The other day, one of my dharma sisters told me a koan: A student asked her teacher: “Are you really present all the time?” The teacher replied: “Yes, I am.” There is a long tradition of Zen students asking their teachers whether they are truly enlightened. In most of the stories I’ve heard, the teacher nimbly evades or deflects the question, or turns it back on the student. For example, this story from The Hidden Lamp, a collection of koans featuring women: Joko Beck had finished a talk and asked if there were any questions. A young man raised his hand and bluntly asked, “Are you enlighte ..read more

Last April, my morning meditation was interrupted by the sounds of whirring chainsaws and clamoring trucks. When I stepped to the window, I noticed three men from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation standing around a large oak tree on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. At first, I thought they were trimming the branches. As I watched them saw off larger and larger sections, I realized they were cutting down the entire tree. My heart started racing. How could I stop this? I thought of the environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill, who climbed a California redwood tree in ..read more

We can’t drink the water, but we can breathe the air. Breathing in short, we know we are breathing in short. Breathing out short, we feel like we’re hyperventilating, because we’re wearing masks. We are purifying, sanitizing, and sterilizing. We drink bottled water, and even brush our teeth with it, but here in Sri Lanka, we are the foreign body, the invasive species threatening to throw the ecosystem out of balance. We have come bearing COVID, seeking Instagrammable photos, as our ancestors sought cinnamon, pepper, tea, and rubber. Like the distinguished visitors of ancient times—the monkey ..read more

The 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson once wrote: A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.  Reading these lines for the first time recently, I was immediately struck by Dickinson’s verses. In Zen practice, just as in any other spiritual or religious practice, we say a lot of words. Most of those are pretty old, first uttered far away in space and time: we chant millennia-old sutras from India, meditate over thousand-year-old Chinese koans (snippets of encounters between ancient Chan masters and their students), and discuss many centuri ..read more

In the face of global crises and catastrophes, how can we work with our anger effectively? And how can we channel our grief and rage without becoming consumed by it? These questions are at the core of Jungwon Kim’s practice. Kim is a multidisciplinary communications strategist and advocate who has chronicled frontline environmental and human rights movements for the past two decades. She previously worked at the Rainforest Alliance and Amnesty International, and she also co-founded two BIPOC Buddhist communities. In a recent episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen ..read more

As a Buddhist teacher, I want to acknowledge how important trees are in Buddhist teachings. The Buddha was born under a tree. He practiced under trees, he got enlightened under the Bodhi tree. He taught under a tree, wandered under the trees, and died between two sal trees in a grove. I lived for a number of years in Ajahn Chah’s forest monastery on the border of Northeast Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. We lived in an ancient rhythm where we would get up in the dark and walk through the forest, sit and chant in the morning, and walk barefoot on dusty paths to the nearby villages for people to ..read more

Unlike many contemporary American poets, Pulitzer Prize finalist Arthur Sze did not attend a traditional MFA program to learn to write poetry. Instead, he turned to translation to hone his craft. His latest collection, The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry, compiles fifty years of his translations, illustrating the vitality and versatility of the Chinese poetic tradition across nearly two millennia. The collection is unique in bringing together classical and vernacular Chinese poetry in the same volume, and it includes several poems by the Chinese Modernist master Wen Yiduo (1899 ..read more

I recently finished watching National Geographic’s latest exploration of the natural world—a rather close examination of its insects, aptly titled A Real Bug’s Life, in a playful nod to Disney’s animated 1998 feature film A Bug’s Life. Over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate this type of nature documentary more and more—other favorites include Apple’s Tiny World (2020–21) and Netflix’s Tiny Creatures (2020)—where the micro becomes the macro in a dazzling, otherworldly fashion. These documentaries push viewers to appreciate what largely goes unnoticed in everyday life, and this is often accom ..read more

Dr. Daisaku Ikeda, Buddhist philosopher, educator, nuclear disarmament activist, founding president of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI) Buddhist community, and treasured mentor to me and millions of Buddhists globally, passed away in Tokyo on November 15, 2023 at the age of 95. Throughout his life, Ikeda Sensei emphasized that a profound transformation within an individual can lead to profound global change, a process he referred to as human revolution:  “A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation and, further, will enab ..read more

When my retreat cabin shook this Friday during a historic earthquake in the Northeast, I reached for “The Powerful Prayer of Aspiration,” a Dzogchen prayer that is prescribed not just for earthquakes but also eclipses.  A fourteen-verse prayer meant to be recited out loud, the prayer comes from a larger Dzogchen text entitled The Tantra of Great Perfection that Reveals the All Penetrating Mind of Samantabhadra. This text teaches that by making powerful prayers of aspirations, all beings will surely awaken to Buddhahood. For those interested in reciting this prayer during today’s total so ..read more