Tathagata

I hope to focus on dhyana paramita , the perfection of meditation, a bit this week.

In the land of the strange but true, as a former Tibetan Buddhist nun I fell in love with and married a man who counsels sex addicts and who is a recovering sex addict himself.

I hope to focus on dhyana paramita, the perfection of meditation, a bit this week. But many of you already are experienced meditators, so I'm not sure what to say about meditation that would be helpful.

Here's one way you could help me. All of my experience in Buddhism has been in the Zen tradition, so I may be qualified to write about Zen meditation.  But I have no personal experience with the meditation practices of other traditions.

So, those of you who are not-Zen Buddhist meditators -- if there's a website or book you can recommend that does a good job explaining or describing your meditation practice, please let me know!  Also, if you have any meditation-related questions, let me know that, too, and I'll attempt to address them.

Perfection of Meditation originally appeared on About.com Buddhism on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 at 16:22:41.

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Following up on the last post on the role of debate in Buddhism -- this brings to mind one of my favorite women of Buddhist history -- Liu Tiemo (ca. 780-859), also called the "Iron Grindstone."

Liu Tiemo was born into a family of farm workers in north central China. It was a hard life. It's said that one day, while she was still an adolescent, she simply put her tools down and walked away. I imagine her taking to the road, alone, bristling with teenage attitude.

She took shelter in convents, and eventually she was ordained a nun. She learned to read, and then she learned to debate. Her reputation as a fierce debater spread, and monks came to challenger her. She earned the nickname "Iron Grindstone" because she relentlessly ground her debate opponents into bits.

She studied witha renowned male teacher, Guishan Lingyou (771-854), and became one of his dharma heirs. Liu Tiemo's name is still listed on many of the the lineage charts displayed in Zen monasteries today. The larger point here is that challenging the understanding of another student is a tradition that goes way back.

The Debate Tradition originally appeared on About.com Buddhism on Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 at 10:02:40.

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After some two decades of visits from the Dalai Lama and exhibitions of Tibetan art in Atlanta, most of us are at least acquainted with the painted mandala as a representation of a complex, symmetrical building with a single enlightened being at its center.

BEIJING - Looking down on Drango town from his hillside monastery on China's eastern Tibetan plateau, monk Gelek Rabten appeared hopeful last fall.