The architect of the Indian constitution. The drafter of the Hindu Code Bill, which permitted Indians from different castes to marry and extended equal rights to men and women. The man who believed Buddhism was the only way to liberation, leading hundreds of thousands of Dalits (“untouchables”) to convert to Buddhism and escape the oppression of the caste system. What Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) achieved was in many ways unthinkable given the tremendous discrimination he faced as a young Dalit. But, had Ambedkar not met and married a young doctor named Sharada Kabir, it’s unlikely that he would have been able to accomplish nearly as much as he did during the last decade of his life.

Kabir, who became known as Dr. Savita Ambedkar after their marriage in 1948, published her memoir in the Marathi language in 1990. In 2022, nearly twenty years after her death, Babasaheb: My Life with Dr Ambedkar was published in English for the first time. Translated by Nadeem Khan, Babasaheb gives English speakers an insightful look into Savita’s complicated commitment to serving her husband—whom many consider a bodhisattva—as a companion, caretaker, and trustworthy confidante during watershed moments in modern Indian history. 

Savita was born in 1909 to what she described as a progressive Brahmin family. Graduating with a bachelor of medicine and surgery from Grant Medical College in 1937, Savita worked as a junior doctor for Dr. Madhavrao Malvankar in Mumbai before accepting a position as chief medical officer of a women’s government hospital in Gujarat. But facing some health issues, she returned to Mumbai and resumed her work with Malvankar. 

Enter B. R. Ambedkar. Savita writes that she wasn’t familiar with him before meeting him at a friend’s house. He was “deeply concerned about women’s progress” and congratulated the young doctor on her accomplishments, Savita Ambedkar writes; they also discussed Buddhism in their early meetings, leaving her “literally goggle-eyed with wonder.”

Though Ambedkar had the elegance of a German prince and the stamina of a high-ranking politician, he was suffering from a number of significant health issues (including diabetes, rheumatism, high blood pressure, and neuritis), which were put on the back burner while he worked on the constitution in 18- to 20-hour stretches. He sought the medical advice of Dr. Malvankar, whom Savita Ambedkar worked with as a junior doctor. 

The Ambedkars’ marriage started as more of a medical commitment than a romance: Savita had offered to live with him to oversee his treatment, diet, and rest; Ambedkar instead proposed, in part because “for the sake of millions of my people, I have to live on.”

“His personality, his work, his sacrifice, his scholarship, they were all mightier than the Himalayas. Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon. How was one to turn down a great person like Dr. Ambedkar?” Savita writes. “The doctor inside me was prodding me to go and serve him medically. The government had placed upon his shoulders the historic responsibility of drafting the Constitution of free India, and therefore it was utterly imperative that his health should be well looked after, and he should be given appropriate treatment.” 

She accepted, and they were married on April 15, 1948, less than three months after Gandhi was assassinated. “From then on till the last moment I stayed with him ceaselessly like his shadow,” she writes.

“Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon.”

Over the past several years, I’ve had a number of conversations with a dharma friend about the faults of applying modern thinking to the lives of ancient Buddhist women. She is working on a book about the Buddha’s birth mother and views Mayadevi as the goddess she is; to compare her to an earthly woman makes no sense, because she was divinely chosen to be the Buddha’s mother. We can take inspiration from her qualities, but to try to think of her as a woman in our world is futile.

In that sense, it was more comfortable for me to think about Savita Ambedkar’s life as a dharma story rather than the biography of a modern woman. When I begin viewing her life through a feminist lens, I see only what she gave up to be the “shadow,” the constant companion and caretaker of one of the most important men of independent India. 

The few glimpses we get of Savita are inspiring and fierce: when Ambedkar was so ill that his constant stream of visitors would not help his condition improve, Savita cut meetings short, or refused to let them start in the first place, so that he could rest. Although they employed a cook, Savita would prepare his food with healing in mind; she taught him yoga asanas and made sure he had oil massages to help with circulation. Savita kept Ambedkar on a strict schedule, helped bathe and dress him; Savita made it possible for him to read and write into the night and work on legislation that affected millions of people at the time (and all the generations to come). Indeed, the ink was still drying on edits and corrections to The Buddha and His Dhamma when Ambedkar died in his sleep on December 6, 1956. 

Yet following Ambedkar’s death, Savita was forced into obscurity. Some of Ambedkar’s followers even alleged that she had murdered him, and a significant amount of the memoir is spent establishing Ambedkar’s health history and how she likely prolonged his life. Though she was effectively blocked from politics, Savita found friends among the younger generation of social reformers in the seventies and eighties, garnering respect from the Dalit Panthers, radical anticaste thinkers who were inspired by Ambedkar, Karl Marx, Buddhism, and groups like the Black Panthers in the US. 

Early on in the book, Savita compares herself to Yashodhara, the Buddha’s wife. Like Yashodhara, about whom we know little from Buddhist literature, Savita’s innermost thoughts and dreams remain a mystery. We are instead left wondering what we might do if a bodhisattva came into our lives. Would we set aside everything to serve them too?

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The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on Effective Altruism, Engaged Buddhism, and How to Build a Better World
by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei
Shambhala Publications, December 2023, 264 pp., $21.95, paper

The Buddhist and the Ethicist is the culmination of a five-year conversation between Peter Singer, a utilitarian ethicist and animal liberation advocate, and Shih Chao-Hwei, an engaged Buddhist nun, academic, and activist who champions gender equality and LGBTQ rights. Ethics is active—something to be done rather than a fixed opinion—and in this fascinating book, Singer and Chao-Hwei explore dynamic topics, including animal welfare, capital punishment, gender equality, and the foundations of both Buddhism and ethics.

The Lost Art of Silence: Reconnecting to the Power and Beauty of Quiet
by Sarah Anderson
Shambhala Publications, December 2023, 304 pp., $21.95, paper

Sarah Anderson, a painter and writer who opened the famed Travel Bookshop in London’s Notting Hill in 1979, provides a thorough meditation on silence: its essentialness and elusiveness, as well as the very human impulse to fill our worlds with “vacuous sound.” The book includes sections on religion and spirituality, the arts, and “darker” silence realms like war and prison. Woven through are histories and anecdotes from great thinkers, artists, contemplatives, and other silence enthusiasts who can inspire our own quest to find silence in the unlikeliest of places.

Buddhism and Loss: Navigating Grief, Adversity and Change
by Diane Esguerra
Mud Pie Books, 2023, 114 pp., $8.95, paper

The first noble truth reminds us that life contains suffering, and Diane Esguerra—a psychotherapist and Soka Gakkai practitioner—very skillfully writes about the many different ways loss comes into our lives, from the deaths of those closest to us, to our youth, to the funds in our bank account. Through Buddhist wisdom and contemporary case studies, Esguerra demonstrates how practice can help us through the losses we’ll inevitably experience, and how mindfully navigating loss can help us better appreciate all aspects of the human experience.

