Blogs & Essays

Going to the Root: How White Caucuses Contribute to Racial Justice

Published by Alex Vlasic

Caucusing is a form of upāya—skillful means. To caucus is skillful because it reduces harm. For Buddhists, practicing harm reduction is a relative bodhicitta practice. In my experience of...

July 3, 2019

Blog, Blogs & Essays

Healing Justice for a World on Fire

Published by Loretta Pyles

In the Adittapariyaya Sutta, known as the Fire Sermon, the Buddha says that everything is burning—burning with the fire of greed, hatred, delusion, sorrows, griefs, lamentations, pains, and despair.1...

December 20, 2018

Blogs & Essays

Cutting Through Spiritual Puritanism

Published by Gabe Dayley

In the West it is difficult for the Dharma to take root. The soil is not fertile. The good and evil, fire and brimstone logic of puritanism has dried...

November 27, 2018

Blog, Blogs & Essays, Editorial

Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People

Published by Kelsey Blackwell

I’m breathing deeply as I write this. What I’m writing about is charged. I feel this energy in my body. It’s a heat in my throat and a rumbling...

August 9, 2018

Blogs & Essays

Beyond Theory: Relating to Dominant Systems and Manifesting Social Alternatives in Dharma Communities

Published by David Kahane

This essay also appears in the special issue “Dharma, De-Growth, and Climate Change.” Click here to download and read the entire issue. We live in a time of seemingly...

March 27, 2018

Blogs & Essays

Drala of the Landscape: Rights of the River

Published by Rachel DeMotts

This essay also appears in the special issue “Dharma, De-Growth, and Climate Change.” Click here to download and read the entire issue. In March of 2017, the Maori people...

March 27, 2018

Blogs & Essays

Contemplating the More-than-Human Commons

Published by Zack Walsh

This essay also appears in the special issue “Dharma, De-Growth, and Climate Change.” Click here to download and read the entire issue. The Stern Review on The Economics of...

March 27, 2018

Blogs & Essays

Losing Our Confidence: Four Subjectivities of the Present

Published by Adam Lobel

In May 2015 a group of young people from Europe, Mexico, and the United States came together in Mexico City and Pátzcuaro, Michoacán for the Ziji Collective Leadership Retreat....

February 9, 2018

Blogs & Essays, Interview

The Tale of Stormtamer

Published by Austin R. Pick

There is nothing whatever to remove from this, Nor the slightest thing thereon to add. Truly beholding the true nature – When truly seen – complete liberation. —Uttaratantra (vs....

August 2, 2017

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

Expanding Awareness: How Patterns of Interaction Support White Supremacy

Published by Kelsey Blackwell

Lately, I’ve been feeling a deep sensitivity as I move about my world—a vulnerability, a brewing sadness, that comes, I believe, from the rawness of beginning to peel back...

May 10, 2017

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

#makingrefuge at Mind & Life’s 2016 International Symposium: Opportunities for Decolonizing Contemplative Studies

Published by Zack Walsh

In November, more than a thousand scholars, practitioners, and activists met in San Diego to discuss the future of their work at the 2016 International Symposium for Contemplative Studies...

April 9, 2017

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

The Four Immeasurables: Heart Practices for Challenging Times

Published by Kristin Barker

Many in the United States and around the world experienced the US Presidential election as a kind of political earthquake, the initial shock at its center disruptive to our...

January 20, 2017

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

Open Up, Lean In, Stay With: Contemplative Practices in Uncertain Times

Published by Jessica A. Stern

In the Tibetan calendar, 2016 was the year of the Fire Monkey: raw, turbulent, tempestuous—a year of personal strife unfolding in tandem with social unrest and political upheaval. Permeating...

January 19, 2017

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

Interrogating the Nature of Identity in an Age of Rising Nationalism

Published by Ajit Pyati

With nationalist and populist waves washing over the globe, many of us within the contemplative world may be feeling upset and disappointed. We might be asking ourselves how nativist...

