January 2022

Lion's Roar

BUDDHISM CULTURE MEDITATION LIFE

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Lion’s Roar
MELVIN MCLEOD Editor-in-Chief ANDREA MILLER Deputy Editor ROSS NERVIG Assistant Editor NANCY CHU Associate Editor MIHIRI TILLAKARATNE Associate Editor PAMELA AYO YETUNDE Associate Editor MEGUMI YOSHIDA Art Director ANDREW GLENCROSS Deputy Art Directo
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She Who Hears The Cries Of Marines
IN 2010, I LED a Marine fire team in Afghanistan. The men and women I served with were smart, strong, and capable in ways I’ll never measure up to. They endured cold, hunger, and the threat of death because they felt they were making the world a bett
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Physician, Heal Thine Own Poisons
AS THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC puts enormous pressure on health care systems in the U.S. and globally, often overwhelming local systems, all of us in the medical field have been forced to take a hard look at how we care for our patients, our colleagues, an
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More From Lion’s Roar
COURSES | EVENTS | PARTNERSHIPS | NEWS Making meditation part of your day can help you find your center and inner calm. But first, you have to make it happen, and that’s what our new special publication, Learn to Meditate, is all about. The guidance
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Meditation Masters
The original mindfulness teacher. LOOKING INTO MEDITATION for the first time, a beginner won’t search long before coming across the Buddha. It can fairly be said that the Buddha was the world’s first mindfulness teacher. He taught mindfulness meditat
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Pema Chödrön
IN TOUGH TIMES, people turn to American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. Her best-selling books like The Wisdom of No Escape, Start Where You Are, and When Things Fall Apart are passed around by those looking for wisdom and practices that help when life’s
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Gifts From The Garden
“HŪI!” MY NEIGHBOR Wanna’s voice makes a two-syllable birdsong out of the greeting. “I have bananas for you.” The bananas are a pale emerald color, still firmly attached to the thick stem, and I accept them gratefully. Then we stroll around my ramsha
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Is Ritual An Important Part Of Your Buddhist Practice?
Ritual helps me stop, pay attention, settle, and sink down. It brings me back to my breath, to now. —Dawn Smart, Union, Washington Ritual is not part of my practice. I found Buddhism in a round-about way through Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day.” B
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Charlotte Joko Beck
ONE OF THE FIRST Western women Zen teachers, Charlotte Joko Beck had a profound impact on the practice of Buddhist meditation in America. Coming to Zen after raising a family, Beck revolutionized how meditation connects with one’s personal psychology
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Ajahn Chah
“LOOKING FOR PEACE is like looking for a turtle with a mustache,” Ajahn Chah once taught. “You won’t be able to find it. But when your heart is ready, peace will come looking for you.” To keep his heart ever ready, Ajahn Chah, a key figure in the Tha
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Together In This Moment
CONSIDER THIS: “If we treated each part of the world with the respect we give to those we recognize as our equals in everyday life, how would our behavior change?” So asks Marc Andrus in Brothers in the Beloved Community (Parallax), the true story of
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Show Up In A Good Way
“I HOPE YOU WILL show up in a good way,” said Ojibwe great-grandmother Mary Lyons. Resplendent in a brightly colored long skirt, she was flanked by her daughters and granddaughters. Behind them lay a glittering lake, towering trees, and representativ
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Jon Kabat-Zinn
JON KABAT-ZINN DOES NOT identify himself as a Buddhist meditation teacher. But he is a Buddhist and he teaches meditation. In fact, as the leading figure in the secular mindfulness movement, he has brought more people to mindfulness meditation than a
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Mahaprajapati’s Daughters
I WAS FIFTEEN when my friend’s dad stumped me with a riddle: “A man and his son get into a terrible car crash. The father is killed instantly, but the son is rushed to hospital where the surgeon says, ‘I can’t treat the boy. He’s my son.’ How is this
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Attachment Theory
Tenzin Palmo shares how she discovered the real meaning of renunciation. IF YOU READ TRADITIONAL TEXTS, like The Words of My Perfect Teacher by Patrul Rinpoche, you know that it is regarded as a sine qua non of the spiritual life that the first thing
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“Now I’ve Seen The Blessed One!”
Attributed to Mahaprajapati, this ancient poem celebrates her spiritual attainments. Buddha! Hero! Praise be to you!You foremost among all beings!You who have released me from pain,And so many other beings too. All suffering has been understood.The s
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The Moment The Mind Let Go
Kee Nanayon on her experience of being simply aware of the mind. ONE NIGHT I WAS SITTING in meditation outside in the open air—my back straight as an arrow—firmly determined to make the mind quiet, but even after a long time it wouldn’t settle down.
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Thich Nhat Hanh
The war in Vietnam was raging, and so were many of us young Americans. We were meeting a frontier of consciousness that focused on freedom, the environment, justice, and nonviolence. Yet for many of us, our sense of moral outrage toward the governmen
