Buddhist Ethics and Modern Dilemmas
Spring 1993 Vol. 9 #2
Spring 1993 Vol. 9 #2
Introduction
For this issue’s introduction, Barbara Gates offers a very personal reflection on birth, death and kindness.
Features
With dry humor and deep knowledge of and faithfulness to Buddhist teachings—combined with a radical application of the precepts to our contemporary world’s crises—Robert Aitken provokes us to stretch our thinking.
Maria Monroe tells the story of a terminally ill friend’s intentional death, exploring it from varying Buddhist perspectives.
Maria Monroe talks with Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche about the karmic implications of “three categories of suicide.”
Trudy Goodman and George Bowman discuss Zen views on suicide with Maria Monroe: “What’s most important is a person’s intention.”
Ajahn Amaro Bhikkhu examines the subjective nature of “wrongness” and how to work skillfully with that which is destructive.
After taking a Buddhist vow to “try to end suffering of all human beings,” death-row inmate Jarvis Masters risks his life protecting a gay stranger.
Wary of rules and dogma, Tenshin David Schneider says it’s a tricky business to decide for others what is and isn’t Buddhism—illustrating his point with a story about Issan Dorsey in a San Francisco gay bar.
The Non-Dual Rides Again
By Christina Feldman, David Berman, Stephen Batchelor, Andrew Cohen, Steven V. Smith, Sharon Kreider, Jill Bart, Robert Pryor, Sharon Salzberg, Michele McDonald, Fred von Allmen, Tim Wyn Harris, Ajahn Amaro, Joseph Goldstein, Andrew Olendzki, Steve Armstrong, Jack Kornfield
Senior teachers weigh in on our last issue’s theme, “Teachers of Non-Duality,” offering insight on various approaches to practice and skillful means.
This article also features three cartoons by Suzie Rashkis.
Poems & Not Poems
In place of this archived issue’s poetry, we offer Buddhist humor: a collection of sketches by Suzie Rashkis.
Reviews
Worlds in Harmony: Dialogues on Compassionate Action (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, et al., Parallax Press)
Seeds of Peace. A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society (Sulak Sivaraksa, Parallax Press)
The Good Society (Robert N. Bellah, et al., Vintage Books)
Two New Books by Tibetan Lamas
Reviewed By Suzie Rashkis
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (Sogyal Rinpoche, HarperSanFrancisco)
White Sail: Crossing the Waves of Ocean Mind to the Serene Continent of the Triple Gems (Thinley Norbu, Shambhala Publications)
(96 pp., Odonian Press, Berkeley, CA)
Practice
Andrew Olendzki describes vipassana as a tool for putting the precepts into practice as a guideline for right action—day and night!
The Dharma & the Drama
Wes Nisker reminisces about seeking freedom, liberation, “a better bliss and an emptier emptiness” in “a hippie paradise.”