Each month, Tricycle features articles from the Inquiring Mind archive. Inquiring Mind, a Buddhist journal that was in print from 1984 to 2015, has a growing number of articles from its back issues available at www.inquiringmind.com. Today’s selection from the Fall 1997 issue, Liberation & the Sacred, was adapted from an interview conducted with Joseph Goldstein by Andrew Cooper and Barbara Gates. It seems to me that all those who enter a spiritual path have very similar goals, though these goals may not always be articulated. These might b...

I find Japanese architecture and interior design extraordinarily beautiful. This has been true for a long time. In the very early days of my practice, Japanese-style surroundings seemed to be a necessary part of zazen, even if it was in a big old landmark house in Riverdale, New York. Although it wasn’t a monastery in Japan, Zen Center New York did its best to imitate one. It worked as long as you didn’t look at the walls and the ceiling, or the stairway and the carpets outside the zendo.  I remember reading in one of Trungpa Rinpoche’s books t...

If consciousness is an ocean, thoughts are waves that can be churned into vast storms. Have you ever awakened in the wee small hours, adrift on your tiny raft of awareness, to find yourself confronted by such a storm? Perhaps an icy wind is whipping up the memory of something you read about COVID and slapping you in the face with it: So now I have to tell the daughter that both her parents are dead in a matter of three days. Her dad’s not even buried yet. You blink up at the ceiling and take a deep breath, before being struck by another blast: ...

Born and raised in Paris, Lama Droupgyu Wangmo, née Fabienne Guillaume, began studying traditional Chinese medicine when she was twenty. The school’s Chinese medicine master had asked students to practice qigong every day for at least an hour, and Fabienne, who practiced assiduously, began to have practice-related experiences—some of them troubling—in which the material world seemed less solid than usual. She had questions about her perceptions as well as about the mind’s influence on health and well-being in general. She spoke about this with ...

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 st...

Masahiro Mori (b. 1927) is a leading pioneer in the research and development of robotics and president of the Mukta Research Institute in Tokyo. In 1974, Mori published The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion, which explores the relationship between religion, Buddhism, and science. It quickly became a classic in robotics and AI (artificial intelligence) and continues to be cited in contemporary scholarship on the ethical implications emerging with the proliferation of robots in our everyday lives. Imbuing hi...

One of the Buddha’s most important insights was that what we experience in the present moment is not entirely caused by the past. Some of our experiences do come from past karma. But the important part is how we shape the raw material coming in from the past through our present intentions. The Buddha calls this process of shaping sankhara, or fabrication.  There are three kinds of sankhara. There is a bodily fabrication, which is the in- and out-breath. There is a verbal fabrication, which the texts call directed thought and evaluation. It’s ba...

March 13, 2023 marks three years since COVID was first declared a national emergency in the US. This week, we’ll be sharing pieces that reflect on how COVID altered all of our lives. Looking back at the challenges of the past three years, I find myself returning to the Diamond Sutra, which is such a guiding light. Short as it is—thirty-two brief chapters—it seems to convey exactly what I need to hear when I need to hear it. At this time, chapter sixteen really resonates, especially when I alter the text from the third-person plural (they, their...

March 13, 2023 marks three years since COVID was first declared a national emergency in the US. This week, we’ll be sharing pieces that reflect on how COVID altered all of our lives. Sitting in this room, in an out-of-the-way part of the medical center, I can feel a deep quiet, almost like sesshin. The atmosphere is still but expectant. Across from me is another clinician who is enrolled in a clinical trial and has just taken a study drug that might or might not be psilocybin. Neither I nor the clinician participating in the study knows whether...

March 13, 2023 marks three years since COVID was first declared a national emergency in the US. This week, we’ll be sharing pieces that reflect on how COVID altered all of our lives. Larry Brilliant, doctor, philanthropist, entrepreneur, and ex-hippie, was a crucial player in the global effort to eradicate smallpox in 1973, but his path there was unusual. He was ensconced in an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas when his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, told him to go to Delhi immediately to help eradicate smallpox in India, one of the world’s las...

March 13, 2023 marks three years since COVID was first declared a national emergency in the US. This week, we’ll be sharing pieces that reflect on how COVID altered all of our lives.  Once a week, for more than five years, seven Buddhist devotees met with Phra Atid, a resident monk at Wat Thao Thaen Noi, outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand, where they would study English and practice meditation together. This simple community connection was taken for granted until March 2020, when everything changed. “There were no Buddha Day ceremonies, monks had ...

