Tricycle1

When the issue of karma comes up in Buddhist circles, it’s quickly followed by the question, “If there’s no self, who does the karma, and who receives the results of the karma?”

The proper response to this question is that it’s not properly framed. It takes the teaching on not-self, interpreting it as a teaching on no self, and makes it the context. Then it tries to fi...

Devon has been practicing meditation intensively for nearly thirty years. She’s spent six of those years in deep retreat, the kind where you sit ten or twelve hours a day, alone with your mind for months at a time.

So it comes as a surprise to us both when, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, I think I know what she should be doing with her mind on the cushion, or whethe...

We live in a world that rewards speed. Many of us rush to understand problems, rush to implement solutions that make sense to us, then rush to face the next crisis and often burn out. But there is a kind of wisdom that only comes slowly—the kind that requires us to sit with a place long enough to truly see it. In my Zen Buddhist lineage, we call this beginner’s mind—approachi...

From 1984 to 2015, Inquiring Mind was a semiannual print journal dedicated to the transmission of buddhadharma to the West. The archive contains all thirty-one years of Inquiring Mind interviews, essays, poetry, art, and more–now hosted by the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies. Please

“I am calling up the dead—the dead of my family,” writes Wendy Chen in her debut poetry collection, Unearthings. “I pull them out of the earth by their hair, by the fistful.”

In crystalline verse, Chen unearths her own family history as well as broader cultural his...