Word: zens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Have we all been here before? Yes, and in this lifetime too. America flirted with Buddhism in the 1950s and again in the '70s; vestiges of those dalliances still waft, pleasant yet amorphous, through the pop atmosphere. Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson applies Zen to the art of Michael maintenance, and Tina Turner and Herbie Hancock chant Buddhist mantras. Terms such as Nirvana and koan are in common usage, if seldom understood...
...thousands of Buddhist immigrants, who have yet to have an impact on mainstream culture. Rather, it refers to some 100,000 American-born Buddhists, many of whom have been practicing for decades and have, as sociologist Don Morreale puts it, "gone mainstream." 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...
...divinity to whom prayers could be addressed. They also revered--and hoped to become--bodhisattvas, fully enlightened, Buddha-like beings who had won the right to enter Nirvana but chose to be reborn on earth to enlighten others. A cornucopia of Mahayana offshoots sprang up over the centuries. Zen, which was adopted by the Japanese samurai class, combined chanting and teacher-student dialogue with an extremely strict sitting meditation practice, often enforced with whacks from a ceremonial wand. As a tool toward faster enlightenment, Zen's Rinzai school had its students wrestle conundrums, or koans, such as the famous query...
...wave of Buddhist interest, with its distinctly Tibetan flavor, and he may spend more time these days in Dharamsala, the Indian town where the Dalai Lama lives in exile, than on Hollywood sets. But his Buddhist fascination, like that of many his age, began during his college years with Zen, as idiosyncratically presented by Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. America had shown some interest in Buddhism before the 1950s: Henry David Thoreau wrote, "some will have bad thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha." But the Beats' incorporation of koans...
...time the Beats and a lively (but very superficial) national "Zen fad" began to fade from national prominence, two more groups of Buddhists had converged with two more groups of seekers. Helen Tworkov, editor of the influential Buddhist quarterly Tricycle, says a generation explored Buddhism "out of an enormous sense of shame" over the Vietnam War and its images of monks setting themselves afire in protest. Others were in search of enlightenment that lasted longer than a tab of acid. Their quests seemed to end in Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a brilliant apostle of Vajrayana and part of the Tibetan diaspora...