Tiger Woods & Buddhism

As the Year of the Tiger unfolds ...

Today, Tiger Woods gave a press conference to apologise for his marital infidelity. As part of his statement, he specifically referred to having been raised as a Buddhist by his Thai mother, and how he sees Buddhism as part of his path towards becoming a "better person."

"I have a lot of work to do, and I intend to dedicate myself to doing it. Part of following this path for me is Buddhism, which my mother taught me at a young age. People probably don't realize it, but I was raised a Buddhist, and I actively practiced my faith from childhood until I drifted away from it in recent years. Buddhism teaches that a craving for things outside ourselves causes an unhappy and pointless search for security. It teaches me to stop following every impulse and to learn restraint. Obviously, I lost track of what I was taught."

There are several good articles exploring Tiger's statement in more detail, as well as discussing the controversial criticism from the conservative Christian commentator Brit Hume on Fox News, who suggested that Tiger should convert from Buddhism to Christianity, as in Hume's opinion Buddhism doesn't provide "the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith".

• "Tiger Woods Apology: Golfer promises a return to Buddhism" (Christian Science Monitor)
• "Woods apology: Buddhist, biblical and Bill Clinton-esque" (USA Today: Faith and Reason)
• "Tiger Woods on Buddhism, craving, impulse control and our search for security" (BeliefNet)
• "Tiger's Buddhism" (Washington Post)
• "Tiger Woods, Buddhism and redemption" (David Nichtern, senior Shambala teacher)
• "Tiger Woods, Buddhism and the Eight-Fold Way" (SBNation)
• "Tiger Woods' 12-Step Classic" (Salon.com)

Buddhist History (Week 8) - Tibetan Buddhism (part 2)

Our conversation on 11 October (Week 8 of Buddhist history) was the second of two sessions looking at the history of tantra and Tibetan Buddhism, and also completing Conze's book "Buddhism: A Short History" by looking at Buddhism in the West and the modern world. We also revisited Alan Wallace's article "The Spectrum of Buddhist Practice in the West" (available here). The recording is available here.

Tibetan Buddhism in the West

This week, our topic was "Tibetan Buddhism in the West", drawing on a series of three articles. The first is by Alan Wallace; there was a reply/response by Tara Carreon, and Rinpoche then wrote his own reply to both these articles. Here are the links:

a) Alan Wallace "Tibetan Buddhism in the West: is it working here?" (Tricycle, Summer 2001)

b) Tara Carreon "Another view on whether Tibetan Buddhism is working in the West" (Summer 2001)

c) Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche "East-West, West-East" (Winter 2001)

The recording of our conversation is available here.

Buddhist History - Week 6

Here's the recording from our meeting on 5 September. We took a break from Conze's review of early Buddhist history to look at Alan Wallace's review of trends in contemporary Buddhism, specifically "The Spectrum of Buddhist Practice in the West" (available here). The parallels between the development of the Mahayana in India and the transition of Buddhism to the West are quite remarkable, and suggest that the development of a new form of Buddhism adapted to the pre-existing Western social, cultural and intellectual environment is inevitable. We started to look at some aspects of what this might include. Some topics we discussed include:

• The challenges of adaptation: the risk of over-simplifying by throwing too much out, and the risk of including elements from other cultures that aren't relevant to the West
• The importance for the current generation of Buddhist practitioners in ensuring an authentic transmission of dharma to the West
• In Tibet, the ecumenical (rimé) movement sought to overcome divisiveness among the four Tibetan schools. In the West, these four are also interacting with all the other Buddhist traditions such as Zen, Vipassana, Japanese Buddhism etc, in a way that is historically unprecedented. What might a rimé movement look like in the West?