Form, feeling, perception, choices, and consciousness. These are called the things that should be completely understood. And what is complete understanding? The ending of greed, hate, and delusion.

Even the Stream Enterer and Anāgāmīn understanding of the Aggregates is provisional. Only the Arahant completely understands the Five Aggregates.

And who is the bearer of the burden [of the five aggregates]? The individual (puggalo), it should be said;

This infamous passage became a point of contention centuries after the Buddha, as the “Pudgalavādins” argued that the “puggalo” here was an ultimately real being “neither identical with nor separate from the aggregates” — a position which earned them much ridicule from the Theravādins.

But, if we don’t read this passage as metaphysical, how should we read it?

Bhante Sujato, in his notes on this translation, proposes that we read this sutta instead as a reformulation of the Four Noble Truths, with “bearing the burden” here meaning not “what metaphysical entity owns the aggregates” but rather, “who is responsible for them?”

With the emergence of literacy as part of human cultural evolution, new kinds of relations and activities formed that have created structures of participation in larger and more distant organizations, relying on accumulating knowledge and mediated through genre-shaped texts. It is for these activity contexts that individuals must produce texts, mobilizing the resources of language, and it is within these contexts that the texts will have their effect.

This second, companion volume to A Rhetoric of Literate Action supplies the theoretical understanding of what written language is and does which underlies that volume’s practical advice. But far from being a mere appendix, this survey of psycho-social theories of media and culture serves well as a compelling introduction to the theory of language in general and its place in society.

This chapter discusses a little-known Buddhist scripture, the Sutra of the Questions by Druma, King of the Kinnara (Daiju kinnara-ō shomon-gyō), translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva in the early fifth century. This sutra is unique in that it proposes a powerful, and sympathetic, philosophy of music rooted in the Mahayana doctrines of emptiness; it also offers a template for Buddhist rituals involving music and dance that have been performed in Japan since the eighth century as part of the Gagaku and Bugaku repertory.

Experiencing revulsion, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion his mind is liberated.

The five aggregates are burning.

The article outlines some of the ways in which professional musicians and music virtuosos among the aristocracy conceptualized gagaku and bugaku instrumental music in Buddhist terms between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries. In addition to providing doctrinal justifications for artistic endeavors, they also contributed to the development of new ritual forms, such as bugaku hōyō and kangen kōshiki. This article explores influential Buddhist canonical ideas about music and shows how they were developed by musicians in medieval Japan.

The first four chapters of this volume provide a framework for identifying and understanding the situations writing comes out of and is directed toward. The next four chapters then consider how a text works to transform a situation and achieve the writer’s motives as the text begins to take form. The final four chapters provide more specific advice of the work to be accomplished in bringing the text to final form and how to manage the work and one’s own emotions and energies so as to accomplish the work most effectively. The advice of this book is for the experienced writer with a substantial repertoire of skills, who now would find it useful to think in more fundamental strategic terms about what they want their texts to accomplish, what form the texts might take, how to develop specific contents, and how to arrange the work of writing.

For a deep exploration of the theoretical understanding of written language undergirding this book, see its companion volume, A Theory of Literate Action.

Tathagata Buddha songs, which this paper studies, has been specifically enabling for Dalit women as it gives them not only a sense of religiosity but it also opens them to the possibility of rationalizing their beliefs and practices. The paper will bring up an ethnographic account of some of these Dalit women singers and look into some of their composition and songs that have a specific invocation to Gautam Buddha and of political icons like Babasaheb Ambedkar, whom they revere.

Buddhist art, if there is such a thing, is perhaps too important to be left to art historians

The Western category of “Art” asks us to appreciate the craftsmanship and aesthetic beauty of religious artifacts, but in doing so it deemphasizes their intended meanings and uses. In this essay, Bernard Fauré encourages us to look beyond the “art” (or even “anthropology”) of “Buddhist art” to see, if we can, its “aura.”

[In Taiwan,] two Humanistic Buddhist groups have influenced the majority of Buddhists on the island to adopt important aspects of sustainable lifestyles. This multi-sited ethnographic study uses participant observation with formal and informal interviews to research these two groups—the Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation and Dharma Drum Mountain—in the two different social contexts of Taiwan and California.

A comparative analysis of the results finds that the believers’ adoption of pro-environmental lifestyle changes is strongly influenced by their membership in a strong moral community, by sensing the material and social, or “terrestrial,” strain of environmental degradation coupled with a feeling that the government and other official institutions are not doing enough, and by integrated religious teachings, which include theory and praxis, from authoritative figures who model the desired behaviors. Moreover, this study shows the power of the sacred to inspire behavioral change, which, in the context of Buddhism, is cultivation of the bodhisattva ethic

You can only use a gallon of gasoline once.