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Peace Begins with You
If you want to change the world, says THICH NHAT HANH, start with your own mind. We need a real awakening, a real enlightenment. New laws and policies are not enough. We need to change our way of thinking and seeing things. This is possible; the trut
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Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams
Like many other African Americans back then, I was introduced to Buddhism in 2001 through a book written by someone who was not Black. Since then, a sea change in American Buddhism and Black religion has occurred in just one generation, and I attribu
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Prophetic Wisdom
REV. ANGEL KYODO WILLIAMS on the unconventional prophets called for in these times. With the exception of Malcolm X, the Black prophetic voice has been erringly associated with Christianity. The prophets called for in these times necessarily arise fr
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Robert Aitken
Robert Baker Atken, a roshi who received dharma transmission from Koun Yamada and lived as a layperson, continues to teach us what socially engaged Buddhism can look like in the West. As a member of the board of directors of the Buddhist Peace Fellow
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Zen Master Raven
Early one morning Woodpecker flew in for a special meeting with Raven and asked, “I’ve heard about essential nature, but I’m not sure what it is. Is it something that can be destroyed?” Raven said, “That’s really a presumptuous question.” Woodpecker
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Maha Ghosananda
Maha Ghosananda is best known for leading peace walks in Cambodia in the 1990s. These walks, called the Dhammayietra, first took place following a peace agreement between the Phnom Penh government andrebel groups. The first walk, in 1992, was from re
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Dharma 24-7
The dharma is timeless, says MAHA GHOSANANDA, because it’s always true. Life is filled with eating and drinking through our senses, and life is also keeping from being eaten. What eats us? Time! What is time? Time is living in the past or living in t
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Wonder Beyond Words
We have received an inestimable gift. To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe—to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it—is a wonder beyond words. And it
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Joanna Macy
If that humanity faces today, then Joanna Macy is unquestionably one the most important teachers of our time. Whenever I reflect on the path of the ecosattva—the bodhisattva dedicated to saving the earth—Joanna is the model that comes to mind. Joanna
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Teachers You May Not Know But Should
Ven. Bhante Suhita Dharma taught through his good deeds. “EXPERIENCE IS the best teacher when it comes spiritual practice,” the late Ven. Bhante Suhita Dharma once said, reflecting on his own life. Born into the Jim Crow South, the racism he endured
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15th ANNUAL ONLINE AUCTION
:: ART beauchamping, BoulderShop, Carl Lennartson, Dan Piraro, Erin Brown, Faith Stone, Good Nature Publishing Company, Kali Levitov Art, Lasha Mutual, Laura Santi Sacred Art, Mahakala Fine Arts, Marlena Agency and Gwenda Kaczor, Mary DeVincentis, ma
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The Art Of Awakening
Architecture, sculpture, and painting have always played a critical role in Buddhism. As well as serving as teaching aids for the practice and dissemination of Buddhism, they also act as important counterparts to written texts as a record of ever-evo
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Why Do Buddhas Look So Different?
When Buddhism spread from Siddhartha Gautama’s birthplace in today’s Nepal to many parts of Asia, texts were often translated into local languages to make the teachings of the Buddha accessible to different peoples. Was Buddhist art and imagery also
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Helping Hands
ENGAGED BUDDHISM recognizes that suffering —dukkha in Buddhism—isn’t just an individual matter. Suffering is caused both by our personal actions, our karma, and by the social systems we live in and create. The individual and society are inseparable,
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What Are You Looking At?
A descendant of samurai, Rima Fujita was born in Tokyo, lived in New York City for thirty-two years, and now resides in California. She’s internationally recognized for her method of working with vibrant colors on black canvas and was described by th
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Buddhist Directory
DHARMA CENTER 5059 Newport Ave, Suite 303, San Diego, CA 92107. (619) 797-5483, www.dharmacenter.com • Dharma Center of Trikaya Buddhism in San Diego exists to share the teachings of meditation and mindfulness and to assist in the Awakening of those
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Just So
O house builder, you have been seen;You shall not build the house again.Your rafters have been broken up,Your ridgepole is demolished too. My mind has now attained theunformed NibbanaAnd reached the end of every sortof craving. —THE BUDDHA PROCLAIMS
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The Ordinary, Extraordinary Teacher
THE FIRST TIME I met my teacher, he was in overalls, a baseball cap on his head, working in his garden. I had just moved with two enormous suitcases to a small village in Japan; I stumbled upon his temple on my second day there. I wasn’t even sure if

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