misperception, incorrectly interpreting what the senses perceive. Likewise, dreams are real. We all experience them. They are not the same as waking life, however, as they are produced wholly by the mind.

When the Buddha tells us to see all conditioned things as an illusion, or like a dream, he is urging us to understand that our experience of reality, and thus our understanding of it, is distorted and that the source of that distortion is the dualistic mind. He is asking us to apply this understanding specifically to our thoughts and feelings.

The Buddha is not saying that nothing exists. The world exists. Beings exist. Nor is the Buddha saying that nothing matters. The world and beings definitely matter. The whole point of Buddhism is to alleviate the suffering of beings. That suffering is real, but the cause of it is not what we think it is. What the Buddha is telling us is that most of our suffering is the result of a distorted impression of the world and ourselves. This distortion is based on inaccurate sense perception and a mind that fabricates a view of the world and ourselves based on incorrect assumptions.

Our senses and the dualistic mind tell us that we and the things of our world are permanent, solid, separate, and independently existing. The truth is that everything is impermanent, fluid, without independent existence, and deeply interconnected. This is especially true of our thoughts and feelings. Not recognizing how things really are gives rise to negative emotions. Anger, hatred, sadness, despair, jealousy, anxiety, dread, self-loathing, frustration, greed, selfishness: all these arise because we are not experiencing reality as it is, because we are misrecognizing our own nature. But these miserable mind states are not who we truly are. All negative emotions are adventitious, which means they are not inherent to our nature. Because of our misperceptions we have no sense at all of what is truly inherent in our nature and inherent in the true nature of all.

The Buddha does not want us to despair. He wants us to be free of suffering.

Recognizing the illusory and dream-like nature of conditioned things (especially our thoughts and emotions) opens the door to that which is not conditioned: the ultimate nature of our minds and of the universe. This ultimate nature is what we call buddhanature. When we recognize the fabricated nature of our experience, those negative thoughts and emotions cease to arise. When they cease to arise, the radiance of our buddhanature naturally blazes forth. That radiance is joy, love, compassion, and evenness.

Even though it may be challenging to recognize that our perception is distorted, that our understanding of the world is based on false assumptions, if we don’t face this truth we will continue to be plagued by the misery that is negative emotion. On the other hand, if we recognize the fabricated nature of our perception and experiences, we will see through the veil of illusion to what is true, what is real.

That truth, that reality, cannot be put into words, it is beyond concepts, but it has the taste of joy, love, compassion, and total equanimity. That is what reality is. That is what we are. Who does not want to abide in that state? This is what the Buddha wants for us, to abide in the perfection of our true nature, to truly know reality and ourselves. The Buddha does not want us to despair, to feel demotivated. He wants us to be free of the suffering of negative emotion. He wants us to be free of the delusion that currently obscures our perception and obscures what we truly are. He wants us to awaken to our buddhanature and join the ranks of the Victorious Ones. And we can do it in this lifetime. That is the promise of the teachings and practices coming down to us from Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal. May we all bring that promise to fruition.

♦

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It’s nice to try, as Bernat Font-Clos does (“The New Tradition of Early Buddhism”), to put a gloss of consistency on the “actual” Buddhist teachings, but I think it’s incredibly difficult. For example, the Sakalika (The Stone Sliver) Sutta states: The Buddha’s “foot had been pierced by a stone sliver. Excruciating were the bodily feelings that developed within him . . . but he endured them mindful, alert, and unperturbed.”

So did the Buddha eliminate pain or not? And then we have the Sallatha (The Arrow) Sutta: “The well-instructed disciple of the noble ones, when touched with a feeling of pain, does not sorrow, grieve, or lament. . . . So he feels one pain: physical, but not mental. Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and, right afterward, did not shoot him with another one.”

This seems psychological to me. Then we have the Maha Vacchagotta Sutta (Greater Discourse to Vacchagotta): “There are not only one hundred . . . but far more lay followers, my disciples, clothed in white, enjoying sensual pleasure, who carry out my instruction.”

This point seems important and interesting, but few details survive. This is not to say that this isn’t a point of contention.

