Best book of 2016

The runners up are Radical Dharma, Time To Stand Up and The Buddha's Wife.

In an age when legitimate concerns are ghettoized in "identity politics" I relish the black and women's voice. It is a time for political activism, time to stand up. It is a time to work together in connection. These three books begin to shore up the lack of black and women's voices, and suggest a path of activism, or literally discuss engaged buddhism, needed now more than ever since we have a president elect who seems to steam past anything but his limited selfish concerns. I hope I'm not put on an FBI watch list for saying this, but I think he's already done enough to be impeached. I hope he doesn't send some goons out here to punish my dissension against his views. Many say give him a chance, but he's already shown who he is. His New Year's Tweet contained more warning than love. But I digress.

The winner of the 2016 Going For Refuge Blog Book Award (GFRBBA) is Great Faith, Great Wisdom. Also available is the author reading the sutras the book is about. This book follows up on the excellent The Art of  Reflection, which won the 2011 GFRBBA. Ratnaguna has a great talk on Free Buddhist Audio.

I liked Great Faith, Great Wisdom because it discussed the pure land sutras in a way the modern Buddhist who is an ecumenical Buddhist can appreciate. An ecumenical Buddhist is one who takes the whole of the Buddhist corpus as their inspiration, every school, throughout history. Is there one Buddhism, or many Buddhisms? I'll table that debate for another post.

Past Winners Include: 2012, 2015. Turns out I haven't been as consistent about the GFRBBA as I wanted to be, since 2004. Since I don't always use labels, it's hard to search it up.

Other notable mentions for 2016 include Subhuti's Mind In Harmony. Just go look at a video of Subhuti on YouTube, and you'll see his passion. He really writes from experience, he teaches all over the world, going to places like India and Turkey. But looking into it, I think it came out in 2015.

Eight Step Recovery is also a quite notable addition to the corpus of recovery Buddhism. Kevin Griffith is the standard with One Breath At A Time, but Eight Step Recovery presents a purely Buddhist approach without any other recovery philosophies like AA.

Engaged Buddhism

Reading Time to Stand Up: An Engaged Buddhist Manifesto for Our Earth -- The Buddha's Life and Message through Feminine Eyes (Sacred Activism) feels somehow important. Thanissara is articulating an engaged Buddhism that makes sense to me. I need things articulated, it's hard to articulate everything for yourself, we really stand up on our civilization that supports us.

She presents an alternate imagining of the Buddha's life to The Buddha's Wife: The Path of Awakening Together, where the Buddha consults with his wife before he goes off. She imagines that to be more compassionate, they were partners.

She focuses on how there is a strand of Buddhism with leads to quietism and withdrawal from the world, and that that might have worked in the past, but today our world is in danger. Samsara is burning. Why get involved in the illusionary world? But Nirvana is the same world. We are living in climate change, and we can see a kind of momentum that is suicidal. We need to consciously change that momentum together.

Is it inevitable that I drive to work, instead of take mass transit or walk or bike? I suddenly thought about the carbon imprint of my next vacation. My partner has been into the local food movement, locavore for quite a while, but we still shop in our plush supermarkets where everything is always in season.

I like the way Thanissara connects colonialism, slavery, and all the various forms of exploitation are part of the equation as we scramble at the crumbs of our dying earth. The book I'm dying to read after reading interesting reviews is Between the World and Me. There is such a dismissal of race in this society by the dominant culture, that is utterly startling.

I think of Danny Fisher, who blogs and writes and tweets about various global issues, I'm sure there are other blogsattvas, but he's one I've read a fair amount of.

Joanne Macy's Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems (Suny Series, Buddhist Studies) was an empowering revelation. I might feel puny in this world, but I'm also not without ability to impact others.

I grew up with a connection to the natural world. I was on my bike and in trees from an early age. I live in NYC, and feel a bit alienated from nature, but at least I'm not like some of my relatives building a house where there was none, further decreasing unsettled land. I think one of the most environmentally friendly things you can do is move to the city, use mass transit, don't have a single family dwelling. And yet paradoxically that causes my children not to be as connected to nature as I was. There is hope for them yet, hopefully the hikes and camping and explorations of the world give them a sense of the world and it's complex and interlocking systems that are currently in great peril. They seem so smart and capable, full of potential.

Watching Jupiter Ascending, there are aliens that harvest earth's energy, because life is about consumption. There are larger universe problems than earthlings exploiting the earth. It's hubris to think we're alone in the universe.

Anyway, I read a lot of books at once, and I've just started Time To Stand Up, but I am finding it quite interesting and recommend it based on what I've read so far.