Word: vipassana
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Dates: during 1997-1997
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...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 out of Williamsburg, Mass. Since 1988, reports Morreale, the number of English-language Buddhist teaching centers has jumped from 429 to more than...
...great spiritual bazaars of the 1970s. One of its most popular courses, after Trungpa's dialogues with such people as Timothy Leary, was a seminar offered by Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein, two former Peace Corps volunteers who returned from Southern Asia as adepts in the Theravadan practice's Vipassana meditation. Suddenly all three branches of Buddhism were teaching on American soil. It must be noted, however, that they did not necessarily teach here the way they taught anywhere else...
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...
...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 for the mechanics of meditation, or who, as Thurman puts it, "teach laypeople and rationalize their own departures from the traditional view. I did so for 15 years myself." For Thurman, "Euro-American Buddhism doesn't exist...