FromIntroduction

I remember the first book of Buddhist writing I ever read. It was 1974, and I was working as a police reporter at the local newspaper. Scanning the shelves at my favorite bookstore one day, I spotted a book called The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I knew nothing about it— not even that it was about Buddhism—but I bought it because of a serious illness in my family.

I remember opening that book, sitting in the newsroom with a bank of police radios in front of me. Halfway through the first page of the introduction, my life changed. I didn’t really understand what I was reading, but I knew it was different from anything else I had ever encountered. I intuited what I can only describe as an unshakable integrity. Whatever this thing called Buddhism was, I somehow knew it would never tell me anything just because that was what I wanted to hear. It would never tell me anything but the truth, and it would never be a crutch. In fact, it would kick the crutches out from under me.

That was thirty-five years ago, and the book of Buddhist writing you’re reading now is very different from that one. Evans-Wentz’s translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead was one of the few Buddhist texts widely available at the time. Published in 1927, its language was archaic, and its understanding of Buddhism was incomplete at best.

Since then, we have benefited from more than fifty years of great Buddhist teachers who have come to the West and presented Buddhism with accuracy and profundity. In turn, Westerners have practiced with sincerity and dedication, and many are now outstanding Buddhist teachers in their own right. The work of great writers and artists has been influenced by Buddhism, and Buddhist insight and meditation are being integrated into all areas of mainstream American life—from health care settings to businesses to prisons. While the actual number of Western Buddhists is probably not much higher than it was in 1974, Buddhist influence has quietly seeped into our society, and deep, authentic practice has put down its roots in America.

All these changes are reflected in this year’s edition of Best Buddhist Writing. But at a deeper level, nothing has changed. Genuine Buddhism will never pander to ego or try to find our favor by telling us what we’d like to hear. It continues to kick the crutches out from under us. Its integrity remains unshakable.

This book contains many different types of writing, in many different voices. Some are personal stories, others are teachings in the traditional sense, and still others apply the wisdom of Buddhist practice to broader issues in our world. Yet all share a dedication to honesty and openness, to telling the truth about our lives as human beings.

The truth, according to Buddhism, is a bad-news-good-news story. From ego’s point of view, the news is bad. Buddhism defines ego as our futile struggle to maintain and protect a permanent, ongoing self. This painful struggle is the source of much of our suffering, because we try to deny the truth that everything in this world is subject to change and dissolution. So the bad news for ego—and this is where Buddhism never pulls its punches—is that death is real, suffering is pervasive, we are without a permanent identity or center, and we cause ourselves and others a lot of unnecessary pain. Because of all that, our hearts are, in a sense, permanently broken.

But that broken heart is the good news too. The broken heart is the true heart of love and tenderness. For Buddhism’s good news is that if we pause in our struggle against the truths of impermanence and change, we catch glimpses of our true nature, which is always present and unaffected by life’s ups and downs. Our true nature is the mind of awareness and wisdom and the heart of compassion and joy. And in its very transience, the world we inhabit is vivid, sacred, and basically good.

Throughout this book, we find Buddhism’s rich mix of unflinching clarity, loving heart, and profound insight into the nature of reality. To this is added the knowledge and wisdom of Western thought, all part of the great spiritual and intellectual ferment known as Buddhism in the modern world.

Like all great stories, this one begins with the personal, with how individual practitioners have brought Buddhism into their hearts as they face the challenges of life. These are powerful and inspiring stories that may make you cry and smile simultaneously—Kathleen Willis Morton on the death of her infant son, Olivia Ames Hoblitzelleon a couple’s journey through Alzheimer’s, Ruth Ozeki’s brilliant meditation on writing and her mother’s death, Gabriel Cohen on coming to terms with his anger after a divorce, and Calvin Malone’s touching story of Christmas in prison. A lot of sadness, certainly, but also open, loving hearts and the genuine benefit of Buddhist practice when times get tough.

As always, the core of Buddhism, its backbone for twenty-five hundred years, is the direct transmission of Buddhist wisdom from the realized mind of the teacher to the open mind of the student. This year’s edition of Best Buddhist Writing presents an interesting mix of teachings by renowned Asian masters such as the Seventeenth Karmapa, Dzigar Kongtrül, and the Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, and by Westerners such as Pema Chödrön, Martine Batchelor, Phillip Moffitt, Norman Fischer, and Christina Feldman, who offer their deep understanding of Buddhism from a perspective informed and enhanced by their Western intellectual training.

An interesting thread in this year’s collection is the discussion of how Buddhist practice, combined with a Western psychological approach, can help us with both our personal issues and our relationships. Jack Kornfield opens this book with a beautiful presentation of basic human goodness, the starting point of Buddhist psychology. The psychotherapist John Welwood is perhaps the best synthesizer of Buddhist and Western psychology, and he shows us how we can use our relationships as the ground of profound spiritual growth. Peggy Rowe-Ward and Larry Ward, married students of Thich Nhat Hanh, offer meditations to help us base our relationships on loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity, known in Buddhism as the four brahmaviharas.

Yet Buddhism, like all spiritual paths, must be about more than just ourselves or our immediate personal relationships. It must be about the relationships among all people, and so it must reflect on, and hopefully influence, the broad issues of the day. Everyone today is looking for wisdom to help them deal with difficult times, and this is, after all, a Buddhist specialty. Here, the Zen teacher Joan Sutherland shows us how the ancient Buddhist masters of China handled their own society’s difficulties.

But with all the ups and down the world is going through now, the long-term fate of humanity may hang on what we do about the environment. That’s certainly the way many Buddhist teachers and writers see it, and in this year’s edition of Best Buddhist Writing, they show us how Buddhist teachings and practice go to the heart of the greatest challenge of our time. The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, founder of Engaged Buddhism, makes a compelling argument that our response to environmental problems must ultimately be spiritual if it is to succeed. The political thinker David Loy analyzes the environmental crisis from a Buddhist viewpoint, and the ecophilosopher Stephanie Kaza explains how we can actually make environmentalism a spiritual path, not just a change in lifestyle. Finally, the Zen gardener Wendy Johnson brings it all back to earth, to our very relationship with the soil.

The basic Buddhist aspiration is that everything we do should be of benefit, both to ourselves and others. And what could be of more benefit than telling the truths the world so often denies—the painful truth of suffering and the equally denied truth of human goodness. The writings in this book will inspire you, provoke you, sometimes make you cry, and sometimes make you laugh. But they were all written with the intention of being of benefit—to the world, to our relationships, and most of all, to the readers. I myself have benefited from each teaching, essay, and memoir in this rich and varied anthology. As I think about it, that’s probably how I made my choices. I hope you will benefit from this year’s best Buddhist writings as I have.