It’s difficult to read some parts of the Pali canon and not conclude that the Buddha thought all existence was a dumpster fire. But we can’t conclude that the discourses are consistent on the matter, we don’t know what is missing from the surviving discourses, and revisionism started almost as soon as the Abhidharma texts, possibly even in early Buddhist history.

—Stephyn Butcher

Bernat Font-Clos responds:

The Pali canon is a vast collection of texts, and people debate how internally consistent it is or how it relates to what the historical Buddha said. I agree, there may well have been teachings not recorded in the canon, perhaps particularly teachings to laypeople. But whether the discourses are consistent or not depends on what is in them; it cannot rest on what may not be there. I look at those texts as the collective creation of the first generations of Buddhists—monastics, and probably mostly male—and as reflecting how they understood their own tradition and teachings.

Underlying the diversity of the early texts is a general logic or ethos that in my view is quite consistent or at the very least dominant. Lay followers do practice, they become accomplished (usually in the first three levels of awakening rather than full liberation), and still their final goal is to leave behind this changing, unsatisfactory, conditioned existence, even if that should happen in a future lifetime. Neo-early Buddhist teachers use a very different rhetoric, a life-affirming one, and what’s more, they focus not on canonical teachings for laypeople but rather on those for renunciant monastics.

You point out very well how the second arrow is psychological, but early Buddhists yearned for more than a first-arrow-only existence. They had the ambition to not be reborn. No second arrow, no first arrow—the complete ending of dukkha.

T is much to applaud in “How to Bring Our Planet Back to Life” by Paul Hawken, including its optimism, its recognition that individual change causes systemic change, and its call for reverence for all life. But it undermines itself on that last point.

Hawken says that humans and nature are “inseparably intertwined,” but he preserves the separation between them in lines like this one: “The only effective and timely way to reverse the climate crisis is the regeneration of life in all its manifestations, human and biological.”

Are humans not biological?

This separation persists in his Climate Checklist, which urges us to ask, among other things, whether an action “enhance[s] human well-being or diminish[es] it” or “serve[s] human needs or manufacture[s] human wants.”

A lot of humans believe that internal combustion engines, coal-fired power plants, and animal agriculture enhance human well-being (despite palpable evidence to the contrary). As long as we preserve this false separation, many will continue to harbor these delusions. But ask the question as the Buddha might—Do engines, power plants, and animal agriculture enhance the well-being of all sentient beings?—and the answer we get is a clear and resounding no.

—Jeff McMahon
University of Chicago • Forbes

Paul Hawken responds:

Thank you for your thoughtful critique. The phrase “regenerating life in all its manifestations, human and biological” is not intended to separate humans from biology. But it is precisely because people see nature as “other” that this sentence is important. In my book Regeneration, from which the article was excerpted, that phrase is preceded by these three sentences:

Regeneration means putting life at the center of every action and decision. It applies to all of creation. . . . Nature and humanity are composed of exquisitely complex networks of relationships, without which forests, lands, oceans, peoples, countries, and cultures perish.

The guideline asking whether an action “enhances human well-being” is at the core of justice and empathy. Without addressing human suffering, there is no path to regeneration. The book is addressed to our species. We’re the problem. We’re the solution.

Human well-being is at the core of justice. We’re the problem. We’re the solution.

It’s true that people believe fossil fuels and animal agriculture are tantamount to human well-being. Those who are privileged can rhetorically disavow these practices, but the rest of humanity depends upon them for heat, food, electricity, and so on. Transitioning to a society that enhances the living world rather than destroying it does not happen overnight. It requires compassion, thoughtfulness, and a clear delineation of how to enhance human well-being without the destructive practices that you describe. On that we certainly agree.

Thank you so much for the article “Buddhism’s Biggest Open Secret” by Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar. I have been following Buddhism since I was 12 years old at Phillips Andover, at least intellectually, but every time I tried to use concentration meditation I would panic. It was not until I reached my fifties—when I bumped into a teacher from the Plum Village tradition with whom I discussed the problems with concentration meditation—that I started working on metta (lovingkindness) meditation. A few years later, I gradually began to use the “following the breath” method of meditation.

