The Six Senses
Spring 2004 Vol. 20 #2
Spring 2004 Vol. 20 #2
Introduction
Welcome to a sumptuous, multifaceted, dharmic exploration of the six senses—the instruments of our survival, the means by which we know the world and ourselves.
Features
Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests that we, as a species, must come to our senses—double entendre intended!
Legendary Berkeley chef Alice Waters talks about taste—in all senses of the word.
With luscious detail drawn from personal experience, Rev. Heng Sure describes three ways of meditating on sound.
Diane Ackerman, author of the sensuously written A Natural History of the Senses, invites us to experience life’s textures and processes while being willing to abandon our sense of self.
Zen teacher Susan Murphy guides us into a meditation on the senses.
Scholar Andrew Olendzki explains how Buddhism’s understanding of the mind as a process rather than an entity—essentially another one of the senses—”whacks the Western tradition on the side of the head.”
Vipassana teacher Ruth Denison, by turn teasing, serious and tender, offers the dharma with her trademark evocative imagery, talking about Charlotte Selver, U Ba Khin, Sensory Awareness and more.
What Mirka Knaster learned from S. N. Goenka about “body wisdom” continues to enrich her dhamma practice.
Eugene Cash presents a sampling of historical Buddhist references to sex, from the Buddha-to-be’s early indulgences in his father’s palace, to the origins of the monastic rules concerning sex, to the pleasures of sex extolled by some rascally Zen poets.
Thai master Ajahn Anan teaches that through restraining our senses the mind has greater opportunity to become peaceful.
For the first time since its inception, the Mind and Life Institute’s annual meetings, bringing His Holiness the Dalai Lama together with Western scientists, was open to the public. It sold out within an hour. Margeret Cullen conveys the excitement, delight and many surprises that filled the meeting hall.
Seeing the mind as a sense faculty, Alan Wallace says, is one of the crucial differences between the West and Buddhism.
On Barbara Gates’s daily walks in an ever-transforming park built on landfill, she finds healing for the “scrape and stench of refuse in the heart.”
Poems & Not Poems
Reviews
(Four vols., 1,514 pp., Sati Center Book Fund, 2003, free distribution)
(251 pp., Trafford Publishing, 2003)
A Mindreader’s Briefing
Reviewed By Jan Eldridge, Wes Nisker
Short reviews of Nixon under the Bodhi Tree • Following Our Bliss • The Next Enlightenment • 365 Nirvana Here and Now • Dharma River • This Precious Life: Tibetan Buddhist Teachings on the Path to Enlightenment • Take a Deep Breath: The Haiku Way to Inner Peace
Practice
Ajahn Sucitto gives instructions on how to find ease in the body, so that concentration comes naturally, with joy.
Joseph Goldstein reflects upon of the life, teachings and death of his first dharma teacher, Anagarika Munindra.
The Dharma & the Drama