Scholar’s Corner

Buddhist Masculinities
edited by Mega Bryson and Kevin Buckelew
Columbia University Press, September 2023, 352 pp., $35.00, paper

Buddhist literature is full of idealized sacred and mundane physical perfections; often, those aesthetic ideals refer to men. Examining a wide range of Buddhist maleness—from narratives of morally superior monks and demon-taming tantric heroes to depictions of irresistible buddhas and bodhisattvas with sensuous bodies and jeweled smiles—Buddhist Masculinities expands on contemporary gender and intersectionality studies, merging a variety of methodological approaches. This much-needed transdisciplinary book pays critical attention to how ideas of masculinity have embodied, defined, and legitimized power and virtue in diverse Buddhist contexts. A must-read for practitioners and scholars alike.

WHAT WE’RE REREADING

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha
by Tara Brach

Now approaching its twentieth anniversary, this modern classic by Buddhist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach continues to find new audiences. “Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” Brach writes, offering readers a path to freedom and fulfillment through the eponymous practice. Utilizing a mix of psychology and Buddhism, the book aims to guide readers out of the strictures we create for ourselves with guided meditations and a discussion of the Jungian shadow self, the repository of our negative emotions.

–Philip Ryan, executive editor

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When the author, radical feminist, and Black Buddhist Christian bell hooks died in late 2021, she was widely celebrated for just about everything in the mainstream press except for her spirituality. 

But hooks’s connection to religion is present throughout her entire breadth of work, which includes thirty books across a variety of genres as well as countless articles on feminism (and how it is for everyone), popular culture, education, recognizing the human rights of children, and more. This missing component of spiritual recognition was part of the motivation for bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist by Nadra Nittle, a journalist and education reporter at The 19th, an independent news outlet that covers gender, politics, and policy. 

The book was published by Fortress Press in November 2023. Tricycle recently spoke with Nittle about the book, hooks’s legacy in spiritual circles and beyond, and as well as book recommendations for Buddhist readers interested in learning more about hooks’s life and work. 

You’re the author of several books, including Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision: Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature. Can you tell me how this book came to be? Sure. I had written a book about Toni Morrison for Fortress Press, which is a Lutheran publisher. My books are for people who are not necessarily religious, but interested in how a figure they might not associate with a spiritual tradition approached spirituality in their work or personal lives. They serve as an introduction to people who have never read these authors before; some people read them as a companion piece to read with their books. 

The publisher wanted me to write another book and had suggested some men. But I thought bell hooks would be a good figure because she was a Buddhist Christian, and many people didn’t necessarily know that, even though she discussed it. It didn’t come up in a lot of her obituaries. Spirituality was foundational to her work. And she died shortly after the Toni Morrison book came out. 

You write about bell hooks visiting your school in the 1990s, when you were a teenager. Can you tell us your impressions of hooks and what has stayed with you? I wish I remembered it better; this was such a long time ago. I had not read any of her books, though I knew she was an important person and an important figure. I remember being pretty intimidated.

I remember the speech she gave, saying that she didn’t think her father had loved her, how she had been saying it for years, and her mother finally agreed with her. She was challenging the idea that all that Black families, in particular low-income families, needed was a man in their home and all of their problems would go away. You heard a lot about welfare queen moms in the 1990s; you still hear about them today, but especially in the nineties. President Bill Clinton had passed welfare reform, and single mothers, especially Black single mothers, were vilified. So for hooks to come out and say, “No, we don’t just need men in the home, they have to be loving men who are not going to perpetuate patriarchy,” was pretty radical. And this is something she discusses in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, and other pieces.

She sat with us at lunch, and I sat close to her. She was discussing movies—this part got cut from the book. There was a movie called Sankofa, about a Black American model who gets more in touch with her African roots, and it also discusses issues around enslavement. I remember one of my classmates getting into an argument with her. My classmate loved the movie, and hooks thought it had problems—obviously, she was very critical of popular culture. But she wasn’t like, “Oh, you’re just a little teenager, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was respectfully arguing with him and treated him as someone capable of having an argument. 

Yes, and one other thing about her visit, which I write about in the book. I didn’t witness this, but bell hooks told one of my friends that she was beautiful, and should consider not straightening her hair and wearing it natural. And she stopped straightening her hair, and she told everyone that bell hooks told her that she was beautiful. I’m not in touch with this person anymore, but hooks really left a positive impact on her. 

I enjoyed learning more about hooks’s cultural criticism in your book. Unfortunately, I only came to hooks later in life, so she’s always been a Buddhist Christian radical feminist to me. And to learn about her interview with Lil’ Kim and her willingness to speak out against Hillary Clinton, even Beyoncé—especially Beyoncé. [In a 2014 panel discussion at the New School called Are You Still A Slave: Liberating the Black Female Body, hooks said Beyoncé was “antifeminist” and a “terrorist” to young Black girls.] To go up against these figures and take a lot of criticism makes her fearless to me. You refer in the book to hooks’s “Buddhist Christian ethic.” Can you expand on what that means? That’s in reference to what she took from both Buddhism and Christianity: the idea that you weren’t spiritual or religious for the sake of being spiritual or religious, you did so for the benefit of other people, to engage in social action. There was love at the root of it, the love of one’s self and the love of other people. She used the late author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s definition of love, which he said was one’s commitment to one’s own spiritual growth or someone else’s spiritual growth. 

You brought up Beyoncé, so when she was criticizing Beyoncé, or criticizing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, she believed that she was doing so in love, in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh and other figures that she was influenced by, like Thomas Merton—people who had social action and liberation right at the heart of their spiritual tradition. 

In a 1992 interview with Tricycle’s founding editor, Helen Tworkov, hooks spoke about her hesitance in meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, whose social activism inspired her Buddhist practice. “As long as I keep a distance from that thread, I can keep him—and I can critique myself on this—as a kind of perfect teacher.” Did she ever meet Thich Nhat Hanh? Yes, she was afraid of meeting him because she didn’t want to be disappointed by him or have [him be] a big letdown. I write in the book about how when hooks first met Hanh, she was still so angry at a past partner who was abusive to her, and she blurted out the words “I’m so angry.” And Hanh told her to “compost” her anger, to turn it into something, for lack of a better term, positive, something that can be used for good instead of her just stewing in anger. And it seems that he handled her anger in a very wise way that she appreciated. 

What about hooks’s upbringing in the Christian church? It seems that she was drawn to social action and outreach from a young age. She was born in 1952 and grew up in Kentucky. She went to predominantly Black churches, where she found people who supported her speaking abilities by reading scriptures; she found people who encouraged her to use her “god voice.” That was in contrast to her home life, where she was more of a misfit and the family scapegoat. She had a difficult relationship with her father; it seemed they butted heads from an early age. She was considered strange or weird by her family members and told she was crazy, even for things like her reading habits. Her mother bought her books, and her family was supportive of her being a good student, but they were still worried if she was going to be a proper young woman who was attractive, found a mate, and was a homemaker—all of those things that she didn’t want to be. 

Her family life really contrasted with her church experience, which was a place of refuge for her. There was an elderly woman, a deacon in the church, who took an interest in hooks and supported her and was loving toward her; she’s the one who told her she had a “god voice.” And both of her maternal grandparents had unique experiences and ideas about spirituality. Her maternal grandmother was not a churchgoing person; she saw the church as being superficial and people caring more about what you wore and who you knew. She was spiritual, but more so when it came to nature—growing things, being self-sufficient, and living off the land. So that was a model for hooks. And her grandfather believed every object had a soul and that she needed to know the stories of all the things around her. He was considered by others to be a strange guy. He was also a pacifist—he never went to war, he refused to fight. hooks believed he was the one family member who truly loved her. 