I have questioned meditation as medicine for years, for it seems to me that separating it from ethics and philosophy is not tenable. I co-lead a humanist meditation group with a psychologist on Sunday mornings. Each week I ask the participants to understand that ethics, honesty, and self/other compassion are also required along with cultivating present-moment attention in an open, nonjudgmental way. Thanks again for allowing this article to be in your publication. I think it will do a world of good.

–Rich H Worth, Jr.Signal Mountain, Tenn.

♦

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As editors, we love to listen when an article sparks a spirited debate, as long as the conversation remains informed and civil. But we are equally pleased to hear an outpouring of gratitude, as we did following our Fall 2021 issue, which invited readers to join us in celebrating Tricycle’s 30th anniversary.

What Kurt Spellmeyer (“Helpless, Not Hopeless”) calls “helplessness” I’ve experienced in the past year as “smallness”—the reality that my individual life and impact are negligible (but not exactly zero) in a vast universe. Far from depressing me, this smallness has driven me, metaphorically, into the arms of our deepest interconnection. This is new to me, so I haven’t tried to articulate it much. But I certainly couldn’t do any better than Spellmeyer has here. What an excellent and important essay.

—John Backman

Mindy Newman’s article about Tibetan Buddhist practices for engaging with the goddess Tara (“Embodying the Healing Mother”) has been very helpful to me. I am having a flare-up of shingles, which I know is related to accumulated stress and anxiety. After reading the article, I have come to almost welcome that sickness; I must first welcome it if I am to do all I can to get rid of that sickness. I send all my discomfort to Tara, asking her to heal the sick part of my little self. Thank you so much for this deep understanding.

—Betty Dunlop

I very much enjoyed reading the conversation between two artistic stars who are fluent in the dharma, the composer Philip Glass and the painter Fredericka Foster (“Music, Meditation, Painting—and Dreaming”). The idea that you have to accept some panic, to be lost in the uncertainty of the creative expression, is counterintuitive but seems to explain creative insight. Turning off the observer-mind to increase creative energy in the artistic process may be the way of genius. Thank you! Great minds, great piece.

—Jeff

Thanks for everything you do. Particularly for those of us outside large urban areas, the Tricycle team is an important part of our sangha. And from this former magazine editor who knows how precarious a business it can be, big congratulations on making 30 years (“The 2,500-Year Argument” by James Shaheen).

—Jack

I admire the Zen teacher and author Norman Fischer and have deep appreciation for his selfless work over the years. But his article (“No Beginning, No Ending, No Fear”) feels very out of touch with the lived experience of so many people in this world who suffer from trauma, daily fear, and the constraints of poverty, violence, disease, and oppression.

Even for those of us fortunate enough to live in materially comfortable, safe environments, the approach Fischer seems to be taking here of rationalizing fear away by looking closely into experience and seeing that There is really nothing but change, so why should we feel afraid? feels hollow. Fischer writes, “Fear is always fantastic, always fake. What we fear never happens in the way we fear it.” That may be true in the narrow sense that we can never accurately imagine all the actual circumstances and minute details of an event we are afraid may happen. But what about people who live their whole lives under oppression, see generations of their families torn apart by systemic violence, and are afraid it will happen to them as well? Maybe they can’t know how actual events will unfold, but they can have a pretty good idea. And do the specific details really matter when the reality is that countless people live lives ruled by fear and under limitations imposed on them by others?

Fear is not fake. It is real. It can have very real causes. And it can arise viscerally, as Fischer says, without apparent cause. Fear is one of the great energies of life, and it can indeed offer a gateway to freedom, as Fischer writes here. But my experience has been that it is a gateway to be entered not by dismissing fear as baseless in the way a logician would dismiss a flawed argument but by moving into my fear and befriending it even when I wake up at night in sweating terror for no reason I can see—in other words, accepting that the fear is real, finding out how it feels to let it be there, and trusting that, yes, whatever happens, it will be OK because—and maybe this is his point after all—this “me” that feels fear is really just part of experience unfolding, not someone who has something to be afraid of.

