Word: buddhists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Alexander D. Gordon ’04-’05, meditation was what first appealed to him about Buddhism. It eventually led him to take time off from school. He is now living with Buddhist monks at the Gampo Abbey, a religious community in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. Gordon had been moderately interested in Buddhism since high school, when he read a book on Zen, but he did not seriously become involved until his junior year of college. “I just gave it a shot,” Gordon says...
Gordon, who identified himself as a Buddhist after a long pause—because it’s “just a label”—is not especially attached to any uniquely Buddhist doctrine. “It’s all very vague—it’s important to be a good person,” Gordon offers as his view of what it means to be Buddhist. “The way I tend to think of it, Buddhists here are like if Unitarians got together and really decided to be serious...
...Buddhists who were not originally Unitarian or some other religious affiliation, the practice of Buddhism can be quite different. Meghan C. Howard ’04 is one such example. Drawn to Buddhism by a Zen text, her parents were Zen Buddhist until she was four, when a Tibetan lama visited Rochester, N.Y. “They were so moved,” Howard says, that they became Tibetan Buddhist and helped set up the local dharma center, which they now run. Howard laughs as she recounts the long hours she spent at the dharma center as a child, saying...
Howard is sometimes disturbed by the picking and choosing that many American Buddhists practice, especially when people use Buddhist doctrine to justify prior beliefs. “If you bring all your baggage with you, rather than using Buddhism to investigate your political beliefs,” you’re not actually subscribing to Buddhism, she says. She does recognize, however, the importance of testing beliefs before internalizing them. “My faith in Buddhism has grown because of testing [what I’m told],” she says. “Otherwise it?...
...Counter-intuitive as that may sound, it is actually a pretty common sentiment among many who come to Buddhism in adulthood. The most popular way of expressing it is to say, as Henry W. Mak ’06 says, “I’m philosophically Buddhist.” Mak meditates daily and calls the practice “the core of my life,” but that core is based on Buddhist theories of psychology and philosophy...