Today, we celebrate His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s 87th birthday! His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet and one of the most beloved and recognized leaders of our time, turns 87 today. His Holiness is the fourteenth person to be recognized as a Dalai Lama, believed to be a manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. The […]
Seven in the morning. Forty-seven degrees. October 2. I’m up to my knees in sage and rabbitbrush by the wide expanse of the Summer Lake playa in Oregon. Perfectly flat for forty square miles, the playa is the chalky white bed of an ancient, land-locked lake. Beside the empty expanse, I stand at the center of the four directions. To […]
On the Fourth of July today, I wanted to see how the value of the Declaration of Independence would merge with the Path of Awakening. I have two copies of the Declaration of Independence that I bought in Philadelphia from the printing press of Benjamin Franklin, the Franklin Court Printing Office. As a Frenchman, I was thinking about the philosophers […]
I walked a long and winding road before I found dharma friends. I’d always thought meditation was basically a solo affair. In my twenties, I got a mantra from a Transcendental Meditation class and meditated twice a day alone in my apartment. After a few years, I stopped, and then many years later I learned T’ai Chi Chih, a Qigong-infused […]
In 1974, scholar Roger Jackson attended a lecture on karma and rebirth at the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala. At one point, the teacher, the Venerable Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey, shared a story about two brothers who were reborn as fish as a result of their misdeeds toward each other. After the talk, Jackson approached the translator to […]
He was only four when his parents fled Vietnam for America in 1975, and he has few memories of the war. But the Vietnam War and its personal, political, and emotional toll is at the heart of the work of the novelist and social critic Viet Thanh Nguyen. Nguyen serves up the existential despair left behind by the war as […]
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 (help Inquiring Mind complete its archive by donating here). Today’s selection is from the Fall 2004 issue, Reconciliation. “My mind fills with anger each […]
In this teaching from 1965—taken from the oldest extant recording of his talks—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi explains what it means to understand your true nature. Shunryu Suzuki with first rice “crop” at Tassajara, c. 1968. Photo by Clarke Mason. We have been studying the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch—and with it, prajna, or wisdom. But this wisdom is not intellect […]
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” —Anonymous My wife, Lizzy, has this bright yellow sweatshirt that reads, “Bee Kind,” and has a bumblebee on it. (She also has a sweatshirt that says, “C’est La Vie,” though that’s fodder for another column.) Anyway, I bring this up because “Be Kind” is a maxim that my dog, […]
The Sources of Buddhist Traditions is a monthly column from three of the major digital resources for Buddhist research, texts, and translation: Buddhist Digital Resource Center, The Treasury of Lives, and 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. Focusing on stories, texts, translation, and teachers, the series will illuminate aspects of Buddhist practice, thought, and tradition. A year before the […]
