Passing Along the Teachings
Spring 2008 Vol. 24 #2
Spring 2008 Vol. 24 #2
Introduction
Dennis Crean introduces our Spring 2008 theme of Passing Along the Teachings. From the vast evolutionary perspective, we humans are the “new animals” on the block. Likewise, we practitioners of Buddhism in the West are the “new kids” embracing this ancient wisdom.
Features
Prince Siddhartha left his family in search of liberation on the day his son was born. Seven years later, he became his young son’s primary caregiver—and proved a remarkably effective parent. Gil Fronsdal examines the Buddha’s parenting techniques.
. . . . . Sons & Daughters of the Buddha
Twenty-one-year-old Adam Baraz (son of Spirit Rock cofounder James Baraz) seeks the Middle Way between taking refuge in the Dharma and fitting in at college.
What’s it like to be the child of a notable Western Dharma teacher? Caroline Kornfield (Jack Kornfield’s daughter) shares her experience of growing up in a Buddhist family.
As a child growing up at Green Gulch, Tassajara and San Francisco Zen Center’s City Center, where her parents taught Dharma, Sarah Weintraub learned how to breathe through fear—a skill she put to good use later, doing human-rights work in a Columbian war zone.
Soren Gordhamer describes how the work of Stephen and Ondrea Levine became a major, lifelong influence on him and his “alternative-minded” family when he was a teenager in conservative West Texas.
When Youth Yoga Dharma founder Cator Sachoy teaches mindfulness practice to abused and neglected foster kids in a residential mental health treatment center, they transform.
Features
Buddhist scholar Bhikkhu Bodhi discusses the Buddha’s decision to leave his wife and child to become a wandering ascetic and pursue enlightenment.
Reflecting on Siddhartha’s renunciation of family, Norman Fischer contemplates sacredness, particularity and the loss that these entail.
Interview with Rosemary Rawcliffe: Women of Tibet Carrying the Culture
By Barbara Gates, Phyllis Pay
The Dharma has been passed along for many centuries throughout Asia, and women have played a fundamental and often unacknowledged role in its transmission. Barbara Gates and Phyllis Pay interview filmmaker Rosemary Rawcliffe on this subject, focusing on her Women of Tibet trilogy and the Great Mother archetype.
Sayadaw U Tejaniya’s more “relaxed” form of retreat practice has recently inspired Western vipassana students and teachers, as Mirka Knaster reports.
Barbara Gates’s wacky hat keeps appearing and disappearing, inspiring kindness, joy and generosity along the way.
Andrew Schelling sees poetry and Dharma as very similar in that they are both explorations of our life in the world, ways of making a journey as opposed to a dogmatic explanation of our reality.
Dharma Jewel
Kate Lila Wheeler on the adventures of a gifted sage who “never quite became a grown-up in the Dharma.”
Reviews
Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World, by Wendy Johnson
Reviewed By Patrick McMahon
(433 pp., Bantam Books, 2008)
Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict, by Tsultrim Allione
Reviewed By Sandy Boucher
(230 pp., Little, Brown & Co., 2008)
The Sound of Silence: The Selected Teachings of Ajahn Sumedho, by Ajahn Sumedho
Reviewed By Brenda Walsh
(350 pp., Wisdom Publications, 2007)
(113 pp., Wisdom Publications, 2007)
(206 pp., Parallax Press, 2007)
(CD, 54 minutes, 2007)
Making Waves and Riding Currents: Activism and the Practice of Wisdom, by Charles Halpern
Reviewed By Wes Nisker
(274 pp., Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008)
Christian Insight Meditation: Following in the Footsteps of John of the Cross, by Mary Jo Meadow, Kevin Culligan and Daniel Chowning
Reviewed By Rev. Heng Sure
(267 pp., Wisdom Publications, 2007)
Practice
Joseph Goldstein describes the use of perception and conceptual thinking in our development of meditative awareness.
The Dharma & the Drama
Wes Nisker says that from the vast evolutionary perspective, no one among us is to blame for who we are.