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Buddhism

Poetry

He Arrived In A Hollowed-Out Studebaker Lark

We also had eyes for his car. You had to give up / all possessions to live here, George fine with that — / he’d just spent two cross-country months in the thing, / its front bucket seat removed for sleeping purposes — / and now an actual Lark was our newest town-runner.

By Rupert Fike October 2022
The Sun Interview

Defending The Roof Of The World

Jamyang Norbu’s Lifelong Quest For Tibetan Independence

The Chinese empire is fragile, because it is built upon oppression. . . . If the oppression is too great, it may all come apart. If the empire were to break up, I think democracy might be possible in the smaller entities that would remain. . . . This is where Tibetans must keep up the fight and prepare for the long haul. We can prevail if we are able to keep our culture intact.

By Judith Hertog May 2021
Photography

Bhutan

The Last Himalayan Kingdom

Bhutan is the final outpost of the rapidly disappearing Tantric Buddhist culture that once guarded the Roof of the World. Tibet, Ladakh, Mustang, and Sikkim have all fallen to conquest or cultural and economic colonialism, while Bhutan — never conquered, never colonized — remains the last jewel in Buddhism’s Himalayan crown.

Photographs By John Wehrheim May 2021
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Monotheism At Thirty Thousand Feet

Below me the world turned slowly through the night, unaware of the multilayered geopolitics my coffee-jangled brain was imposing upon it. I could find reasons to forgive Judaism and Islam their present-day sins. Christianity was another matter.

By Andrew Boyd May 2020
Poetry

Two Weeks After A Silent Retreat

How quickly I lose my love / of all things. I nearly flick an ant / off the cliff of an armchair.

By Heather Lanier May 2020
The Dog-Eared Page

Fear Of Rest

In the stillness there are forces and voices and hands and nourishment that arise, that take our breath away, but we can never know this, know this, until we rest.

By Wayne Muller May 2020
The Sun Interview

Our Grand Delusion

Norman Fischer On The Tyranny Of The Self

We are paradoxical. We are beings who are limited and who will always create a world of suffering, and we’re beings who have the capacity to understand that and, in some way, go beyond it.

By Corey Fischer August 2018
The Dog-Eared Page

Two Mirrors Facing Each Other

One does not sit in order to become enlightened. One sits because, as the Buddha exclaimed at the moment of his awakening, one is enlightened as one is. The practice is simply a means of realizing this fact, which the ordinary, dualistic mind obscures.

By Lawrence Shainberg August 2018
Quotations

Sunbeams

The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.

R.H. Blyth

August 2018
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Hospital Runs

On my very first hospital run I picked up this long-faced, country white guy who’d survived seven surgeries in the last five years. He looked to be late eighties, all but dead, but friendly in a half-deaf way.

By Lee Durkee March 2018