And this was one of the reasons [why] she was opposed to the traditional, nuclear family, because she believed that it takes a village to raise a child. And if you did have a village, you were more likely to find people who rooted for you and nurtured you. hooks felt that her father was not loving; he was physically abusive to her, to her mother, and at times to her siblings. At one point, this started to affect hooks’s relationship with her mother, because her mother would sometimes act abusively toward her to get into her husband’s good graces. And I haven’t gotten into child liberation theology yet…

We did see a bit of that earlier when you recounted hooks telling your school friend that she was beautiful and to not straighten her hair and engaging in a respectful debate with your other classmate. And with her mother being abusive, that shows that it doesn’t have to be men acting patriarchal, it’s the system, right? Yes. I think the most radical part of bell hooks is her belief that women can enforce or perpetuate patriarchy. Often in popular culture, when we’re talking about the #MeToo movement, or sexism and misogyny in general, it’s framed as women not perpetuating any of these things. And she very much believed women are capable of perpetuating patriarchy and teaching their sons to be patriarchal. She also said women need to interrogate their ideas about women and gender. 

You write that one of the things that drew hooks to Buddhism was her confronting this image of a white Jesus at her Black church. Later in her life, she goes on a pilgrimage to Spain to see the Black Madonna at Montserrat as a way to reclaim the divine feminine for Black women. How did that trip impact her view on spirituality? As a child, hooks went to a church where they had a huge image of a white Jesus holding a globe, and at the bottom of the globe were all the people of color. She discussed how this image really had an impact on her brother who struggled to be a Christian, to be confronted with this image of a white Jesus, that he didn’t feel represented by, every Sunday. It doesn’t sound like she took that as hard as her brother did, but she longed for representations of divine feminine deities portrayed in all different colors, shapes, and sizes.

One of the reasons she became interested in Buddhism was [because] she saw Buddha portrayed in various colors, shapes, and sizes. One of her first encounters with Buddhism was through Buddhist nuns during the time she was a student at Stanford University. She met them, took an interest [in their message], and decided to pursue Buddhism. In terms of the divine feminine and Christianity, she was interested in the Virgin Mary and, specifically, the Black Madonna. She hadn’t grown up hearing about or seeing a Black Madonna, but eventually, she made a pilgrimage to Montserrat, Spain, to view this statue. 

It’s also important to mention that the Catholic Church has recently made an effort to start portraying Jesus, Mary, and other figures in different races and ethnicities, so that people feel represented. 

All About Love: New Visions, hooks’s book that was published in 2000, made a resurgence during the pandemic and even made the New York Times’ bestseller list for the first time, twenty years after its original publication. Why do you think it resonated so much with readers? In the US, we now have more single-headed households than partnered or married households. During the pandemic, especially during lockdown, people were isolated, and it made them think about their connections to other people, maybe in a way they hadn’t before. And people who were partnered or married had to deal with being around their partners for sustained periods, whereas before they were going out or going to work and didn’t have to see their partner or children as much. The pandemic forced some people to engage with their partners and children in ways they hadn’t prior to the pandemic. It makes sense people were interested in a book like All About Love during that time. Quotes from the book were being shared on TikTok and other forms of social media, so I think it was a perfect mix of social media, the pandemic, and younger generations being exposed to the book for the first time. And there are some influential people, like the filmmaker Sofia Coppola and the model Emily Ratajkowski, who began to cite the book as important in their lives and development. 

I also discussed that we can see from dating sites like Match.com that people are looking for more substantial relationships, not just a pretty or handsome face. All About Love is a go-to book for people interested in going beyond the butterflies and rush of feelings at the beginning of a courtship; this book is really about a deeper connection. And she was really clear that she didn’t want to just focus on romantic relationships. A lot of people who like All About Love cited the fact that she writes friendship should be equal to any other relationship, and that friendship will be different (than romantic love) but should not be devalued. And that was a lesson hooks wished she had learned before entering into an abusive relationship where she found herself isolated. 

There’s a quote attributed to the Buddha about friendship being the whole of the spiritual path. And the other thing is the epidemic of loneliness that we sometimes overlook. And she was discussing that more than twenty years ago. Now, there’s more attention to the fact that it’s not just elderly people who suffer from loneliness; there are a lot of young people who are lonely and looking for connection. And that may be a reason why [so many] young people [are now appreciating] the book. 

Toward the end of All About Love, hooks writes that the book is a guide about love, but also death. And if we treat each interaction with someone as if it were our last, that would change how we interact with others; it would allow us to live more consciously. To me, that’s a very Buddhist sentiment. Are there any Christian parallels between living consciously or staying connected to loved ones who have died? As a text, the Bible focuses on the importance of your ancestors. But in contemporary Christianity, in the US, I think that ancestors are not focused on in the same way. hooks was interested in how Black American and West African spirituality mixed with mainstream Christianity, and how during enslavement, Black people had to hide their African spiritual traditions but found a way to still have yard shrines and altars, even if it was just having rocks or things placed in a certain kind of way. Or the pictures in their house arranged in a way that transcended enslavement and white supremacy in an attempt to separate Black people from all that. 

And hooks believed in the power of naming ancestors too. That’s the whole reason she chose a pseudonym after her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. I tried to honor hooks by naming her grandparents in the book.

Lineage is so important in Buddhism—who your teacher is and lineages that can be traced back to the time of the Buddha. It’s interesting to see the parallels with other religions. Can you recommend a few books for Buddhist readers who have never read hooks or who would like to revisit her more spiritual works? All About Love is one of the books where she most engages spirituality, be it Buddhism or Christianity. Her memoir, Bone Black, will allow you to see where she came from and why spirituality was important for her. [Bone Black also provides some framework for] the lessons and understanding [she received from] her Kentucky ancestors, who were not at all familiar with Buddhism [but who] paved her way to becoming a Buddhist; whether it was her grandfather being a pacifist and telling her that everything has a soul or her grandmother using quilting as a form of meditation, losing herself in the process and coming back to herself. And then, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. She’s urging Black women to not just have a patriarchal, fundamental approach to Christianity, but to expand our options, whether that’s through Buddhism, traditional African religion, Hinduism, or something else. 

I wanted to close with something hooks wrote in All About Love: “Sometimes, we invoke the dead by allowing wisdom they have shared to guide our present actions.” Since you have spent so much time with hooks’s writing, what do you think she would make of the world right now, especially with multiple conflicts going on? Her grandfather, who was one of her teachers, was a pacifist. Hanh and King were pacifists. So I think she would be horrified. 

About ten years ago, she was one of many writers and scholars who signed a letter in support of Palestine. I imagine she would be heartbroken by what’s happening there. And she cautioned people to be wary of the media and the messages in the media. She talked about the importance of making sure you have access to a wide range of information and aren’t just turning on the TV and absorbing whatever messages [come your way, which often] perpetuate what she coined as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” I think she would urge people to take in the news with caution and advocate for peace and liberation. 

