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I Wandered Through the City, a Monk in Old wandered through the city, a “Imonk in old robes, sleeping in doorways, nodding with the homeless through the night in coffee shops, foraging through dumpsters for fruit and vegetables. I was in my early fif- ties, no spring chicken, but I was lit from within by my mission to bring the Dharma to the West. Besides, what did it matter? The lessons Don- chu had taught me made it a matter of indifference to me whether I slept in a big room or a small room or in the doorway of a church.” From Footprints in the Snow: The Autobiography of a Chinese Monk by Chan Master Sheng Yen, Doubleday, 2008 Winter 2009 Chan Magazine Chan Magazine Volume 23,29, Number 41 Autumn,Winter, 2009 2003 Chan Magazine is published quarterly by the Institute of Chung-Hwa BuddhistBuddhist Culture, Culture, Chan Chan Meditation Meditation Center, Center, 90- 90-5656 Corona Corona Avenue, Avenue, Elmhurst, Elmhurst, NY NY 11373. 11373. The The magazine magazine is isa non-profita non-profit venture; venture; it accepts it accepts no advertisingno advertising and isand sup is- supportedported solely solely by contributionsby contributions from frommembers members of the of Chan the ChanCenter Center and the and readership. the readership. Donations Donations to support to support the maga the- magazinezine and otherand other Chan Chan Center Center activities activities may maybe sent be sentto the to theabove above address address and and will will be begratefully gratefully appreciated. appreciated. Please Your donationmake checks is tax-deductible.payable to Chan For Meditation information Center; about your Chan do- Centernation activitiesis tax-deductible. please call For (718)information 592-6593. about For Chan Dharma Cen- Drumter activities Publications please callplease (718) call 592-6593. (718) 592-0915.For Dharma E-mail Drum thePublications Center at please [email protected], call (718) 592-0915. or E-mailthe magazine the Center at [email protected],at [email protected], or orthe visit magazine us online at at:chanmaga - http://[email protected], or visit us online at: http://www.chancenter.org. Founder/Teacher Founder/TeacherChan Master Ven. Dr. Sheng Yen Chan Master Ven. Dr. Sheng Yen Editor-in-chief Editor-in-chiefDavid Berman David Berman Coordinator AssociateVirginia Tan Editor Buffy Laffe News editor CoordinatorBelia Pena Virginia Tan Photography PhotographyDavid Kabacinski (Chang Wen) John Feng, Jerry Roach, Kaifen Hu Contributing editors ContributingErnie Heau, Chris editors Marano, Virginia Tan, Wei Tan Ernie Heau, Kevin Mathewson, Virginia Tan, Wei Tan, ContributorsGuogu Rikki Asher, Berle Driscoll, Jeffrey Kung, Rebecca Li, Char- Contributorslotte Mansfield, Mike Morical, Bruce Rickenbacker, Wei Tan,Rikki Tan Asher, Yee TinaWong Kacandes, (Chang Ji) Jeffrey Kung, Rebecca Li, Mike Morical, Bruce Rickenbacker, Ayn Steele, Tan Yee AdministratorWong (Chang Ji Fa Shi), Chang Wen Fa Shi Guo Chen Shi Administrator Chang Wu Fa Shi Chan Magazine Winter 2009 2 From the Editor 4 The Noble Eightfold Path 6 The second of four articles by Chan Master Sheng Yen “Full Moon” 7 Painting by Rikki Asher A Buddhist Pilgrimage to China 8 A report by Rebecca Li and David Slaymaker The Past 29 News from the Chan Meditation Center and DDMBA The Future 36 Retreats, classes, and other upcoming events Chan Center Affiliates 38 Cover photo by Chris Milson Winter 2009 Chan Magazine 3 From The Editor I’ve just read a book by the Italian novelist erywhere, its quality is controlled by technol- Alessandro Baricco (author of Silk, soon to be ogy, it is immediately drinkable, its sensory a major motion picture) called I Barbari, The appeal is extravagant, it all tastes the same... Barbarians, a collection of essays that exam- and sales have gone through the roof. ine the deterioration of the institutions of life that he holds most dear – literature, music, A similar thing has happened with books. Writ- scholarship, wine, soccer (he’s Italian, after ers and intellectuals are fond of saying that all), civilization as he knows it. He treats what with TV and the internet people don’t the institutions as “villages” under attack by read anymore, but in fact U.S. book sales are some new kind of creature, “mutants,” with up 60% in the last decade. What people don’t something like gills instead of lungs, who do read anymore is what we call “literature,” not simply destroy, but rather transform what meaning those books that stand on their own they encounter into a landscape better suited as complete works of art, but they’re reading to their transformed anatomy, one in which the heck out of all the thousands of books they will breathe freely but we (I clearly iden- that