What they built

Robert Thurman died last Tuesday in Woodstock, New York. He was eighty-four. The first American ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama, back in the 1960s, when Buddhism in the West was still mostly a literary curiosity, something you encountered through Kerouac or Alan Watts but didn’t practice in any structured way. Thurman helped build the floor that American Buddhism now stands on: the first endowed chair in Buddhist studies at Columbia, Tibet House, translations of the Vimalakirti Sutra that made a 2,000-year-old text feel like it was written last week. “Buddhism requires clear thinking and critical scrutiny, not dogmatic adherence or blind faith,” he told an interviewer once. “It is an educational tradition more than a religious one.”

The Dalai Lama, in his tribute, said Thurman “lived a meaningful life and has left behind a legacy that will continue to inspire future students.” Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Buddhadharma have all published remembrances. But the truest measure of what Thurman and his generation built might be the calendar itself, what American contemplative practice now takes for granted as ordinary infrastructure.

Consider what starts next week at Tassajara, San Francisco Zen Center’s mountain monastery in Carmel Valley: Whole Heart, Boundless Heart, six days on the four Brahmaviharas. Loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity. These are classical Theravada practices, but the retreat frames them through Soto Zen, koan study, and creative and conversational methods, something more spacious than a standard sesshin, built for people who want to work with the heart practices but don’t need eight hours of silence a day to do it. The Brahmaviharas are sometimes called the “Immeasurables,” which is the kind of word that sounds inflated until you’ve spent a week trying to extend goodwill to someone who hurt you. Six days at Tassajara, with hot springs and communal meals and the canyon quiet, is a serious container for that work. $280, residential, open to newcomers.

Then something genuinely new. Family Sangha Totoro Sleepover Retreat at Green Gulch Farm, July 1-3. Two nights of zazen, children’s activities, and a screening of My Neighbor Totoro. The Miyazaki film is not incidental. Totoro is about childhood wonder and the porousness between the human and natural worlds, the kind of attention Zen practice cultivates and parenthood constantly disrupts. Green Gulch, a working farm and Soto Zen center in Marin County, is hosting this as intergenerational practice: families sitting together, eating together, then separating into age-appropriate activities so the adults can practice and the children can play. The format acknowledges what every parent who meditates already knows, that the question isn’t whether kids belong in the dharma but whether the dharma can make room for the chaos kids bring. $210, dormitory-style lodging, all ages.

Day of Remembering Our Interdependence at Brooklyn Zen Center, July 12, takes practice off the cushion entirely. A walking pilgrimage across New York City, chanting and sitting at sites of historical significance, ending at the African Burial Ground National Monument in lower Manhattan. Inspired by the Buddhist Monks’ 2,300-mile Walk for Peace. The container here is the city itself, its noise and heat and layered history, practice meeting the street rather than retreating from it. Free, open to all. Bring water and shoes you can walk in through July.

The heart practices at a mountain monastery, a Miyazaki film at a coastal farm, chanting at the African Burial Ground. None of it would have seemed possible when Thurman took his robes. All of it now feels ordinary, which is its own kind of achievement. What matters next is what gets built on the floor his generation laid. The calendar is full. The question is who walks through it.