⧫

This interview has been edited and adapted for length and clarity. 

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This year-end review skims the surface of 2023’s academic works on Buddhism, bridging the often intimidating divide between scholarly discourse and everyday practice. These articles and books taught us new perspectives, challenging and enriching our understanding of our Buddhist tradition. We believe engaging with academic studies can significantly deepen the insights that practice reveals, offering nuanced views beyond conventional teachings. While some of these may require a bit of perseverance and careful reading to complete, each one broadened our understanding of Buddhist history and culture. We encourage you to explore these well-researched works from the academy, allowing them to enlighten the way on your Buddhist path.

We find intellectual and practical value in each of these publications, but to aid this year-end review, we’ve assigned a four-wheel dharma rank (☸️☸️☸️☸️): those with the highest ranking are the most accessible and applicable to practice. 

“Beyond Queen and King: Democratizing ‘Engaged Buddhism’” by Donna Lynn Brown. In Journal of Buddhist Ethics vol 30, February 2023. Open access article.

The term “engaged Buddhism” has become ubiquitous in common understanding (particularly in the West) and academic discourse. However, its usage is often unclear and sometimes problematic. Labeling certain traditions as “engaged” by necessity implies others are not, and those others are usually traditional Buddhist beliefs and practices that compose the vast majority. Certain forms of social engagement count in this delineation process, and others do not. 

For years, a minority of scholars have criticized this categorization to no avail—until recently. Scholar Donna Lynn Brown provides a solid history of the term in academics, drawing out some of the biggest names in studying Buddhist modernism who have created a consensus in meaning. She also examines the dissenters and the backlash they have received. Moving the discussion beyond both sides, she recommends new approaches for exploration.

While this article is important for Western practitioners and academics alike, the discussion this paper initiated in formal publications and online chatter is more interesting. As the main targets of Brown’s paper, Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King both responded and claimed misrepresentation of their work, and several heavy hitters in Buddhist studies weighed in through a rabbit hole of comments and tweets. This very public exchange provides an accessible glance into the dynamics of academic discourse and the dialectic at work in producing scholarship and meaning, a back-and-forth often gleaned only from conferences and public appearances. Maybe you have two coins to throw into this fountain of knowledge.

Rating: ☸️☸️

“Gender Conflicts in Contemporary Korean Buddhism” by Eun-su Cho. In Religions vol 14, February 2023. Open access article.

Are fully ordained Korean nuns (bhikshuni) as empowered as we think they are? Though Korean nuns have long had a higher social standing than other nuns in Asian countries, Eun-su Cho finds that this “equal status is challenged once the nuns step outside their own communities and into the hierarchical system of the (Jogye) Order.” 

Cho’s paper traces the historical development of the Korean bhikshuni order, the effect of South Korea’s economic growth on the Buddhist community, and how, despite the increased opportunities for nuns to study and hold (a single) administrative position in the predominant Jogye Order, conservative and misogynistic values limit bhikshunis. Cho concludes by calling for the promotion of “gender awareness” and the establishment of “fair policies across religious, institutional, and social aspects” as a way to create a genuinely inclusive sangha. 

Rating: ☸️☸️☸️

Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India by Douglas Ober. Stanford University Press, March 2023, 394 pp., $32.00, paper.

Scholar Douglas Ober offers a fresh take on Buddhism’s trajectory in colonial and postcolonial India, challenging widely held views of its 13th-century decline and Western rediscovery. Ober digs deep into overlooked histories, revealing indigenous contributors instrumental in Buddhism’s resurgence as a modernizing force. He deftly shows how Indian scholars, educated under colonial influences, shaped Buddhism as an intellectual, anti-Brahmanical movement. This dense exploration of India’s history weaves together the interconnectedness of monks, scholars, international networks, and nationalistic drives in Buddhism’s reawakening. A crucial read, it sheds light on the sociopolitical forces shaping Buddhism’s revival and gives insight into the roots of Buddhist modernism.

Read the Tricycle review.

Rating: ☸️☸️

“Ethical Veganism as Moral Phenomenology: Engaging Buddhism with Animal Ethics” by Colin H. Simonds. In Journal of Animal Ethics, Vol 13 No 1, March 2023.

With animal rights and liberation increasingly in the spotlight, Canadian scholar Colin Simonds dives into how we see and value our nonhuman animal friends. Simonds argues for a moral phenomenological approach to “ethical veganism,” differentiating it from “dietary veganism.” This move demands a perceptual shift where people recognize nonhuman animals’ sentience and moral worth as the primary concern. To cultivate this new awareness, Simonds advocates implementing a framework grounded in Tibetan Buddhist understandings of view, meditation, and action: intellectually understanding the view of animals’ sentience and moral worth, internalizing this view through meditation, and then acting in alignment with this integrated perception. Presenting historical and contemporary Tibetan Buddhist examples of direct encounters with nonhuman animal suffering that led to ethical reorientations, Simonds suggests that this reframing can guide future scholarship and activism strategies, fostering broader adoption of ethical veganism. You’ll have to use a school or local library (yes, they still exist) to access this article on Project Muse or subscribe to the Journal of Animal Ethics.

Rating: ☸️☸️☸️

Living Treasure: Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in Honor of Janet Gyatso edited by Holly Gayley and Andrew Quintman. Wisdom Publications, June 2023, 544 pp., $59.95, hardcover.

Janet Gyatso, the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies at Harvard University, has been “one of the most creative and influential thinkers of her generation,” as the editors write, and has made rich and prolific contributions to the field since the eighties. This anthology celebrates two areas of her greatest expertise, terma (hidden) texts and Tibetan autobiographical writing, and features essays from many former students turned colleagues. Gyatso’s multidisciplinary approach and “interrogation of what it means to be human” is found in these pieces on supine demonesses, a third gender, and Tibetan nuns’ advocacy for full ordination. What results is a scholarly work that will be enjoyed by anyone with even a remote interest in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, and need not be limited to an academic audience. 

Rating: ☸️☸️☸️☸️

New Perspectives in Modern Korean Buddhism: Institution, Gender, and Secular Society edited by Hwansoo Ilmee Kim and Jin Y. Park. SUNY Press, June 2023, 348 pp., $36.95, paper.

Westerners might be familiar with Master Seung Sahn’s Kwan Um School of Zen, but the importance and influence of Korean Buddhism, particularly its attempts to harmonize doctrinal inconsistencies, remain mostly unknown outside East Asia. This edited volume sheds more light on one of the world’s oldest surviving Mahayana traditions. Mark Nathan lands some historiographical punches on previous scholarship. Hwansoo Kim’s late Joseon Dynasty Court Lady Chon account brings laywomen to the fore. And Su Jung Kim leads monks’ secret wives out of the closet. Despite not offering new perspectives outside the dominant Jogye Order, this monograph is a must-read for contemporary Korean Buddhist studies.

Rating: ☸️☸️

Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds by David L. McMahan. Oxford University Press, July 2023, 264 pp., $29.95, hardcover.

