the DharmaRealm
The DharmaRealm is an occasional podcast conversation between Harry Gyokyo Bridge, resident minister of the Buddhist Church of Oakland, and Scott Mitchell, Dean of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, about Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, Buddhism in the modern world, pop-culture, music, sci-fi and how all those things are related.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dharmarealm
Twitter: http://twitter.com/theDharmaRealm
- Update frequency
- every 21 days
- Average duration
- 27 minutes
- Episodes
- 99
- Years Active
- 2008 - 2020
How to do Shin Buddhist practice
We’re back! And we’re taking up a listener question about practicing Buddhism when you’re not near a Shin community, so we’re calling this one “how to do Shin practice?” This is an important question…
Buddhism and music, part three
We round out our conversation about music by focusing on Shin Buddhism, starting with Shinran. It’s clear chanting was an important part of early Shin communities, and many of Shinran’s wasan (poems)…
Buddhism and Music, part two
In part two of our discussion of Buddhism and music, we talk (mostly) about the potential genre of “Buddhist music.” Genre is a tricky; it raises all sorts of questions about who gets to define an ar…
Buddhism and Music, part one
We’ve got a long-standing interest in music; coincidentally, a listener asked us a question about music on Facebook, so we took the subject and ran with it! This is the first of three episodes dedica…
Renunciation and Family
“Won’t somebody please think of the children!” This week we take up the tension in Buddhism between the ideal of monasticism, the renunciant, the solo practitioner who goes off in search of awakening…
Teachers, Authority, and Community
Let’s pick up where we left off; last time we discussed how contemporary Shin Buddhists can make the teachings and practices applicable to modern life, balancing tradition and change. This raises the…
Tradition and Change
Prompted by a listener who’s interested in how Buddhist teachings and practices change over time, in this episode we take up the tension between maintaining tradition versus adaptation to new circums…
Is compassion possible?
Today we go down the rabbit hole of the Tannisho, the so-called razor text of Shin Buddhism, a text that can cut away misunderstandings, or be extremely dangerous in the wrong hands! Specifically, we…
Media Representations of Buddhism
In this episode, Scott complains about the media! Seriously, though, bouncing from the last episode that dealt with the commodification and commercialization of Buddhism, we now deal with the related…
Commercialization
Someone tried to sell some shoes with an image of the Buddha on them. And, boy, were Buddhists mad about it! This is our jumping off point for a discussion about commercialization and the commodifica…
Hardcore Shin Buddhist Practice
A couple episodes back, we tossed out this idea, off the cuff, of hardcore practice. We finally get to it now, asking directly, what is hardcore Shin Buddhist practice? Of course, this raises the imp…
Shin Buddhism 101
We’ve been inspired. A listener wrote in asking for the basics of Shin Buddhism? Could we do a sort of Jodo Shinshu 101 episode? And we thought, well, we can try. This is a great question and in an e…
Institutionalism, anti-institutionalism
We pick up our conversation from last time about the attrition problem in American Shin Buddhism, its possible causes, and solutions. This time we focus on our listener’s suggestion that there is an …
Listener question: challenges facing the BCA
A listener wrote in to ask about the problem of attrition in the Buddhist Churches of America (or Jodo Shinshu more generally) and suggested a few possible doctrinal reasons for declining membership …
Love and Creation
Inspired by conversations in our last two episodes, today we discuss creativity, art, and love. What does Buddhism have to say about the creative process? Is it merely a kind of desire? Or attachment…
Suspension of Disbelief
We’re not done with TRON yet! Well, sort of we are. We use TRON — film, art, music, anything really — as a jumping off point for discussing the suspension of disbelief. What is it about our expectati…
Buddhism and TRON
We’re going to talk about Buddhism and sci-fi again! Get ready for several episodes about sci-fi, movies, music, the creative process, and Buddhism.
In this episode we talk about TRON: Legacy, a movi…
Startling Superficial Soteriological Similarities
Inspired by a listener question, we explore some of the superficial similarities between Pure Land Buddhism and the monotheistic religions. After considering the difficulty of really knowing the hist…
Episode 51: We’re back!
It’s been six months since our last episode. Where’ve we been? What did we do all summer? Now that we’re back in the “studio,” we recap some of the stuff we’ve been working on and promise to release …
Buddhism, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness
Hey! This is our fiftieth episode!
This week, we take up our conversation from last time about aspects of American culture and their intersection with Buddhism — this time, talking about freedom. Wha…