Dharma Realm
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The DharmaRealm is an occasional podcast conversation between Harry Gyokyo Bridge, resident minister of the Buddhist Church of Oakland, and Scott Mitchell, Dean of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, about Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, Buddhism in the modern world, pop-culture, music, sci-fi and how all those things are related.
Dharma Realm
3y ago
We’re not talking about magicians, we’re talking about ritual and whether or not there is some efficacious power inherent in Buddhist ritual practice. Ritual is often derided by modern folks or rejected explicitly as not a part of Buddhism, distinct from practice proper. But there’s ritual throughout Buddhist history and practice, and ritual serves an ..read more
Dharma Realm
3y ago
One of the issues that came up in our last conversation was the idea of "original enlightenment," or the idea that from an enlightened point of view, everything's equal. Today we take up some of the consequences of this view; do we use this idea as a way to minimize, dismiss, or disregard the experiences ..read more
Dharma Realm
3y ago
Is the BCA silent on issues of social justice? For many, it might seem like there's no Shin Buddhist public voice in the American discourse on Buddhism and social justice. We've been asked several times about this, so today is part one of a larger conversation about Shin Buddhism and social justice. We start by ..read more
Dharma Realm
3y ago
In prepping for our last episode on how to do Shin Buddhist practice, we started thinking about why people do practice and the question of motivations. The conversation starts with a reflection on a conference paper Scott heard early in the summer about Buddhism, the self-help industry, and BCA's "Zen envy" (hat tip to James ..read more
Dharma Realm
3y ago
I'm not going to rehash the ongoing conversation online about Aaron Alexis who, early this week, killed twelve people before being killed himself by a Washington, D.C., police officer. It's pretty clear by now that he had been interested in Buddhist for a while, but whether or not that's relevant to why he did what ..read more
Dharma Realm
3y ago
We're back! And we're taking up a listener question about practicing Buddhism when you're not near a Shin community, so we're calling this one "how to do Shin practice?" This is an important question; what is our practice? How do we do the practice? Harry breaks it down into external and internal aspects where the ..read more
Dharma Realm
3y ago
We round out our conversation about music by focusing on Shin Buddhism, starting with Shinran. It's clear chanting was an important part of early Shin communities, and many of Shinran's wasan (poems) have come down to us as songs still sung today. We take a brief detour to talk about Herbie Hancock before getting into ..read more
Dharma Realm
3y ago
In part two of our discussion of Buddhism and music, we talk (mostly) about the potential genre of "Buddhist music." Genre is a tricky; it raises all sorts of questions about who gets to define an artist or musician and whether or not it further divides people into camps of musical identity. But we definitely ..read more
Dharma Realm
3y ago
We've got a long-standing interest in music; coincidentally, a listener asked us a question about music on Facebook, so we took the subject and ran with it! This is the first of three episodes dedicated to the subject of Buddhism and music. Today's show is a general overview of the subject, both the question of ..read more
Dharma Realm
3y ago
"Won't somebody please think of the children!" This week we take up the tension in Buddhism between the ideal of monasticism, the renunciant, the solo practitioner who goes off in search of awakening versus the reality of home life, laity, and family. Our conversation is inspired, in part, by a post last fall over on ..read more