Known for his widely cited The Making of Buddhist Modernism, David McMahan’s recent contribution to Buddhist studies will surely spark reactions. Dissecting the evolution of Buddhist meditation across cultures and eras, McMahan delves into how meditation practices are reinvented with contemporary values, debunking the myth of a singular, timeless Buddhist practice. He examines how modern meditators, influenced by their cultural biases, focus on aspects like interdependence and health, while earlier practitioners emphasized different views and goals. Tackling a wide range of buzzwords and topics, McMahan’s intentionally accessible prose invites readers to a slow, thoughtful read through complex ideas and poignant contemplations. Destined to ruffle a few feathers in the meditation business, anyone interested in seeing clearly and letting go of the raft they rode to the other shore should read this book.

Read the Tricycle review. Read an adaption by the author.

Rating: ☸️☸️☸️☸️

“‘Meditation Sickness’ in Medieval Chinese Buddhism and the Contemporary West” by C. Pierce Salguero. In Journal of Buddhist Ethics vol 30, August 2023. Open access article.

With the explosion of mindfulness and meditation as a cure-all, there have been increasing reports of adverse effects of meditation on message boards, Buddhist and mainstream publications, and other outlets. In this paper, C. Pierce Salguero, author of A Global History of Buddhism and Medicine and a professor of Asian history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Abington College, examines four medieval Chinese Buddhist texts and their “antidotes” to meditation sickness. 

Salguero writes that “details in these contemporary accounts of meditators in distress” had an “uncanny similarity to descriptions in the medieval Chinese materials,” and part of his motivation for the analysis was to consult non-Western, non–English speaking sources to counteract the “current practice of almost exclusively centering Western voices.” Many antidotes, Salguero notes, include visualization meditation techniques and, to a lesser extent, “confession and repentance rituals like cleaning the monastic toilets and other menial tasks as part of the remedy.” Salguero’s most important takeaway for modern practitioners is the question as to why modern (Western) meditation teachers aren’t more knowledgeable about classical sources, and that these historical techniques ought to be better understood by practitioners, teachers, and mental health professionals alike. 

Read “Buddhism’s Biggest Open Secret,” the winter 2021 feature that Salguero references in his academic paper. It includes a mental health check-in list for practitioners considering a retreat. 

Rating: ☸️☸️☸️

Zen Evangelist: Shenhui, Sudden Enlightenment, and the Southern School of Chan Buddhism by John R. McRae, edited by James Robson and Robert H. Sharf, with Fedde de Vries, Kuroda Institute (University of Hawaii Press), August 2023, 360 pp., $68.00, hardcover.

Zen Evangelist sheds light on Shenhui (684–758), an important but somewhat overlooked figure in Chan Buddhist history. Known for his boisterous personality and penetrative teachings, Shenhui was a vociferous advocate for the sudden enlightenment-gradual cultivation view of awakening and practice. His advocation of this created controversy in his day and significantly influenced Chan Buddhism’s trajectory and much of East Asian Buddhist views on meditation.

Scholar John R. McRae’s posthumous work provides an English translation of Shenhui’s surviving teachings for the first time and offers valuable insights into his enduring impact. Those familiar with Chan’s history will find McRae’s challenge of established narratives useful and eye-opening, and practitioners will find resonance in Shenui’s relentless rebuke of dualistic thinking. A memorialization of both McRae and Shenhui, this publication will surely capture both the hearts and minds of its readers and reshape our understanding of Chan.

Read an excerpt.

Rating: ☸️☸️☸️

Buddhist Masculinities edited by Megan Bryson and Kevin Buckelew. Columbia University Press, September 2023, 352 pp., $35.00, paper.

Buddhist dharma and literature are full of idealized sacred and mundane physical perfections; often, those aesthetic ideals refer to men. Examining a wide range of overlooked and unexplored Buddhist maleness—from narratives of morally superior monks and demon-taming tantric heroes to depictions of irresistible buddhas and bodhisattvas endowed with sensuous bodies and jeweled smiles—Buddhist Masculinities expands on contemporary gender and intersectionality studies, merging a variety of methodological approaches. This much-needed transdisciplinary book pays critical attention to how ideas of masculinity have embodied, defined, and legitimized power and virtue in diverse Buddhist contexts.

Rating: ☸️☸️

Living Nembutsu: Applying Shinran’s Radically Engaged Buddhism in Life and Society by Jeff Wilson. Sumeru Books, March 2023, 158 pp., $24.95, paper. 

Living Nembutsu: Applying Shinran’s Radically Engaged Buddhism in Life and Society by religious scholar Jeff Wilson explores the teachings of Shinran Shonin (1173–1263), the founder of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, and how his teachings can resonate and inspire us nearly a millennium later. Wilson highlights Shinran’s radical approach to Buddhism in medieval Japan, where he rejected mainstream practices to create an inclusive Buddhism accessible to everyone, irrespective of social standing. 

Wilson emphasizes Shinran’s role as a political prisoner, exile, and refugee and explores how Jodo Shinshu communities, inspired by Shinran’s teachings, can address LGBTQ+ inclusion, refugee crises, and climate change. 

Read an interview with Wilson. 

Rating: ☸️☸️☸️

The post Our Scholarly Year-in-Review 2023 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This is the first year that my son, August, has been totally enthralled with Santa Claus. 

The questions started after Thanksgiving. How will he get into our house, through the door or the window? How will he know I live here, will he look at my face? Will he recognize the back of my head?

We already live in a very imaginative and playful world, but when the questions started, it felt different to me than pretending to be dinosaurs. I was spinning a tale that will one day unravel. What will he think of me then? What will I think of me now? 

In Buddhism, right speech is the third step of the eightfold path that leads us to the end of suffering. Engaging in right, or wise or virtuous, speech is a mindfulness practice that  “gives rise to peace and happiness in oneself and others,” writes Beth Roth, a nurse practitioner and Vipassana teacher. We practice right speech by refraining from saying things that are untruthful, harsh, unhelpful, or idle, and instead engaging in speech that is “well spoken,” “just,” “endearing,” and “true,” according to a translation of the Subhasita Sutta by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. 

Santa Claus, of course, did not live in ancient India, so we don’t have any advice from the Buddha. He didn’t live at all, though his composite character is based on saints and other historical do-gooders. I couldn’t find anything about truth-telling and Santa in the vast Tricycle archives, and because his presence (and my aversion) is constant in our house this month, I decided to ask spiritual friends, Tricycle colleagues, and dharma teachers about this predicament. 

At first, I felt a little silly asking a monk about Santa Claus. But I’ve never met a monastic who didn’t provide a timely response to a dharma question, and Tenzin Peljor is no exception. Tenzin is a German Tibetan Buddhist monk who lives in Berlin and often teaches in Leipzig, where I live. In addition to his dharma teaching at Tibethaus Germany, he teaches schoolchildren about Buddhism and meditation. 

“Oh, oho, complicated question,” he wrote back with his answer. Uh-oh. 

Peljor explained that before he took his vows, he would make up imaginary stories with kids that he knew, about things like the white trails a plane leaves in the sky. “They loved it, and now, as adults, they still love me for telling these stories. One of them, a psychologist now, said she would entrust her children to me. So, obviously, it was good and funny for them and didn’t harm them or our relationship.”

