Meditation Teachers Research Articles

Buddhist meditation: an anthology of texts from the Pali canon

Meditative practice lies at the heart of the Buddhist tradition. This introductory anthology gives a representative sample of the various kinds of meditations described in the earliest body of Buddhist scripture, the Pali canon. It provides a broad introduction to their traditional context and practice and supplies explanation, context and doctrinal background to the subject of meditation. The main themes of the book are the diversity and flexibility of the way that the Buddha teaches meditation from the evidence of the canon. Covering fundamental features of Buddhist practice such as posture, lay meditation, and meditative technique it provides comments both from the principal early commentators on Buddhist practice, Upatissa and Buddhaghosa, and from reputable modern meditation teachers in a number of Theravadin traditions. This is the first book on Pali Buddhism which introduces the reader to the wide range of the canon. It demonstrates that the Buddha's meditative tradition still offers a path of practice as mysterious, awe-inspiring yet as freshly accessible as it was centuries ago, and will be of interest to students and scholars of Buddhism as well as Buddhist practitioners.

Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha (review)

Reviewed by: Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha Aaron Gross Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha, edited by John Keenan, Linda Klepinger Keenan, and Harold Kasimow. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2003. 288 pp. $14.95. Beside Still Waters wears its tremendous significance lightly. This readable volume provides a unique combination of reflection on the transformative power of inter-faith encounter and documentation of that encounter in the lives of committed Christians and Jews. The bulk of the book consists of a collection of remarkably candid, autobiographically driven essays by seven Jewish and seven Christian scholars and religious leaders. Though the form is personal testimony, taken as a whole these essays present an argument for the value of the inter-faith encounter in conscious opposition to those who fear its effects. A stimulating final section consists of four essays respectively written from a sociological, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist perspective by authors who have read the fourteen primary essays and are reflecting on the inter-faith encounter more broadly in light of their own experience and research. This final section is implicitly a model of the sort of discussion the book hopes to stimulate; indeed, providing a platform for further reflection and analysis—and getting that process started—is the great merit of this volume. Those who pick up this book as seekers will find themselves in the company of fellow travelers who will offer them life stories filled with keen observation and theological nuance. Readers with scholarly interests in pluralism, inter-faith encounter/dialog, or the modern and contemporary Western religious landscape more generally, will find a groundbreaking collection of primary sources on how the encounter with Buddhism is propelling Jews and Christians towards their tradition in new ways. Both audiences will benefit from the book's useful, partially annotated list of suggested reading and helpful index. The contributors are all "seniors" in the Jewish and Christian encounter with Buddhism who first were exposed to Buddhism 20 to 40 years ago. Significantly, many are also professional clergy, popular writers, or are otherwise active in the mainline Jewish and Christian community; they are mediators as well as representatives of this encounter. Among the seven Jewish contributors we find Sylvia Boorstein, a highly regarded Buddhist meditation teacher, who tells of the great trepidation with which she "came out" to her fellow meditation teachers as a "nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn" (p. 21). As it turned out, Boorstein's "confession" was what Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi—another contributor—called a "no-karma event," meaning, in part at least, that no one was surprised or worried by her dual identity. This is a theme that runs throughout the volume. While many of the contributors had setbacks along they way, these are largely stories [End Page 197] of individuals who have found acceptance in their respective Jewish and Christian communities. A closely related theme that is found particularly in the Jewish respondents is how the contributors' encounter with Buddhism, and sometimes other Asian traditions, led them back to their birth tradition—that is, to the degree they ever left it. Professor Nathan Katz's puts it simply, "I don't believe I would have found my way into an Orthodox Jewish life had it not been via a Buddhist/Hindu route." In all cases, the contributors share how their encounter with Buddhism has deepened their own—and sometimes their communities'—religious life as Jews or Christians. Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi's essay, the only one which takes the form of an interview, is particularly informative on this point, for he has been at the hub of the Jewish-Asian encounter and has served as mentor and guide to many of the most prominent figures in that encounter, including several of the Jewish contributors to this volume. He suggests that Buddhist mindfulness has helped people recover aspects of Judaism that were previously obscured, "It's been there all along! But it's almost as if the scales fell off the eyes because we went next door" (p. 90). The theme of rediscovering aspects of one own tradition is another that runs through the volume. As Dr. Maria Reis...