are by-products of other cultural artifacts tify with the author), alas, may not. He uses – the insider tell-alls, the ghost-written celeb- this metaphor to examine the phenomenon of rity autobiographies, the extended op-eds, the headlong cultural change, by asking and try- books based on the film. These are books that ing to answer a series of questions: Who are have no independent value; they hang like so the barbarians? What do they want? What are many twinkling lights on the Christmas tree the characteristics of the new artifacts they of popular culture, and begin to cloy as soon create, as opposed to those of our beloved dy- as their season passes, but we are writing ing traditions? And by what methods do they and reading a huge lot of them. wreak what we old folks see as such havoc? But it is in Google that Baricco finds the icon The analysis Baricco makes is complex, but of the cultural phenomenon he is trying to I’ll try to convey its essence through a couple understand and identify. In the old epistemol- of his examples: ogy, an idea was considered correct and im- portant according to how well it corresponded Wine was made, for centuries, in a very few to something identified as the truth, but in the countries, by a small elite of artisans, who had world according to Google the very concept of inherited their unique land and their esoteric information, of truth, of quality, of what is skills from generations of forebears, and who important and what is not, has been radically created a product that was profound, austere, reformulated. The Google search leads not to difficult, unapproachable in its youth, unpre- the truth, as determined by an elite cadre of dictable in its age, and reliably different from experts, but to the most popular hub, as de- year to year, from hillside to hillside, even termined by the pathways of links that make from bottle to bottle. Now wine is made ev- up the web. And once there the imperative Chan Magazine Winter 2009 4 is not to stay for any length of time, but to replaced “stopping and seeing” as the road to alight and be off, following the web wherever wisdom? it may lead. “The idea that understanding and knowing signify entering deeply into that And what will such a world make of Bud- which we study, until we discover its essence, dhism, and of an institution like Chan Maga- is a lovely idea that is dying,” he writes. In zine? Even if we were to become Chan Mag- the Googled world the truth “is not hidden in azine Online – toward which the economics the depths, but dispersed along the surface,” of printing and mailing already propel us and the act of knowing, thus redefined, has a – would not our mission define us as some specific name, coined in 1993: surfing. kind of reactionary holdout, preaching still- ness and contemplation to a growing legion “Never has a name been more precise,” writes of mobile multi-taskers for whom wandering Baricco. It’s not the ding an sich, the thing in mind is not the problem, but the goal? itself, nor the depth of experience that mat- ters, but the ever-shifting web of relations be- Baricco makes it clear whose side he’s on, but tween things, and the freedom of movement he also recognizes that this kind of cultural that implies – sounds positively Buddhist, shift has occurred again and again through- like emptiness made electronically manifest. out history, that it’s always seen as catastro- On the other hand, lightly skimming over the phe by the elders, and that things are more waves from one briefly held notion to another complex than nostalgic value judgment makes sounds a lot like wandering thought – how them seem. I wonder, though, what kind of are we to “penetrate through the heights and Buddhism we can pass on to Gen iPod, and the depths, without omitting anything,” as whether it, like so much modern merlot, will Yuanwu taught, in a world where surfing has be as easy to forget as it is to drink. Photo: Kaifen Hu Winter 2009 Chan Magazine The Noble Eightfold Path Part Two by Chan Master Sheng Yen In the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004 Master Sheng Yen gave several lectures at the Chan Meditation Center in Queens, New York, on the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. This article is the second of four in which Master Sheng Yen discusses the Eightfold Path as a liberation pro- cess. The articles are part of Master Sheng Yen’s forthcoming book on the 37 Aids to Enlight- enment. The lectures were orally translated by Dr. Rebecca Li, transcribed by Sheila Sussman, and edited by Ernest Heau. The Noble Eightfold Path can be seen from vate the Path we will surely experience con- the point of view of the threefold division of tinued suffering.
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