Sometimes folks ask me whether they can, and should, bring Zen monastic practices into their ordinary home, work, and family lives.  Should they stick to strict schedules of ritualized behavior? Must one seek to be mindful and graceful in every step and gesture? Should they chant more during their day and otherwise limit speech or undertake strict vows of silence? Would it be good to take most meals in slow oryoki ceremony, bow to the toilet and sink before each use, sleep on a hard bed, sit zazen for hours on end, and wear only plain robes? Sh...

My friend Michael died in late January at the age of 39. Two weeks prior, he and his partner Addie came to Buddhist practice for the first time at our temple in Malvern, UK. He shared that he had four months between his cancer diagnosis and his death. In the shadow of his shortened life, I have been asking myself what it means to live a good life. Is it necessary for us to have a spiritual practice or a spiritual dimension to our lives in order to live well? As a Pure Land Buddhist, I have also been wondering if Michael, having said the name of...

The Dharma of Western Literature In this series on The Dharma of Western Literature, we consider six classic works through the lens of the six paramitas, or sublime virtues: generosity, ethical conduct, patience, diligence, meditation, and wisdom. Next up is patience, or kshanti.  *** When you studied Macbeth in English class—or skimmed the CliffsNotes and hoped for the best—you probably learned the standard interpretation: Macbeth’s fatal flaw is ambition. Ambition, we are told, is the great error that fuels his ruthless drive to become king o...

Many of my earliest childhood memories take place in nature. Sitting at the banks of a creek in rapt silence, marveling at the tenacity of crocuses blooming in late winter, and singing, drumming, and dancing surrounded by forests and fields. In my relationship to the earth, I found wisdom, enchantment, and magic. Truly, nature was my first dharma teacher. While I did not have the language for this at the time, my fingers can now trace the shamanic undercurrent present in these earliest experiences of the sacred. It is this undercurrent that has...

Radiating outward from the Boudhanath Stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal, is a web of streets and alleys buzzing with activity─dharma activity─of a large Tibetan community. On a quiet, hidden corner, sits Tek Chok Ling Nunnery─home to some seventy nuns ranging in age from 5 to 85 years old. Completed in 2006, the abbey, one of several started by the beloved scholar, teacher, and yogi Khenpo Tsültrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, is dedicated to the life and practice of female monastics. The nuns at Tek Chok Ling carry on a regular, weekly sacred dance practice from...

Between-States: Conversations About Bardo and Life In Tibetan Buddhism, “bardo” is a between-state. The passage from death to rebirth is a bardo, as well as the journey from birth to death. The conversations in “Between-States” explore bardo concepts like acceptance, interconnectedness, and impermanence in relation to children and parents, marriage and friendship, and work and creativity, illuminating the possibilities for discovering new ways of seeing and finding lasting happiness as we travel through life. *** “Writing chose me,” says author...

On an April morning in 2019, my sister rested in a California hospital bed and gazed with wonder at her beautiful new infant. A thirty-minute drive away, my father also rested in a hospital bed, fighting his years-long battle with stage IV melanoma. Across the country, I sat perched on the edge of a plastic blue chair in the airport waiting to board a plane from Boston. Knowing my dad was very ill and that my sister would want help with her new baby, I had decided to take a week off from my busy working-parent life.  That decision was an obviou...

In recent days, sangha members and other friends have written to me, sharing the fear and sadness in their lives: stories of illness and addiction, a loved one’s death, violence and war (a friend in Ukraine), lost jobs, lost relationships, and lost hope. What do I as one person, one friend, one Buddhist priest, have to offer to them? I sometimes feel powerless in the face of so much pain.  What do I, as one friend, have to offer? Of course, as a friend, I lend an ear, a shoulder, and some practical advice when I can. We sometimes cry together, ...

Charles Johnson writes every novel as if it’s the last thing he’s going to do. He believes that art holds the power to free us from our habitual ways of viewing the world, and he structures each of his novels around a core philosophical question. Since the publication of his first novel in 1974, he has published ten novels, three cartoon collections, and a number of essay collections that explore Black life in America, often through the lens of Buddhist literature and philosophy. In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief...