History in the Making?

A guest post by Wisdom editor David Kittelstrom.

The first Theravada bhikkhuni (nun) ordination in Australia, and the first in the Thai Forest Tradition anywhere in the world, was performed in Bodhinyana Monastery in Western Australia on October 22nd. Four nuns from the nearby Dhammasara Nuns Monastery took ordination: Vayama, Nirodha, Seri, and Hassapañña. The second half of the ordination ceremony was performed by  Ajahn Brahm—the abbot of Bodhinyana—along with other monks from the monastery.

Many feel reestablishing the full ordination of nuns, which was first established by the Buddha himself  is vital for ensuring the respect and vitality of the Buddhist Sangha in the modern world and accords with the essential message of the Buddha. As with monks, well-trained and observant nuns are a wonderful field of merit, wonderful exemplars, and a wonderful source of teachings for all who seek to live life according to the Dharma, and seeds of peace for the world as a whole.

While the Chinese tradition has preserved female ordination, the lineage died out in the Tibetan and Theravada traditions. In recent years, women within these traditions have been taking full ordination nonetheless, but the practice has not yet been endorsed by a consensus of senior lineage holders, the resistance coming primarily from older monks in Asia. The Dalai Lama has been vocal in his support and an important international conference to advance the issue was held in Hamburg, Germany in 2007. Proceedings from this conference will appear soon in Wisdom’s forthcoming book Dignity and Discipline: Reviving Full Ordination for Buddhist Nuns.

The  ordination drew a severe reaction from conservative lineage holders in Thailand. The monks of the Ajahn Chah tradition headed at Wat Pa Pong complained that they had not been consulted and called Ajahn Brahm to a meeting in Northeast Thailand this past Sunday, November 1st, where they voted to expel him from the Wat Pa Pong community.

Ajahn Sujato, another central figure in the ceremony, has been posting regular updates on his blog as events unfold. Ajahn Brahm’s comments from the time of the ordination can be heard here. There is also apparently a group on Facebook with lively discussion of the event and its ramifications.

Karma Lekshe Tsomo, a Buddhist nun and a professor of Religious Studies at the University of San Diego, says in Dignity and Discipline, “Just as countries who refuse women the right to vote are considered backward today, Buddhists will certainly go down on the wrong side of history if they deny fundamental rights and freedoms to women…Recognizing full ordination for women is not only a matter of social justice, it is also simply a matter of common sense.”

Dignity and Discipline goes into these issues in great detail. I would highly suggest reading it when it comes out. The analyses of scripture presented in that book would indicate that the means exist to pursue bhikkhuni ordination in keeping with the Vinaya,  but that what is missing is the will to do so.

For photo’s from the event click here.

New Low Price for The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha

Wisdom has recently reprinted the classic, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya.

In this new printing we have lowered the price from $65.00 to $49.95. The book remains in its hardcover format.

The 152 discourses of this major collection combine a rich variety of contextual settings with deep and comprehensive teachings that illuminate the suttas of the Pali Canon.Winner of the 1995 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award, and the Tricycle Prize for Excellence in Buddhist Publishing for Dharma Discourse

 

“What Mindfulness Does” — An excerpt from Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness

From Shambhala SunSpace.

In this excerpt from Deborah Schoeberlein’s new book, Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything, we learn what mindfulness is, what it isn’t, and how the benefits of its practice might show themselves.

Mindfulness isn’t a panacea for the world’s problems, but it does provide a practical strategy for working directly with reality. You might not be able to change certain things in your life, at work, or at home, but you can change how you experience those immutable aspects of life, work, and home. And the more present you are to your own life, the more choices you have that influence its unfolding.

With mindfulness, you’re more likely to view a really challenging class as just that, “a really challenging class,” instead of feeling that the experience has somehow ruined your entire day. Purposefully taking a mental step back, in order to notice what happened without immediately engaging with intense emotions and reactions, provides a kind of protection against unconstructive responses and the self-criticism that can slip out and make a hard thing even harder. Even just pausing to take a breath can help you slow down, see a broader perspective and redirect the energy of the situation.

I’ve had moments (as I’m sure have you) when a cascade of little annoyances gathered momentum and I lost it—only to regret my outburst later. Developing mindfulness promotes awareness of the cascade, but from a distance. This way, I have a better chance of working with my assumptions without losing my perspective. Annoyances can be events that don’t have to gain momentum, rather than triggers for more and more difficulty. Mindfully noticing the discrepancy between what I wanted to accomplish and what I actually achieved provides useful information without the distraction of unproductive anger, frustration, or disappointment.

I’ve also known days when one challenging class rattled me to my core and poisoned whatever came next. Even after school, such experiences often lingered—as if the actual class weren’t bad enough, the ongoing mental repercussions were worse. If this has happened to you, then you’ll know exactly how painful and frustrating this feels. It’s easy to torment yourself by questioning your competence as a teacher when a forty-five minute class can cause you to take students’ poor behavior personally and lose your center. Even reflecting, “I should have handled that differently since I’m a professional after all—and I’m the adult in a room full of kids!” doesn’t really provide any practical guidance for the future.

So what’s the answer? Put simply, part of it is all about mindfulness: practice and application, and more practice and yet more application. Practice begins with developing mindfulness in a calm, quiet place, a place where the practice is comparatively easy. Application is about walking into a more challenging situation in real life, like your most difficult class, with increased skills and the confidence to help you stay focused, present, flexible, and available. Should you lose the quality of mindfulness you’ll eventually notice what’s happened. And when you do, you can practice returning your attention to paying attention, and redirect your awareness onto the experience of awareness. As you practice and apply mindfulness, you’ll gain skills that will help you accurately assess challenges and handle them with greater ease.

Having techniques that help you manage your own experiences and emotions is more comfortable than feeling powerless as a result of your emotions and habits or, worse, buffeted about by the changing winds of other people’s behaviors and the environment. It’s a simple fact of life that we cannot change other people to suit our will. Yet you can change your own habits and your relationship to your reactions—but reaching that goal requires effective strategies.

For more check out the book here.

How Mindfulness Can Make for Better Doctors

From The New York Times

PAULINE W. CHEN, M.D.

Published: October 15, 2009

One night during my training, long after all the other doctors had fled the hospital, I found a senior surgeon still on the wards working on a patient note. He was a surgeon with extraordinary skill, a doctor of few words whose folksy quips had become the stuff of department legend. “I’m sorry you’re still stuck here,” I said, walking up to him.

He looked up from the chart. “I’m not working tomorrow, so I’m just fine.”

I had just reviewed the next day’s operating room schedule and knew he had a full day of cases. I began to contradict him, but he held his hand up to stop me.

“Time in the O.R.,” he said with a broad grin, “is not work; it’s play.”

For several years my peers and I relished anecdotes like this one because we believed we knew exactly what our mentor had meant. All of us had had the experience of “disappearing” into the meditative world of a procedure and re-emerging not exhausted, but refreshed. The ritual ablutions by the scrub sink washed away the bacteria clinging to our skin and the endless paperwork threatening to choke our enthusiasm. A single rhythmic cardiac monitor replaced the relentless calls of our beepers; and nothing would matter during the long operations except the patient under our knife.

We had entered “the zone.” We were focused on nothing else but our patients and that moment.

But my more recent conversations with surgical colleagues and physicians from other specialties have had a distinctly different timbre. While we continue to deal with many of the same pressures that my mentor dealt with — decreasing autonomy, increasing administrative requirements, less control over our practice environment — the demands on our attention have gone, well, viral.

Extreme multitasking has invaded the patient-doctor relationship.

Click here to read the entire article.

For related Wisdom titles click here.

Jane Dobisz at Boston University

One Hundred Days of Solitude author Jane Dobisz ( Zen Master Bon Yeon ) will give a dharma talk and a question and answer session on Wednesday, October 21 from 7:30 to 8:30 PM on the Boston University campus at Sargent College, room 101.

In One Hundred Days of Solitude: Losing My Self and Finding Grace on a Zen Retreat,American teacher of Korean Zen Jane Dobisz (Zen Master Bon Yeon), recalls her first solitary meditation stint in the woods. Luckily, this is not just a recounting of a winter’s worth of cabin fever. Instead, Dobisz takes us into her cabin, and into her mind, as she tries–at least temporarily–to live a Walden-like existence.

All the bowing and meditating and wood-chopping that is part and parcel of her retreat is hardly first nature, but the good-humored and tenacious Dobisz is able to adapt, and to relate her hundred days with moving insight and humanity. Her Solitude in fact offers us all a chance to commune with her and to look inside and rediscover our own grace.

Click here for more.

Buddhism Roots Deeply in America

From New America Media, Commentary, Andrew Lam, Posted: Oct 18, 2009 //

While the Dalai Lama was snubbed by President Barack Obama, who refused to meet with him last week, there was an open door policy everywhere else in our nation’s capital – from congressional receptions to synagogues and schools.

One scene in particular is striking: the most famous monk of the 20th Century on the dais, lecturing on wisdom in the modern world as hundreds of enthralled monks and laymen look on below. The scene harks back to the golden era of Tibet, with the halls festooned with hundreds of strings of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, except the event took place at American University.

In the last half of the 20th Century, America cunningly exported itself overseas, marketing its images, ideologies, products and religions with ingenuity and zeal, but what it has not been able to fully assess or prepare for are the effects in reverse. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.

