Practice and Resilience

October 09 · Teachings · dukkha, emptiness, enlightenment, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, interdependence, liberation, relative and absolute, Resilience, responsibility, Summer / Fall 2018

by Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi

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FROM THE RECORD OF MASTER YANGSHAN

Ho-shang Mi of Ching-chao sent a monastic to ask Yangshan: “Right in this very moment are you dependent on enlightenment?”

Yangshan said “There is no absence of enlightenment. Why fall into the secondary?”

Ho-shang Mi was a peer of Master Yangshan, a very important Chinese master in our lineage. Here he asks, right in this moment are you dependent upon enlightenment?

A New Incarnation

October 09 · Editorial, Sangha News · digital version, Mountain Record, Resilience, Summer / Fall 2018

Editorial by Danica Shoan Ankele

Dear Reader,

Here at the Monastery, we’ve been having deep discussions about the Mountain Record over the past several years. After long conversations and careful reflection among the Mountain Record staff, the Monastery’s abbot, monastics and Board of Directors, we’ve decided it’s time to make a significant change. We’re excited about the vision we have in mind, but we also feel the poignancy of shifting the Mountain Record’s familiar and well-loved format.

Remembering Love

October 09 · Beyond Fear of Differences, Essays · bullying, healing, Resilience, sexuality, Summer / Fall 2018

An Informal Contemplation on Healing

by Lama Rod Owens

You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love’s no longer being served.

—Nina Simone

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?…Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.

—Toni Cade Bambara, “The Salt Eaters”

When people ask me how I’m doing, I feel a little confused and pause for a moment. In my mind I want to talk about this deep sense of heaviness and despair that feels like mourning with and for the world. I want to say that a part of me doesn’t feel good enough, that this was a feeling I was born into, trained in, and encouraged to accept–that I do not remember experience before this.

There’s No App For That

October 07 · Earth Initiative, Essays · biodiversity, climate, climate change, conservation, consumerism, culture, income inequality, journalism, morality, politics, population, Resilience, Summer / Fall 2018, technology

Technology and Morality in the Age of Climate Change, Overpopulation, and Biodiversity Loss

by Richard Heinberg

Technology has grown with us, side by side, since the dawn of human society. Each time that we’ve turned to technology to solve a problem or make us more comfortable, we’ve been granted a solution. But it turns out that all of the gifts technology has bestowed on us have come with costs. And now we are facing some of our biggest challenges: climate change, overpopulation, and biodiversity loss. Naturally, we’ve turned to our longtime friend and ally—technology—to get us out of this mess. But are we asking too much this time?

The Fork

October 07 · Creative Expression, Poetry · Summer / Fall 2018

by Chase Takusei Twichell

A wooden Buddha gazes down
upon my desk from a small shelf
painted the same color as the walls:
Chinese Dragon. Beside him,
a picture Lucy drew when she was six
shows a bird with human face
and the words Have fun being a parrot
written below it in parrot colors.

Earnestly I vow to become one,
sleek-feathered, able to fly pathless
above human traffic in a kingdom
of light and air, no suffering.

I can’t go on feigning surprise
at the kalpas it’s taken so far,
since they’re all my kalpas.

I follow the path, but it forks.
To the right, faint blazes ruckle the bark.
The trail follows the brook all the way to Nirvana,
where I have never been. To the left,
the path soon splits again: right to Nirvana,
left to the trail that forks.