We’re looking at the cycling of Buddhist teachings in contemporary America—between parents and children, classroom teachers and students, the subculture and the culture. Passing Dharma Around the Generations. Our title doesn’t quite satisfy us, but we’ve let it stand for lack of a better one. Mostly, we aren’t satisfied because dharma isn’t an “it” to be passed around. As Joseph Chilton Pearce suggests, we don’t teach a prescription, but a way of being.

While we were trying to figure out how to introduce the diverse voices gathered here, a note arrived from contributor Susan Moon. “I hope you and your big and little families are all well.” It occurred to us that all of the articles are about the teaching of, and awakening to, dharma in our smaller and/or larger families—our blood families, our classrooms, our communities, our country, our planet.

In his talk on the crisis in parenting, Jack Kornfield says that a loss of connection with the larger family—the community of elders, the village, the earth—is the source of many problems facing the world today from the depleted ozone layer to dysfunctional families. Unless we are informed by the wisdom of the natural world, the values of the heart, these crises will continue.

Several articles tell stories of our smaller families. Each, in its own way, draws on the larger family, expanding back through the centuries. The parents and children in Patrick McMahon‘s stories are sustained and inspired by traditional tales and rituals: the pilgrimages of the old Ch’an monks, the parable of the Buddha leaving home, celebrations of Hanukkah, Buddha’s Birthday and the Solstice. With guidance from generations of grandmothers, Barbara Gates and her three-year-old experience the teachings of the natural world. Other experiences open out from the moment into the “largeness” as when Judith Stronach shares a surprise teaching with a homeless man and another with a child drawing a flower.

Other articles focus on the larger family—on communities joining together to create, practice or celebrate. When Susan Moon‘s blood family leaves her nest, she finds family in her Buddhist sangha. Wes Nisker joins the families of the counterculture—the beatniks and the hippies—as they introduce the teachings of the East to balloon-filled auditoriums and Human Be-Ins. Betsy Rose forms new sangha families through circles of song-making.

For John Seed, family is the community of the natural world, with its dirt, water and rock. The rainforest offers him a powerful experience of no-self, of interconnectedness, of his own umbilical tie to the earth. For Wayne Muller spiritual awakening itself involves letting go of “our family lineage,” leaving behind “our primary identity as children of these particular beings” and claiming “a deeper lineage as a child of the earth.”

Of course, big family versus small is an arbitrary duality posited to frame this introduction. Attention to the tiniest includes all. As five-year-old David Richter says in the Kids’ Poetry Pages:

your hand is a pocket

for my kisses

∞

From the Spring 1992 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 8, No. 2)

Text © 1992–2021 by Inquiring Mind