I take it as some cosmic law of exchange that if Disneyland pops up in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Buddhist temples can sprout up in Los Angeles, home of the magic kingdom. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to many Californians that scholars have agreed that the most complex Buddhist city in the world is nowhere in Asia but Los Angeles itself, where there are more than 300 Buddhist temples and centers, representing nearly all of Buddhist practices around the world.

Over the past 25 years, Buddhism has become the third most popular religion in America behind Christianity and Judaism, according to a 2008 report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Evidence of Buddhism spreading deep roots in America is abundant.

Read the rest here.

Momentary Buddhahood in Elephant Journal

“In this well-written book by Anyen Rinpoche, the connection between mindfulness and Vajrayana practice is explored. Rinpoche advocates for the idea that mindfulness is not something to be focused on solely at the beginning of practice, but should be continued throughout. Momentary Buddhahood also discusses the idea that achieving enlightenment isn’t an all or nothing proposition; that it happens incrementally; and from time to time, each of us experiences glimpses of total enlightenment, however fleeting. At the base of all of it though, is mindfulness, which should not be thought of as exclusive to Zen nor should it be thought of as non-essential to Tantric practice; it is essential to all phases and all aspects of Buddhism, and especially to those who have taken the Bodhisattva Vow. Anyen Rinpoche will be at the Boulder Bookstore tonight to speak about and sign his book. “–Elephant Journal

John Daido Loori Roshi, Influential American Zen Teacher, Dies at 78

John Daido Loori Roshi, successor to Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi Roshi, founder of the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism, and abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery, and one of the most influential Zen masters in the West, died at the Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York on Friday, October 9th. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer eighteen months earlier.
Daido Roshi, who in a magazine interview conducted in the 90s referred to his style of Zen teaching as “radical conservatism,” was a dynamic religious figure whose depth of spiritual insight, fierce commitment to his students and the Buddhist tradition, personal charisma, business acumen and sharp organizational skills contributed to the creation of a well respected and wide ranging organization of Zen Buddhist temples and practice centers in the United States and abroad. His life-long work was recognized by Franklin Pierce University in May of this year with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.
Daido Roshi grew up in a working-class family in Jersey City, New Jersey, joined the Navy, and later worked for seventeen years as a physical chemist while nurturing a lifelong love of photography. He then underwent fourteen years of lay and monastic Zen training in New York and California. In 1980, Loori founded Zen Mountain Monastery, considered to be one of the leading Zen training centers in the United States.
As a Zen priest, Daido Roshi was a highly skilled and accurate reader of human nature, a trait that allowed him to guide the spiritual practice of students from widely varied walks of life—from prisoners in maximum security correctional facilities to wall street executives and ordained monastics. An avid environmentalist, he was just as much at home navigating the rapids of an Adirondack river during a wilderness retreat or sitting in a local diner discussing politics, as he was conducting an elaborate ceremony in full Zen robes or giving a lecture on the relationship between the Zen arts and social activism.
Daido Roshi’s commitment to formulating a distinctive style of teaching that was both based on authentic training and also relevant to contemporary lay and monastic practitioners was evident in all of his work. It was present in his environmental projects, his creative use of media as a vehicle for social change, and the creation of a national Buddhist prison program. It also shaped the development of the Mountains and Rivers Order, its sister organizations Dharma Communications, Fire Lotus Temple, the Zen Environmental Studies Institute, the Society of Mountains and Rivers, the National Buddhist Prison Sangha, and the order’s mainhouse, Zen Mountain Monastery.
One writer said that there is nothing that exemplifies Daido Roshi’s vision and personality more than Zen Mountain Monastery itself. Started as a Zen Arts Center, the Monastery is now a thriving monastic and lay community with a rigorous and innovative training program called the “Eight Gates of Zen,” a modern manifestation of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path.
“Daido tries to demonstrate that all of life is practice,” said Charles Prebish, author of Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America. For Roshi, there was nothing that could not be used as a mirror for self study. This was especially true of art, the way in which Daido Roshi was first introduced to Zen.
An avid photographer since the age of ten, as an adult Daido Roshi attended a workshop with the “Eastern guru of photography,” Minor White. White’s meditative approach to the art fascinated Roshi, and before long he found himself becoming increasingly interested in the spiritual aspect of White’s teaching until he eventually found his way to Dai Bosatsu monastery in upstate New York. Here he began his Zen studies with Soen Nakagawa Roshi and Eido Shimano Roshi. Within a few years, Daido Roshi moved to Los Angeles to study with Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi Roshi, became ordained under him, completed his training and finally received dharma transmission, becoming one of only three westerners to be recognized as lineage holders in both the vigorous school of koan Zen and the subtle teachings of Master Dogen’s Zen.
During the last three decades, Daido Roshi also established himself as an important commentator of Master Dogen’s teachings, most notably with his three photography books and the translation of and commentary on the Three Hundred Koan Shobogenzo, a work that took Daido Roshi over a decade to complete. Roshi’s love of Dogen’s teachings is evident in every aspect of the Mountains and River’s Order training, from the very title of the order to the monastic schedule, the rules and regulations, and the bi-annual Shobogenzo intensives Daido Roshi began leading in the mid-90s.
When paying tribute to a deeply loved teacher and pioneer whose work profoundly touched thousands of lives, it is not an easy task to pinpoint what exactly will be this man’s legacy for a generation of Buddhist practitioners. Yet Daido Roshi himself would probably have answered without hesitation, “It is what my teacher asked me to do—to create an American Shobogenzo.
Daido Roshi is succeeded by Bonnie Myotai Treace Sensei, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold Sensei, and Konrad Ryushin Marchaj Sensei.

