A few days ago, a friend let me know that freelance writer Mark Hay’s piece in Tricycle Magazine about his years-long journey to get an appropriate-and-non-appropriative Buddhist tattoo had come out. Hay interviewed me as part of the piece, and I see that I get more than one mention in the final cut. Thankfully, I’m not paraphrased too awkwardly, and Mark gives a good overview of some of the issues at stake with getting tattoos that involve very culturally-specific imagery or contexts. Continue reading
Tag Archives: impermanence
The Meditation on the Two Brandos
Reply
For many centuries and up until the present day, Buddhist ascetics have used contemplation of their body and its transformation into a rapidly disintegrating corpse as a sobering exercise – as a practice that reconfigures their relationship to their sense of self and deepens their appreciation of impermanence. In some cases, meditators have even visited charnel grounds and cremation sites where they have observed corpses directly to amplify their reflections. Not all of us have such opportunities. Continue reading