Peljor says that, as a monk, he is now “very strict with not-lying,” and if confronted with the Weihnachtsmann (German for Santa Claus; literally, “Christmas Man”) would ask the child questions to continue their fantasy, thus not telling an untruth and also not shutting down a child’s imagination. 

A Middle Way response appeared in all the responses I received. Santa is truly a balancing act. And while August must know I don’t know everything, he knows I know a lot of things. Often, when I turn a question back on him, he replies: “You know, Mama!” 

Sumi Loundon Kim is an author and the Buddhist chaplain at Yale University. She also has two teenagers of her own and founded Mindful Families of Durham. 

Kim says that Santa wasn’t a thing for her growing up in a Soto Zen community, and she remembers “struggling” when her kids were younger. “In the end, I caved,” she told me, and she too helped her children write letters to the North Pole and disguised her handwriting when addressing gifts from Santa. 

The deciding factor, Kim said, was “because we lived in the South and Christianity was more embedded in the culture … Santa was a widespread, shared story.”

It is this “collective buy-in,” as Kim puts it, that makes me purchase and conceal a “Santa Claus only” wrapping paper. It’s why we left our shoes by the door earlier this month for St. Nikolaus, who also left a present in his sock in kindergarten (there were many questions on sock versus shoe). Who am I to insist that he go against the collective grain? Withholding Santa seems unnecessarily cruel and alienating, even more so because I’m technically an alien, a non-native German speaker who messes up grammar and occasionally asks embarrassing (but, I hope, charming) questions in the parent group chat. Going along with Santa stories seems more kind and endearing than harsh. 

August has no interest in my childhood hardcover edition of The Polar Express this year. Instead, every evening, we read A Present for Santa, a curious book inherited from a neighbor, about a little girl named Molly who wants to give Santa a present and is blown to his North Pole Grotto by the North Wind to deliver it on Christmas Eve. She meets Santa, who turns her stuffed animal, a rabbit named Pickles, into a real rabbit, and they hop on his sleigh to help deliver gifts. August’s favorite part is when they’re all standing next to a chimney, Santa’s toy sack packed to the brim. I don’t feel like I’m lying by reading this very mediocre tale; the lying comes in when we talk about sending him letters or how he’ll get in our apartment without a chimney.

Night after night, as Molly and Pickles travel to the North Pole, I find myself hoping August will want to give Santa, or his friends, presents too. So far, no go.

Kim and I also talked about the opportunity that Christmastime presents in both practicing generosity and in kindly and respectfully responding to different beliefs and viewpoints, both “fraught and hard-core.” 

Santa is an “important educational moment” that is similar to a larger problem we have to navigate: “what do we do when people believe something, have a view about the nonmaterial world, about God, Shiva, Allah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, what social and conversational position do we take when there are true believers in something you can’t verify, that isn’t a part of your culture or world. How do you work with that?” Respectfully listening and acknowledging that God exists to some people, though possibly not to us, is important, Kim says. Then she mentions the tooth fairy, which I hadn’t even considered yet …

I found out early on in parenthood that all the parents who have become parents before you are keepers of precious knowledge, priceless wisdom that can help to make you feel connected, supported, and less alone. My parent-colleagues proved this once again with their Santa strategies. Tricycle’s art editor, Nina Buesing, comes from a lapsed Protestant German family, and her own family is now multicultural and multireligious, her kids having been exposed to a number of traditions and customs. “Our approach is to meet the kids where they are, to teach them to be respectful and to figure out what works for them, offering them a full buffet to choose from, but we do not tell lies or fibs,” she told me. Alison Spiegel, a Tricycle contributing editor with three young children, says that Santa is “so fantastical that it really feels more like a story than a lie, and I know when my kids reach a certain age, they’ll figure this one out on their own.” 

Our publisher Sam Mowe has a 6- and 3-year-old, both of whom are in prime Santa time. “When it comes to telling the truth to my kids, it’s easy because I believe in Santa. I don’t mean that flippantly—I think the songs, stories, and traditions that we share around Santa make him real.” Like me, Mowe is conflicted about his children’s literal beliefs and his role in going along with them. 

Santa is also real to our executive editor, Phil Ryan. “My father always claimed to have seen Santa Claus at a certain time and place, and so—case closed, he was real, end of discussion. But every year, my conversation with my kids was about it as a great mystery. This worked well for my kids because they were (and remain at age 12) strong believers in spirits and the supernatural.” 

These notions, that Santa is real and that there are mysteries beyond what we know, are helpful. I also know this magical window of wonderment is very short—and that at least one of the older kids in August’s class has figured it out. And I already catch glimpses of August playing along, like his blasé attitude toward the Weihnachtsmann visiting his kindergarten last week on a fire truck. Is he in on this too? Is he playing along for my benefit? 

Going back to right speech, the eightfold path is a “path” for a reason. It’s not linear, nor is it an open-and-shut assignment. This whole month has been a reflection on how much truth I’m actually telling on a day-to-day basis, like when we do have ice cream, but he’s already had ice cream, and I’m too tired to give a good reason as to why he can’t have more. 

The Santa stories might set me back a few karmic notches, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. August didn’t consent to becoming a Buddhist or a little kid in a corner of the world where everyone waits for Santa on Christmas. Maybe he’ll have a problem with me as an accomplice one day, and if it’s not that, he’ll likely be upset with me for something else. Maybe he’ll tell me he knew all along that we were pretending. I just hope he knows that I chose joy, generosity, and flexibility over rigidity and harshness in the darkest time of the year.  

The post Right Speech and the Christmas Man appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

May We Gather, a Buddhist collective created in the wake of anti-Asian violence in the US in 2020 and 2021, will commemorate the three-year anniversary of the 2021 Atlanta spa and massage parlor shootings with a pilgrimage in Antioch, California, on March 16, 2024, and a series of online talks leading up to the event.

This three-part speaker series, called “Resilience, Recovery, Repair,” will feature conversations with a variety of speakers and is cosponsored by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Upcoming talks are “Recovery: The History of America’s Early Buddho-Daoist Temples,” moderated by Chenxing Han on February 8, and “Repair: A Path to Healing Land and Ancestors,” moderated by Funie Hsu on February 22.

May We Gather was born out of conversations between Duncan Ryuken Williams, a Soto Zen priest and director of the Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture at the University of Southern California; Funie Hsu, a transdisciplinary scholar and associate professor of American Studies at San Jose State University; and Chenxing Han, an author and the Khyentse Visitor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. May We Gather aims to emphasize interconnection and the necessary ongoing work to “heal America’s racial karma,” according to the organization’s website. Events were held on the traditional Buddhist days of mourning: forty-nine days, one hundred days, one year, and three years. 

In March 2021, a gunman targeted two spa and massage parlors in the Atlanta area, killing eight people. Six of the victims were women of Asian descent; Yong Ae Yue, 63, was a Buddhist who was born in South Korea and remembered for loving her family, cooking, and karaoke. The alleged shooter, Robert Aaron Long, who was 21 at the time of the murders, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the Cherokee County slayings. Long is facing the death penalty for the murders in Fulton County, and the case is ongoing. 

