Category: buddhism

And Back In Again
Inside Out a film by Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen Some years ago, my wife and I would emerge from a movie and say, “That was very Buddhist.” We nearly always agreed. It seemed that movies were starting to reflect Buddhist values, or perhaps that, since we had both started studying Buddhism, we picked up ...
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The Beer-Sodden Mystery of Chogyam Trungpa
Mindfulness in Action by Chogyam Trungpa. Shambhala. 196 pp. $21.95. Twenty-seven years ago, on my first trip to Mexico, I was sitting in the back seat of a bus on the outskirts of Oaxaca. My wife and I weren’t on a tour; we had joined a group that was studying Spanish at a school in Cuernavaca, ...
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Heaven All the Way
In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen Riverhead Books 250 pp $16.00 Peter Matthiessen’s final novel—it was published right around the time of his death in 2014—concerns a group of people who come together to do a meditation retreat at Auschwitz. Matthiessen’s Zen teacher, Bernie Glassman, conducted such a retreat, perhaps more than one, and I don’t know ...
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Apology to Peter Matthiessen
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen. Modern Library. 912 pp. $18.00. For some years—having read a few things avidly—I avoided the work of Peter Matthiessen. I devoured his book of Zen Journals, Nine-Headed Dragon River, which featured some of the most important figures of American Zen, read it two or three times. I also loved my first ...
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