From Barbara Gates, co-editor and co-founder (with Wes Nisker) of the venerable Buddhist publication Inquiring Mind, comes notice that after some three decades, the magazine is folding. Barbara writes:
This journal, published with low overhead, on newsprint, and financed by donation by those who could afford it, is, after 31 years of service, completing its final issue in April 2015. Readers of Inquiring Mind include followers of many different Buddhist traditions, and others interested in the philosophy and ideas of Buddhism.
Gates also notes that “many prisoners have been the recipients of the journal over the years. In fact, prisoners have Inquiring Mind’s most quickly growing population of readers,” and that, to this end, “the magazine would like to donate its 17,000 back issues to prisoners. If you would be in interested in receiving a box of 25-30 back issues of Inquiring Mind for free distribution to interested prisoners, please contact IM Prison Project: prison_project@inquiringmind.com. We’ve already sent out 150 boxes to prison chaplains all over the country—from Baton Rouge to Chicago to Raleigh to Seattle!”
Born out of the Theravada Buddhist community of insight (vipassana) meditators, Inquiring Mind is highly regarded for excellent and thought-provoking interviews of Buddhist teachers such as Jack Kornfield, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Joanna Macy, as well as for art, poetry, stories and humorous essays. Readers can continue checking the IM website, inquiringmind.com, for news of the Inquiring Mind Digital Archive, which is a project getting underway.
About the final issue, Gates says, “In preparing our final Mind, Spring 2015, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” we’ve read over our many years of issues, from our first lean edition in 1984. We came across a letter in 1993 from Joseph Goldstein which ended, “Freedom and compassion are the reference points for all of practice. The Dharma has one taste, the taste of freedom.” This is the underlying message we at the Mind have hoped to convey. It feels appropriate that with that aspiration, we would be donating our back issues to prisoners.”
