Insight Journal interviews David Loy, a professor, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Zen tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism. He will be teaching "Nonduality” in Buddhist Teachings and Practice at BCBS September 28-30, 2018. Wisdom Publications will be releasing a second edition of David Loy's book Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy in 2019. Insight Journal: Nonduality is one of my favorite topics, and there are so many different ways of looking at it. I really loved your book … [Read more...]
David Loy
The Three Institutional Poisons: Challenging Collective Greed, Ill Will, & Delusion
The historical Buddha Shakyamuni lived at least 2,400 years ago. Buddhism began as an Iron Age religion, and all its important teachings are pre-modern. So can Buddhism really help us understand and respond to contemporary social problems such as economic globalization and biotechnology, war and terrorism (and the war on terrorism), climate change and other ecological crises? What the Buddha did understand is human dukkha—how it works, what causes it and how to end it. Dukkha is usually … [Read more...]
Bursting the Bubbles
Insight Journal: So at what point did you find your work moving into what we now call socially engaged thinking? David Loy: I think that dimension was always there, but was not always the focus. Nonduality is about subject-object nonduality in Buddhism, Vedanta and Taoism. By the time it was published I was reflecting more on the existential and psychological implications of Buddhism, due to some close encounters with death: my father suddenly got cancer and died about the same time as my … [Read more...]