While the events and remembrances have focused on the Atlanta murders, organizers also wanted to respond to the growing anti-Asian sentiment following the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus originated in China and was referred to as the “Chinese virus” by then-president Donald J. Trump, who is seeking a second term in November 2024. There were instances of temples across the country being vandalized, and other victims of violence believed to be racially motivated, including Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai American who died after being pushed to the ground in San Francisco in January 2021. 

Han tells Tricycle: “we hope these events will inspire others to open up conversations around resilience, recovery, and repair and to organize meaningful gatherings—whether memorials, pilgrimages, or something else—that connect their sanghas with neighboring Buddhist temples and spiritual friends near and far.”

Han explains that the March 16 pilgrimage, which will also be live-streamed, is being held in Antioch due to the city’s “history of discrimination and violence against early Chinese immigrants and their descendants.” She also notes how Antioch’s Chinatown was burned and destroyed in 1876 by white residents following the “scapegoating of six Chinese American women as sources of sexual contagion.” The city had so-called “sundown laws” for at least two decades in the mid- and late 1800s that barred Chinese residents from being in public after sunset. The city formally apologized for these discriminatory laws in April 2021. 

“We selected this diverse city for our upcoming peace walk because it highlights a historical parallel between 19th-century racial, religious, and gendered violence and contemporary attitudes toward the Asian American community in the wake of COVID-19,” Han says, adding that this history was brought to the group’s attention by founding member Hsu. “We gather in Antioch at the site where [its] Chinatown once stood to recover this history, to acknowledge the legacy of America’s racial karma—as demonstrated by the Atlanta-area shootings and the ongoing racial violence in Antioch—and to heal in community together.”

Buddhist leaders from different traditions and languages are expected to attend the pilgrimage. May We Gather’s website provides information in many languages, including Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese, which sanghas can use to share with their communities. Those planning to attend in person are asked to register in advance. 

“Recovery: The History of America’s Early Buddho-Daoist Temples,” moderated by Chenxing Han, will be a discussion on “cultural and religious recovery through architecture and archives” with Drs. Chuimei Ho, Bennet Bronson, and Jonathan H. X. Lee at 4 p.m. Pacific / 7 p.m. Eastern on February 8. “Repair: A Path to Healing Land and Ancestors” will “consider Asian American Buddhist resilience and recovery alongside the racial karma of settler colonialism and enslavement, as well as the cultivation of spiritual friendship.” Speakers for this panel are Corrina Gould of Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, Christine Cordero of Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and Devin Berry and Noliwe Alexander of Deep Time Liberation; the talk will be moderated by Hsu at 4 p.m. Pacific / 7 p.m. Eastern on February 22. Those interested can register for both events here.

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The girls are waiting for me at the entrance of the Bodhi Institute, smiling and holding kata scarves and bundles of flowers—hibiscus, a fiery orange flower from an Ashoka tree, and other flora that have been growing in Lumbini since the time of the Buddha. The girls are a little bit shy when giving me the gifts. Then, suddenly, the little ones wrap me up in a group hug. For the next five days, they’re my personal holy-girl gang, showing me around the place where the Buddha was born.

I’d come to Lumbini in southern Nepal to meet with the Buddhist monk Metteyya Sakyaputta, who has devoted his life to this sacred city that is also his hometown and to the girls growing up in and around it. In rural Nepal, it’s not uncommon for girls as young as 10 to be married and move into their husband’s family’s home and begin serving as a housewife. An April 2023 UNICEF report found that South Asia, with 290 million child brides, was home to nearly half the total global number of married girls, even though child marriage has long been illegal.

Every year, an estimated 1.5 million people visit Lumbini, where, according to most Buddhist traditions, the Buddha was born. There are over thirty monasteries here, and at times the monastic community is estimated in the tens of thousands.

Lumbini is one of the four most important pilgrimage sites in Buddhism.

For the last two decades, Metteyya and his team at Lumbini Social Service Foundation have worked to open schools for children in the Lumbini area. Until recently, Metteyya served as the vice chair of the Lumbini Development Trust, a governmental organization tasked with carrying out the Lumbini Master Plan, developed by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange (1913–2005). He is also president of the Lumbini Crane Foundation. His more recent endeavors include Peace Grove Nunnery, which at the time of my visit in March 2023 had nineteen nuns, aged 9 to 17, living at the Bodhi Institute.

It may seem like an odd occupation for a Theravada monk. The Vinaya, or monastic code, specifically prohibits a monk from being alone with a woman, in part to avoid the appearance of impropriety. When I ask Metteyya about it, he brushes this off as a dated social rule.

Since 2010, Metteyya has run a monastery where the girls live and study Buddhism, in addition to academic subjects at different schools in Lumbini, and they’ve welcomed new students ever since. The nuns take eight precept vows, and special accommodations are made because of their age. For example, younger nuns eat evening meals to help them grow. Metteyya says that the environment is at times “dharma light,” as he doesn’t want to put too much emphasis on suffering. Some of the nuns have already been married, he explains, and have already lived through extremely trying circumstances.

All the work done here flows back into the motivation to see Lumbini’s local community grow and thrive as outside investment and growing tourism bring in more and more people.

Now 38, Metteyya was born Awadhesh Tripathi in a nearby village. He describes his family as devout Brahmins and the women in his family as strong matriarchs who guided and nurtured his extended family of sixteen people. Growing up, he knew Hindu scriptures well from his grandparents’ daily prayers and was curious during his school years about Buddhism and its role in the history of Lumbini. Metteyya became a student of the Venerable Sujata, who was among the founding nuns of the Nepalese Bhikkhuni order.

Metteyya’s family wanted him to study medicine, and at one time he thought that he would serve his community as a doctor, but his life took a different course. In the early days, he was back and forth between Kathmandu and Lumbini, and eventually had to make the decision between running the school and continuing his own studies. He picked the former, and what is now known as Metta School was incorporated in 2003.

Ordained as a monk in the Theravada tradition, he was given the dharma name Metteyya (Maitreya in Sanskrit), the future Buddha. Metteyya said his decision led to a few years when he and his father didn’t speak, but his family is now supportive and has donated money and furniture to the schools. They have even come in to advise the students.

Metteyya has also started Karuna Girls College and Pragya Gurukul School in a village outside Lumbini. Karuna is the only all-girls school in the region, and students there learn academics and job skills, as well as issues that are still very real problems in the villages surrounding Lumbini: child marriage, lack of family planning, and poor stewardship of the environment. The schools all operate on a dana model, with no mandatory tuition fees.

As the Buddha’s birthplace, Lumbini is one of the four most important pilgrimage sites in Buddhism. The other three are Bodhgaya, site of the Buddha’s enlightenment; Sarnath, where he gave his first sermon; and Kushinagar, where he passed away.

