Word: buddhists
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Many of Myhrum’s fellow practitioners at Harvard are also drawn to the flexibility they perceive within the Buddhist tradition. They often emphasize the sentiment that the Buddha himself expressed in the Kalama Sutta, a central treatise of Buddhism, that his followers should personally test what they are told and accept it only if they truly see and understand...
Sean D. Sullivan, a Divinity School student studying Buddhism and a board member of the graduate student dominated Harvard Buddhist Community, describes the phenomenon of making personal choices about all Buddhist beliefs and doctrines as something many Americans do. “I think Americans selectively choose like that—I like this, oh not this, oh that makes sense,” Sullivan says as he pantomimes plucking ideas out of the air. Sullivan personally practices this process of selective screening. “Things like reincarnation and stuff like that, I don’t believe...
...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...