Exiled – A Tibetan’s Tale

“I was concerned about the many differences between India and China — the ways of thinking, for one — and India was not really up to confronting China. If I stayed in India, maybe I wouldn’t be able to do the kind of things I really wanted to do to help Tibet.” He eventually set his sights on Japan, with its own brand of Buddhism and spirituality, as his next home in exile.

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Rocking to the Flow

The 7th generation Ogawa Jihei (1860-1933), better known as “Ueji,” was a magician with water and stone and a pioneer of modern Japanese garden design.

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Kyoto in the Mid-sixties

Waiting in the snow at the Ryoan-ji bus stop on a Kyoto winter morning in 1964, I was interrupted by a woman who came out of a nearby house and, seeing me standing there, went back inside and returned with an overcoat which she helped me into. It was a three-quarter-length brown coat, and warm…That was my introduction to Kyoto.

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Buddhism Engaged

BUDDHISM
BY DAVID COZY

Buddhist teachings, Loy believes, can help us to understand the true nature of lack and the havoc it causes, and because they can perform this necessary function, he feels it is important that Buddhism remain vital in the twenty-first century.

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In the Realm of the Bicycle

I first noticed them, the fact of their everywhereness, during my daily commute to and from work, as they stood and leaned and laid and zipped around in all the conditions of life itself…

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Rediscovering Kyoto

I work as a guide for foreign tourists and though I mean to introduce them to the charms of Japan, instead it is often they who remind me of my country’s beauty.

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Turtles All the Way Down

To add credence to our myths, we enmesh them in Big Stories, such as the Bible and Buddhist sutras. These Stories try to explain it all, but inevitably fall far short. Their promise of absolute truths is empty since these Big Stories too were (and forever are) constructed.

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The Garden View

Shisendo

“My idea was to create photographs that explore this undefined border between private and public space by photographing the garden from deep inside the temple, balancing the areas of the tatami/ meditation space and the garden space equally in the image.”

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Boundaries

I look outside again and something happens, at once strange and wonderful. I breathe, deeply, and the universe inhales with me. Suddenly, and with great force, the air expands…

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Kyoto Waters

Kyoto exists in layers of wildness and control; something built juxtaposed with something natural: one against the other, layered, intertwined, spiraled infinitely around the plain, a kind of DNA of place.

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Facing Self, Reality

Naikan, which means “introspection” in Japanese, implores us to look not merely within but beyond ourselves by routinely asking a set of three questions…

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