The tradition tells us that the Buddha’s mother, Queen Maya, or Maya Devi, enjoyed a comfortable pregnancy, and as the birth approached, she set off from the palace in Kapilavastu for her parents’ home in Devadha. The queen and her entourage stopped on the way in Lumbini to enjoy the cool shade provided by a grove of sal trees. There she rested, surrounded by singing birds, buzzing bees, and blooming flowers. She began laboring and, while gracefully standing with her arm draped over a tree, gave birth to the boy that would become the Buddha.

The Maya Devi Temple marks the site where it is believed Maya Devi gave birth. The surrounding gardens are beautiful, adorned with prayer flags that dance in the breeze. The birds keep singing, the bees keep buzzing, and the flowers still bloom. Monastics of many different traditions meditate, chant, and speak the dharma around the complex (some bring microphones and speakers so that they’re the loudest), and many gather under the oldest and largest banyan tree. Sleepy monkeys recline and snack in the trees above.

Lumbini remained hidden to the outside world until the turn of the 20th century, when surveyors, using Buddhist writings as a guide, rediscovered the Ashoka Pillar. But according to Metteyya, Lumbini locals never forgot about the sacred spot. The grove was revered as a fertility shrine by local Hindu women. Metteyya’s grandmother brought the hair from his first haircut—an important Hindu rite of passage—there for a blessing.

With the rediscovery, the outside world came back to Lumbini. Archaeologists excavated the mounds built over the site of the Buddha’s birthplace. Monasteries and guest houses were built. After a life-changing pilgrimage by United Nations Secretary-General U Thant in 1967, Lumbini gained the support of the UN. During the seventies, the influential brutalist architect Kenzo Tange created a development plan aimed at preserving Lumbini as a spiritual site and welcoming visitors from around the world. Tange recommended a five-mile-by-five-mile zone centered on the “Sacred Garden” where Maya Devi gave birth to the Buddha. Tange’s plan includes space for forty-five monasteries and meditation centers in two monastic zones.

The redevelopment has, however, turned Lumbini into a Buddhist “Disney World,” Metteyya says. Indeed, the properties, built by various countries, are beautiful and ornate, with manicured lawns and gardens. But residents from seven villages were relocated as part of the plan, and the land was turned into a crane sanctuary.

“We have these beautiful, world-class monuments, but outside [the monastic zone], life is pretty much the same,” Metteyya says.

Four decades after the master plan was adopted, it’s about 80 percent complete. Over the years in his role at the Lumbini Land Trust, Metteyya spent a lot of time with visiting dignitaries and also making sure Lumbini isn’t overdeveloped. (Metteyya ended his term in late 2023.) Gautam Buddha International Airport opened near Lumbini in May 2022, giving international pilgrims and visitors direct access to the holy site.

And the work with the girls goes on. Trust in Metteyya and his team has paved the way for significant change in a short amount of time. Graduates have gone on to become nurse-midwives serving the area, while others have become housewives or serve on public boards. Some graduates have traveled to Sri Lanka to continue to live as nuns and study Buddhism. They ride motorbikes, and locals no longer bat an eye.

Though Bodhi Institute is protected, it’s far from closed off. The girls travel home on school breaks and some weekends; those who live farther away from Lumbini go with their school sisters’ families. Bodhi Institute hosts sleepovers for the girls and their mothers. Amma Café, which is along the canal leading up the Maya Devi Temple, sells tea, coffee, and local sweets like laddu, a rice ball treat, and is staffed with all women from Lumbini. Amma means mother in Nepali, and many of the women who work at Amma Café have children who attend schools started by Metteyya.

The women of Lumbini are the spiritual heirs of Maya Devi and Mahapajapati Gotami, Maya Devi’s sister and the Buddha’s adoptive mother, who successfully argued that women should have an equal place in the sangha. And they can have the power and confidence of both the Buddha’s mothers to do great things.

When Metteyya and his group of social workers are convincing parents to send their girls to school or to extend their education, they emphasize that the world they live in today isn’t the same one the parents grew up in. Earning money for the family is important, and the girls will have to live one day without their parents’ help.

“And that’s what we wanted to create,” Metteyya says. “If there’s one woman who [demonstrates] that they can be independent, earn a decent living, raise a good family, and be accepted, then it becomes OK in our culture. And hundreds of women can follow her.”

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Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself
by Tracy Cochran
Shambhala Publications, April 2024, 256 pp., $18.95, paper

Presence opens with a broken-down VW bus on a secluded highway in the Midwest. Tracy Cochran—then a new college graduate, today an author and meditation teacher—found herself at this moment disconnected, daydreaming about the thwarted possibility of meeting a Tibetan Buddhist teacher in Boulder, followed by an insight that what she was seeking was “not out there” but “right here, right now.” Drawing on personal experiences—being mugged in New York City in the eighties; the joys and challenges of being on retreat with her 7-year-old daughter—this collection of short essays shows the depth that mindfulness can add to our own lives’ stories. 

–WBA

Noble Truths, Noble Path: The Heart Essence of the Buddha’s Original Teachings
by Bhikkhu Bodhi
Wisdom Publications, February 2023, 200 pp., $19.95, paper

The latest anthology from Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi, a Theravada Buddhist monk and distinguished translator, zeroes in on the Buddha’s teachings on nibbana (“liberation”) in the Samyutta Nikaya (“Connected Discourses”). If you’ve been interested in Bodhi’s translations but were intimidated by linguistic discussion, this “reader-friendly” version was created with you in mind. Bodhi writes that the Samyutta Nikaya, if rearranged, “provides a systematic overview of the Dhamma that mirrors the pattern of the four noble truths.” This “underlying blueprint” provides a direct and clear understanding for students of early Buddhism.

–WBA

Footprints on the Journey: One Year Following the Path of Dzogchen Master Khenpo Sodargye
by Khenpo Sordargye, translated by Sally Yuanghong
Wisdom Publications, March 2024, 344 pp., $29.95, paper

Khenpo Sodargye, a Tibetan Dzogchen master and scholar from Tibet’s Larung Gar Buddhist Academy, shares his impressions of daily life as a Buddhist monk in this collection, which was forgotten about in a drawer and then edited after the death of his teacher, Jigme Phuntsok Rinpoche. Footprints is more than a record of day-to-day activities; there are musings on altruism and devotion, anecdotes on saving local yaks from slaughter, pith instructions, and much more. Short chapters that can be read on their own make this book a timeless practice companion.

–WBA

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Scholar’s Corner

Esoteric Pure Land Buddhism
by Aaron P. Proffitt
University of Hawaii Press, 2024, 445 pp., $35.00, paper

Scholar Aaron Proffitt’s compelling and rigorous exploration confronts long-held Western misconceptions about Buddhist practices centered on Amitabha’s Pure Land and its importance within the Japanese and pan-Asian Buddhist traditions, challenging us to reimagine Buddhism as we know it. Diving into Japanese Pure Land’s esoteric aspects and providing never-before-translated texts, he masterfully dispels the notion of Pure Land Buddhism as merely devotional while showcasing its vital place within Buddhist thought and practice at large. This book will have you rethinking preconceptions and appreciating the tradition’s nuanced, transformative potential. It’s a must-read for scholars and serious practitioners alike.

–FMR-H

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WHAT WE’RE REREADING

The Heart of Buddhist Meditation

by Nyanaponika Thera

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