Razor-Wire Dharma on CNN

Razor-Wire Dharma was mentioned in a CNN.com article this morning. Below is the beginning of the article.

PRISON INMATES GO ZEN TO DEAL WITH LIFE BEHIND BAR by Stephanie Chen

RIVERDALE, Georgia (CNN) — In his darkest moment, Kenneth Brown lost it all. His wife and kids, the housebroken dog, the vacation home on Cape Cod all vanished when he was sent to prison for an arson in 1996.

Trapped in his gloomy cell and serving a 20-year sentence that felt like an eternity, Brown, then 49, found himself stretched out on the floor. He was silent. His eyes were shut. His body did not move.

Brown, a man raised as a Baptist and taught to praise the Lord and fear the devil, was meditating.

“I try to focus on the space between two thoughts, because it prevents me from getting lost,” said Brown, who discovered meditation, yoga and Buddhist teachings three months into his sentence.

“This helped me stay on track and get me through prison,” he said.

Eastern religions encompassing meditation techniques have captivated hippies, 20-somethings and celebrities like actor Richard Gere. But since the 1960s, the art of meditation also has found a growing number of unlikely followers behind prison bars.

The inmates say meditation — an ancient practice that develops mental awareness and fosters relaxation — is teaching them how to cope in prison.

“Mostly, the people in Buddhist community are going into the prisons, providing programs, and word of mouth gets from one inmate to another,” explained Gary Friedman, communications chairman for the American Correctional Chaplains Association. “It’s a break from all the hustle and noise of the prison environment.”

There is no group tracking the number of inmates converting to Buddhism or engaging in meditation practices. But programs and workshops educating inmates about meditation and yoga are sprouting up across the country.

Meditation can help the convicts find calmness in a prison culture ripe with violence and chaos. The practice provides them a chance to reflect on their crimes, wrestle through feelings of guilt and transform themselves during their rehabilitative journey, Buddhist experts say.

Read the rest here.

To find out more about Razor-Wire Dharma click here.

Wisdom on Public Television

Wisdom is excited to announce that we are a corporate sponsor of the PBS presentation of Vajra Sky Over Tibet. The award-winning documentary is currently available to be shown on more than 120 public television stations reaching more than half of all potential television viewers in North America.

Vajra Sky Over Tibet is a visually spectacular cinematic pilgrimage bearing witness to the indomitable faith of Tibet’s endangered Buddhist community and the imminent threat to its very survival. With unprecedented access to many legendary venues, this is one of the rare documentaries to be filmed entirely inside of Tibet.

Below you will find our sponsorship video spot and listing of scheduled show times and stations.

Market / Station                                    Day / Time

San Francisco/KQED                       11/26 at 8am and 11am / Thursday

Boston/WGBH                                    10/25 at 5:30pm / Sunday

Atlanta/GPB*                                      10/23 at 12:30am / FriSeattle/KCTS                                      11/1 at 10:30pm / Sunday

Miami/WLRN                                       10/7 and 10/11 at 9pm / Weds & Sun

Cleveland/WVIZ                                 10/4 at 6:30pm / Sunday

Raleigh/UNC-TV*                              finding a timeslot

Salt Lake City/KUED                        11/28 at 8pm / Sat

South Carolina/SCETV*                   11/22 at 7:30pm / Sun

Grand Rapids/WGVU2                      10/11 at 9:30pm / Sun

Albuquerque/KNME                           11/18 at 9pm / Weds

Louisville/KET*                                    10/23 at 2am and 10/25 at 3am /Fri & Sun

Evansville/WNIN                                 10/22 at 8pm / Thurs

Burlington/VPT*                                  10/4 at 4:30pm / Sun

East Lansing/WKAR                           11/12 at 8pm / Thurs

Bangor/MPBN*                                    10/14 at 9:30pm / Weds

NOTE: * indicates statewide networks

For more on the film click here.