Friends

Friends Manjushree Thapa (bio) By day, Kathmandu's tourist district, Thamel, hawks trinkets and curios. The Dutch, the Italians, the Germans, the Japanese, the French, the Americans, the Israelis—tourists all—come to the memorabilia shops to buy Buddhist mandalas, turquoise bracelets, Gurkha knives, bottled water, pashmina shawls, demon masks, rice-paper notebooks, chocolate bars, hiking boots, embroidered T-shirts that read I LOVE MOUNT EVEREST. A roll of Fuji film sells for three hundred here and twenty rupees less over there; each price is negotiable. All day, the streets bustle with bargaining: "Sixty." "Last price fifty." As evening falls, Thamel crowds travelers into its low-budget restaurants, and they become wide-eyed with wonder because serendipity has brought them together in—of all places—Kathmandu, Nepal. For less than two dollars each, they eat eggplant lasagna, garlic naan, schnitzel, swimming rama, stir-fries, buffalo dumplings, risotto, curry, and pizza while swapping adventure stories and worldviews. "My meditation teacher said flowers bloom even in the desert." "I found an awesome used bookstore selling Pico Iyer." "The first main thing I don't like of Nepal," some tourist declares in broken English, "is the dirty air." Indeed, the exhaust from the city's cars and buses is one of the largest cracks in this patched, foggy mirror image of Western dreams: a mirror quicksilvered with incredible mountain stories, some fantastic tales of Kew, and a Cat Stevens song about Kathmandu. The traditional Nepalis who inhabit Thamel, however, cannot begin to identify the syncopated beat of Bob Marley competing with the wail of Joan Baez around the corner. Hoping to profit by the tourists nonetheless, most locals have rented out their houses to hotels, restaurants, and shops and moved their families to quieter neighborhoods. Proper Kathmandu shuns Thamel. Driving by on some rare occasion, the nation's who's-who murmur, "This is where we used to play ball as boys. It was just an empty field," and then exclaim, "There was a sweetmeat store—and look: there it is, still, beneath that INTERNATIONAL TRUNK CALL FAX PHOTOCOPY SERVICES sign. I wonder if it's still run by that pock-marked shopkeeper." The sweetmeat store, as it so happens, has changed hands several times and now belongs to Kuber Sharma, a recent migrant from the south who [End Page 169] takes the growth of concrete houses around his shop as a personal insult. "Why can't I have a house of my own?" he mutters to a picture of Laxmi, the Goddess of Wealth, as he heats the oil in which he fries, for one despondent hour every morning, the crisp, sugared sweetmeats that he sells for the rest of the day. Warding off flies, sipping weak tea, counting change for customers, Kuber Sharma curses his fate and his young wife, who makes expensive demands of him; but he does, at the end of each month, make enough to pay his rent and meet his living expenses. Tenzing Namgyal, keeper of the art shop next door, doesn't believe in God because he is Tibetan, and the Buddha said there is no God. Tenzing is flexible, though, and will question his views when talking to a foreign woman. The prettier the foreign woman is, the more religious-minded Tenzing is inclined to become. "This is Avalokitesvara, future Buddha," he says serenely in his high-school English, spreading for her benefit a scrolled acrylic painting. "One-hundred-percent vegetable dye." He strokes the deity's pink navel. "For you, only two thousand. Where you from—Italian?" Kamal Malla, a young computer programmer, strolls by Tenzing's store every evening on his way back from work. He is charmed by this part of Kathmandu, so different from his own staid, duty-bound corner of the city. When the sky darkens and halogen lights switch on, he hears old men and women greet each other as though a new day has begun. And indeed it seems to have. Rust-colored lights warm the air. Peddlers press close and whisper, "Hashish?" "Tiger balm?" "Change money?" Irate tourists brush past. "No, no, no." Flutes and saxophones riddle the night. Kamal stops to take in picturesque sights: a...

Is It Sick to Want to Live to 100? The Popular Culture of Health and Longevity

Is It Sick to Want to Live to 100? The Popular Culture of Health and Longevity