Word: buddhistically
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Very early on, the American Buddhist trailblazers, particularly those working in Vipassana and Zen, made a vital break from Asian tradition: they opted against trying to replicate the Asian monastic system, where intense practice is left to the monks and the main devotion of laypeople is once-a-week temple offerings. "American people don't want to be monks and nuns," says Kornfield. "They want practices that transform the heart." The approach seemed to work: Kornfield's meditation seminars with Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg in Barre, Mass., and at Spirit Rock in California, turned out thousands of graduates. Zendos began...
Even grimmer, in a way that would do Jeremiah proud, is Robert Thurman: father of the actress Uma, adviser on both upcoming films, the Dalai Lama's longtime friend, co-founder with Gere of Tibet House and Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. Thurman states baldly that those like Batchelor who prefer their Buddhism karma free "are non-Buddhists...they want to live as American humanists and call it Buddhism, [but] it's not really solid." He is only slightly less disdainful of Vipassana seminars that de-emphasize the supernatural side of the faith...
Adam Yauch's recorded voice comes pounding out of the speakers, in support of political justice and inner peace. If the world of Tibeto-Buddhist chic can be said to have a red-hot center, it inhabits the small restaurant in Manhattan's East Village where Yauch and his Milarepa fund are celebrating the release of the Tibetan Freedom Concert's CD. Opinion makers in knapsacks and nose rings schmooze; a large portrait of the Dalai Lama beams...
Yauch, 33, does not disagree with Thurman--"to really be a Buddhist practitioner, you need a real lama and direct link to the heritage," he says. But his youth and enthusiasm make the possibility seem more palatable. "There's something going on," he says. "It's at its inception, its birth; it's kind of helpless right now. But as it takes root, it will evolve into American Buddhism...
...baby boomers, I went through a period of spiritual crisis, examining other faiths. I was always interested in studying Buddhism because it's more than a religion, it's a philosophy." Her script is torn neatly in two, between the notion of conflict, which drives Hollywood movies, and the Buddhist sense of reconciliation and liberation. It is a Western film that goes East for answers. Its aim is to give the viewer, in images of rhapsodic beauty, a radical message: not fight and win but accept and give...