Word: monke
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...While the Dalai Lama bestrides the globe, Zen Buddhists in San Francisco run two of the better-respected AIDS hospices, and their philosophy infuses the entire "good death" movement. In New York City and elsewhere, fans flock to talks by Thich Nhat Hanh, a French-based, socially engaged Vietnamese monk whose book Living Buddha, Living Christ sold 100,000 hardcover copies. In cyberspace the Manhattan-based Asian Classics Institute has transferred 100,000 deteriorating pages of scripture from Tibetan block prints onto the Internet. Mirabai Bush, a devotee of the non-Tibetan Vipassana school, teaches Monsanto executives nonreligious meditation techniques...
Back in 1938, a Japanese monk, noting that it took China three centuries to adopt Buddhism from India, said introducing it in America would be like holding a lotus to a rock and waiting for it to take root. It has been only 60 years, and at least one authority, Columbia professor Robert Thurman, states grimly that as far as he is concerned, a true, indigenous Buddhism doesn't yet exist here. But others are convinced that for the first time, American Buddhism may be strong enough not only to withstand the distortions of celebrity but also to attract...
...most colorful of the three major Buddhist branches, however, was Vajrayana, the "Diamond Vehicle" adopted in Tibet in the 7th century. Instead of attaining complete enlightenment gradually, Tibetan monks claimed to do so in a single lifetime, an approach compared by Rick Fields, author of the American Buddhist history How the Swans Came to the Lake, to climbing the sheerest face of a Himalayan cliff: demanding and perilous. Unwilling to limit themselves to the standard tools--chanting and meditative breath-control techniques--the Vajrayana Buddhists employ an eclectic mix that includes religious visualizations, philosophical debate, ritual, yoga and the energies...
There are dozens of other innovations and debates, some small and some quite radical. A civil but ferociously felt argument has raged for the past few months around a book called Buddhism Without Beliefs, in which Stephen Batchelor, a former monk in both Zen and Tibetan traditions, suggests that Buddhism jettison reincarnation and karma, thereby making possible what he calls an "existential, therapeutic and liberating agnosticism." In fact, many American practitioners have already Batchelorized themselves by default. A good example is Ann Buck, 67, a retired businesswoman and teacher of Theravadan meditation. Although she does not reject karma, it plays...
...that chapter, Gould retraces the history of malfunctioning Christian calendars back to a monk named Dionysius Exigus who began the A.D. calendar at the year 1 rather than the year zero. From there sprang the simmering academic debate over whether the new millennium begins on Jan. 1, 2000, or one year later. Based on extensive research of fin de siecle newspapers and magazines, Gould observes that pop culture has generally favored the 1999 New Year's Day as the dawning of the new century. The other view "has always been over-whelmingly favored by scholars and by people in power...