January 18, 2017

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

The Thousand Eyes of Knowing and Action

Published by Lisa Maloof

While it may pacify our confusion to look at wisdom traditions as prescriptive “medicine” for our suffering times, we must also take care to begin to understand, personally, our...

January 17, 2017

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

Upstream and Downstream: The Sacred Importance of Joining Contemplative Practice and Political Engagement

Published by James K. Rowe

There is a social change parable that powerfully illustrates the vital connection between contemplative practice and social change: There was once a village located next to a river. One...

January 16, 2017

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

Editorial: Destroying the Politics of Trump and Seeking a Deeper Political Consciousness

Published by Kai Beavers & Gabe Dayley

The Arrow seeks to explore politics in a broad sense of the word—societal issues, challenges, and questions that are political by nature. We have avoided the trappings of US...

October 29, 2016

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Blog, Blogs & Essays, Editorial

Rising to the Challenge: Race and Inclusivity in the Sangha

Published by Kelsey Blackwell

Last summer I traveled from my home in Berkeley, California to Pátzcuaro, Mexico for a weeklong “young” sangha meditation retreat. I say “young” because in our group of roughly...

June 27, 2016

comments 31

Blog, Blogs & Essays

Is a Fear of Death at the Heart of Capitalism?

Published by James K. Rowe

Donald Trump is a personification of capitalist values: He’s elitist, possessive, exploitative, and always hungry for more. Having multiple buildings emblazoned with his name is not enough. The presidential...

April 28, 2016

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

The Practice of No Success

Published by Liza Smith

In the fall of 2013, I was at the end of an era in my life as a Colombia human rights activist, or so I thought. Having left my...

February 26, 2016

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

Speeding Past a Receding World

Published by Sam Holden

This past June, during a three-day research trip across rural Yamanashi Prefecture, a friend and I visited a town called Hayakawa, nestled in the mountains 100 kilometers to the...

January 20, 2016

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

Why Buddhists Can Stop Worrying and Learn to Love “Us vs. Them Thinking”

Published by James K. Rowe

An often-rehearsed refrain in Buddhist and contemplative communities is that we need to overcome “Us vs. Them thinking” (or what I’ll abbreviate as UVTT). This intention makes perfect sense....

September 15, 2015

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

Out of the Shopping Mall and into the Bathhouse

Published by Sam Holden

At the beginning of August, I flew from Tokyo to Hong Kong to attend a friend’s wedding. It’s now possible to make the four-hour journey for as low as...

September 15, 2015

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Blog, Blogs & Essays

Moving Beyond the Language of Economic Utility

Published by Gabe Dayley

On a spring evening in Southern California, with too much school work and an uncooperative clock ticking away the day’s warmth, I glanced outside my window to find the...

December 1, 2014

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Blogs & Essays, Editorial, Short Reads

A Din amid Quiet Ruins

Published by Heather Williams

A year ago on a bright summer morning in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, I took a break from a study on community water I was conducting...

December 1, 2014

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Blogs & Essays, Short Reads

Rituals of Urban Life in Post-Growth Tokyo

Published by Sam Holden

Recently, as I pondered how the rituals of life in modern Tokyo emerged and evolved alongside the growth of the city, and what the rituals of post-growth Tokyo could...

December 1, 2014

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Blogs & Essays, Short Reads

All That Is Solid Melts into the Air, All That Is Holy Is… Marxist?

Published by James K. Rowe

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is a self-proclaimed Marxist, or at least half of one. This ideological preference is little-known but longstanding; in a 1993 interview he noted that...

March 31, 2014

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Blogs & Essays, Short Reads

Visions of Enlightened Societies

Published by Michaele Ferguson

“There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It’s over. Give it up.” -Bernice Johnson Reagon1 The...

March 31, 2014

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Blogs & Essays, Short Reads