If we analyze fear as a conceptual misunderstanding, we are just using another, more sophisticated escape route that can cut us off from the freedom that comes from embracing and truly knowing in our bones the insubstantiality of all existence.

—Andy Hinson

The Question

What is your favorite work of Buddhist-inspired fiction, and why?

The Buddha, Geoff and Me by Edward Canfor-Dumas. Love, loss, fear, doubt, skepticism, relief, hope, grief— it’s all in there and neatly wrapped up in some decent lay terms. It’s one of the books I read in the early days of my practice and it changed my life. I still go back to it when I need a pick-me-up.
—Kelly Day

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being for its characters, humor, and reflections on coincidence—in time and of self.
—Elizabeth Angowski

Life of Pi. Its theme is the search for the answer to the question “Is there a god?” I think it’s a story about a journey through hardships and delights in the search for enlightenment. The movie does not do it justice. I recommend this novel for one’s reading bucket list.
—Leslie

I always thought The Big Lebowski had dipped a toe or two in dharma waters, but recently I saw an interview with Jeff Bridges where he says it actually never had Buddhism as a reference; he only discovered the similarities decades later when talking to Bernie Glassman for another movie.
—@mariana_aurelio

For the next issue:

How does your Buddhist practice inform your relationship with the environment?

Email your brief responses to editorial@tricycle.org, post a comment on tricycle.org, or tweet us at @tricyclemag.

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It has been nearly three decades since Jan Nattier’s article “The Heart Sūtra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text?” sent shock waves through the Buddhist world. Her thesis—that the Heart Sutra was written in Chinese, then translated into Sanskrit rather than the other way around as was believed—has been met with strong opposition by various Buddhist communities. The following pronouncement appeared in The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (edited by Donald Lopez and Robert Buswell): “Although there is as yet no scholarly consensus on the provenance of the text, if her argument is correct, this would make the Heart Sūtra by far the most influential of all indigenous Chinese scriptures.”

Such a cautious reception belies Jayarava Attwood’s assertion in his article “Losing Ourselves in the Heart Sutra” (Spring 2021) that the Chinese origin of the Heart Sutra has been proven and renders somewhat fanciful his claim that, through similar philological methods, he has recovered a lost interpretation and a forgotten practice. Furthermore, attempting to reduce the Mahayana view of emptiness presented in the Heart Sutra to an enigmatic rendering of an earlier practice seems dubious.

Attwood tells us, “The Heart Sutra does not deny the existence of things as such. Rather, it states a truism about having lost ourselves in meditation so that we no longer experience form or self or world. However, this meaning was lost.” Drawing on Matthew Orsborn’s work on the Heart Sutra, which would replace aprāptitvād, “because there is no attainment,” with anupalambhayogena, “by means of the yoga of nonapprehension,” Attwood asserts that the famous negations are qualified twice, first by emptiness, then by the yogic practice. To determine whether this could serve to justify demoting the ontological interpretation of the Heart Sutra (and, by implication, the Perfection of Wisdom literature of which it is an exemplar) and elevating the somewhat less revolutionary epistemological interpretation advocated by Attwood would require further analysis. Having rediscovered a practice “that has been lost to us for centuries” would surely be a momentous discovery, though the practice as Attwood describes it sounds more like mindlessness than mindfulness. Seeking to draw a parallel with concentration (samādhi) or trance (dhyāna), the practice sounds so effortless, even facile, as if losing track of things (which sounds suspiciously like absentmindedness), losing track of the object of meditation, “losing track even of losing track” were the way to awakening. This is, of course, not the way attainment of the four absorptions, the four brahmavihāras, and the four immaterial spheres is traditionally described, and the reference to Bhikkhu Analayo’s Compassion and Emptiness, which discusses these practices in detail, fails to clarify or resolve the murkiness; one does not get lost but rather absorbed in the practice.
—Eric M. Zsebenyi, Naropa University graduate and Tricycle contributor

Jayarava Attwood responds:

A brief popular magazine article that condenses over 100,000 words of published research (requiring a working knowledge of Sanskrit and Chinese grammar and idiom) can be an easy target for criticism. Still, I thank my sometime sparring partner, Eric Zsebenyi, for attempting a critical reading.

