Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

“Consciousness is the only valuable thing. Money is not,” says the Chinese electronic musician Howie Lee. We’re sitting on a bench in the urban garden of the Bois de Vincennes in Paris, France, overlooking the banks of the Lac Daumesnil. Behind us, beyond tall grass and towering oaks, sits the Kagyu-Dzong center, a rather fitting backdrop to meet a producer whose last LP,

Shakespeare’s Richard II opens with a king who seems to possess everything—the throne, the divine right to it, and the absolute confidence of a man who has never been told no. By the play’s end he is alone in a cell, turning his own dethronement over like a koan he cannot solve. In between, the most powerful man in England discovers his power was never a possession. It...

“We are the ancestors of descendants yet to come,” writes Norma Ryuko Kaweloku Wong Roshi in her most recent book, Who We Are Becoming Matters: The Courage, Wisdom, and Aloha We Need in the Timeplace of Collapse. 

Wong herself is a desce...

Nāmo Lokeśvaraya!

You see all phenomena as devoid of going or coming,
yet you strive single-pointedly for sentient beings’ welfare.
O supreme guru and lord, Avalokiteśvara,
I pay homage to you at all times through my three doors.

The fully enlightened buddhas, the sour...

Between the 7th and 12th centuries, in the long morning of Japanese literature, women shaped one of the world’s most refined poetic traditions. The poems presented here are waka—thirty-one-syllable lyric vessels cast in the pattern of 5–7–5–7–7—forms small enough to fit in the palm, vast enough to hold grief, longing, weather, memory, politics, and desire. From this lu...