It’s 50 years since Buddhist teachers started arriving in the west in the early 60s and Buddhism crash-landed into the counterculture. So what have we learned about western Buddhism? This piece appeared in The Guardian (Saturday 17 March 2012). These thoughts...
The young Kalu Rinpoche, the reborn ‘tulku’ of a respected Tibetan Buddhist teacher, has posted a video detailing his sexual abuse at the hands of Buddhist monks, his tutor’s attempt to murder him and his descent into drug addiction and alcoholism....
Vishvapani reviews Schettini’s heartfelt and vivid account of becoming a Tibetan Buddhist monk and his valuable reflections on what it means for westerners to practice Buddhism When I first encountered Buddhism in the UK around 1980 there was already a generation of...
In my last post I wrote about current issues within the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT). As promised, to fill out my attitude to the NKT I am posting an article I wrote in 1996 in the second issue of Dharma Life magazine, just as the dispute over Dorje Shugden was...
A few years ago I wrote on my previous blog an article called ‘NKT: Succession & Question of Authority regarding difficulties in the New Kadampa Tradition in managing the succession from Geshe Kelsang Gyatso to a new generation. Much has changed in the subsequent...
The Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions by Andrew Rawlinson (Open Court, 1997) £31.50 Review by Vishvapani Not long ago, when the East was axiomatically ‘mystical’, teachers of eastern religions were assumed to be possibly mad, probably...