Zsebenyi’s letter begins by stating that there was “strong opposition” to Jan Nattier’s conclusion. The most common reaction among English-speaking scholars, in my reading, was indifference. Most simply ignored Nattier’s 1992 article and continue to do so. Moreover, the handful of published critiques of Nattier’s work tend to be thoroughly confused about her methods and conclusions, as my recent article “Studying the Heart Sutra” in Buddhist Studies Review (March 2020) showed.

“The world with which the Buddha’s teaching is principally concerned is ‘the world of experience.’”

Nattier concluded: “The Heart Sutra is indeed—in every sense of the word—a Chinese text.” Matthew Orsborn and I have checked Nattier’s reasoning, applied her methods to other parts of the text, and arrived at the same conclusion. For example, three of my articles published in the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies—“Epithets of the Mantra” (May 2017), “Form is (Not) Emptiness” (November 2017), and “The Buddhas of the Three Times and the Chinese Origins of the Heart Sutra” (November 2018)—all strongly support Chinese origins. A forthcoming article in a premier Buddhist Studies journal will review the overwhelming evidence in favor of Chinese origins, which now goes far beyond Nattier’s initial study of the “core passage.” On this basis, I do indeed consider Nattier’s conclusion to be well founded.

The scholar and translator Bhikkhu Bodhi has said, “The world with which the Buddha’s teaching is principally concerned is ‘the world of experience,’ and even the objective world is of interest only to the extent that it serves as that necessary external condition for experience.” Applying this observation to Prajñāpāramitā, using ideas drawn from Sue Hamilton’s epistemic reading of Pali suttas, has proved a fruitful avenue of research. I intend to continue to pursue it, especially in light of recent neuroscience studies of “contentless awareness” by such researchers as Thomas Metzinger, and Ruben Laukkonen and Heleen Slagter.

The practice of “genuine, undistorted, pure descent into emptiness” (yathābhuccā avipallatthā parisuddhā suññatāvakkanti) outlined in the Cūl. asuññata Sutta (MN 121) involves “inattention” (amansikāra) to what is “present” (asuñña) allowing it to become “absent” (suñña), through a series of stages (āyatana) until all sensory experience ceases and one “dwells in emptiness” (suññatā-vihāra). Several recent studies—notably the 2016 book Old School Emptiness by Orsborn (then writing as Shi Huifeng)—make the obvious connection between this canonical practice and Prajñāpāramitā. Orsborn also, crucially, begins to disentangle Prajñāpāramitā from Madhyamaka.

My scholarship on the Heart Sutra can in most cases be obtained online. I’m happy to supply copies of articles to anyone via email: jayarava@gmail.com.
—Jayarava Attwood is a Buddhist scholar from New Zealand now based in Cambridge, UK. He was ordained in the Triratna Buddhist Order in 2005.

THE QUESTION

How has your practice changed since COVID-19 began?

As a traveling COVID nurse, I have begun to incorporate into my practice more meditations of lovingkindness and thankfulness. I thank my patients for their efforts to get well, my body for sustaining me in hot PPE day after day, and the sangha for supporting me.
—Briton Bradley
Atlanta, Georgia

My formal sitting practice fell apart. For a long time, I felt that my mindfulness of the moment increased as I needed to be vigilant with threats all around. Now I miss the deeper perspective of regular practice. Back to the cushion!
—Peggy Kersulis

I live in a nursing home and have been in lockdown for over a year. A lot of the residents sit around staring at the walls. I do, too, but I’m meditating. Some of them are bored and depressed. Without Tricycle and meditation, this pandemic would have been a lot more difficult for me. I am one lucky 89-year-old Buddhist who understands about suffering and knows how to deal with it.
—Sheila Ryan

I’ve learned to find stillness in each moment. I heard a teacher say jokingly, “You can tell someone is a monk by the way they open a door.”
—Kate (@hungryforspirits)

For the next issue:

What is your favorite work of Buddhist-inspired fiction, and why?

Email your brief responses to editorial@tricycle.org, post a comment on tricycle.org, or tweet us at @tricyclemag.

The post Letters to the Editor appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.