This fundamental difference between renewable and nonrenewable energy sources is why you should be excited for the energy revolution that’s already under way.

In this video, Alec explains the benefits of using technology that you don’t need to burn and addresses the land-use and minerals concerns head-on in this must-watch video for anyone who uses electricity.

Monks, there are these three effluents. Which three?

A short poem on the ending of the out-flows.

Defiled happiness and undefiled happiness. These are the two kinds of happiness.

An unprecedented number of multilevel pagodas were built in China from the tenth through the thirteenth century. This growing emphasis on verticality, in contrast to the usual horizontal sprawl of China’s building tradition, raises questions about what “height” meant in the history of Chinese architecture. This essay argues that the height of the multilevel pagoda was necessarily performative: not so much because the pagoda served as a means of ascending to that height, but because it drew the attention of the faithful.

Where earlier stupas were icons and indexes of the Buddha encased within indexes of his presence, later stupas were symbols of the Buddha and Buddhist theology. This change in the material practice of Buddhism reduced stupas ’ emotional immediacy in favor of greater intellectual detachment. In the end, this shift in the meaning ascribed to stupas created the preconditions from which the Buddhist image cult and Mahayana Buddhism emerged in the first through fifth centuries A.D. The development of Mahayana Buddhism and Buddha images signified a return to iconic worship of the Buddha.

The report includes chapters for each continent, habitat type, and social system, analyzing the impacts on each in depth, ending with a chapter on sustainable development.

Because of the war, the mission of the Shōjuin bell swung drastically…

During the Asia-Pacific War, as metals grew scarce, temple bells became a material resource for munition production. Why were temples and shrines convinced to give up their bells that embodied the hopes and vows of past donors? What was the process of transformation from a religious instrument used to comfort the dead into an object that would destroy life?

Miracle tales from medieval China recorded the ability of Buddhist statues to walk, speak, emit light, and even feel pain. Consecration ceremonies, however, emphasized the sense of vision and the agency of the ritual practitioner over the agency of the statue. This essay argues that by underscoring the corporeal agency of animated sculptures, which was manifested both in their extraordinary qualities and in their vulnerability to damage, the circulation of miracle tales enabled a participatory practice in which devotees, monks and laypeople alike, were able to engage in the performative act of writing statues into life.

Ritual theories almost always assume that ritual is a kind of human action, which makes it impossible to explain ritual spaces or objects that were designed to enact the ritual without human participation. The relic depository of Chaoyang North Pagoda was a completely sealed stone box that was clearly designed as a ritual space for chanting the Uṣṇīṣavijayā dhāraṇī. This ritual space—occluded from human access—contradicts contemporary understandings of ritual. By illuminating the relic depository from the emic perspective of medieval Buddhists and applying anthropological theories, this paper offers theoretical explanations for conditions in which religious rituals were primarily enacted through non-human agency.

chimerically constructed commodities should be considered neither irrelevant nor an outrage—two common responses. Rather, they are important elements for understanding the development of any religious movement, including Buddhism in America (and maybe especially Buddhism in America).

An analysis of the meditation cushion industry in America and what it says about American Buddhism.

This article addresses an issue of growing political importance: the global rise of civilizational populism. From Western Europe to India and Pakistan, and from Indonesia to the Americas, populists are increasingly linking social belonging with civilizational identity—and at times to the belief that the world is divided into religion-based civilizations, some of which are doomed to clash with one another.

Secular mindfulness requires an ideology of white conquest that makes invisible the enduring efforts of Asian and Asian-American Buddhists in maintaining the legacy of mindfulness practices.

This study employs ethnographic field data to trace a dialogue between the self‐psychological concept of the self object and experiences regarding the concept of “interbeing” at a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery in the United States. The dialogue develops an understanding of human experiences with the nonhuman natural world which are tensive, liminal, and nondual. From the dialogue I find that the self object concept, when applied to this form of Buddhism, must be inclusive enough to embrace relationships with animals, stones, and other natural forms.

Buddhism was here deployed in the service of a pre-existing narrative of conflict between conservatives and liberals and, by making appeals to secular scholars to define Buddhism, Buddhist voices were obscured or ignored. Finally, despite having their own media outlets, U.S. Buddhists were unable to effectively counter such representations either by perpetuating pre-existing media narratives nor by ignoring them altogether.

This ceremony centres on the recitation—usually by Buddhist monks—of extracts fron the Pali Canon, collected in a text called the Gatubhāṇavārapāli, Paritta or in Siahala Piruvānāpotvahanse. Its objective is to ward off danger, ensure protection and bless the sponsors. It is prevalent in other Theravada Buddhist countries such as Burma and Thailand as well, but this work is confined to a study of the tradition preserved in Sri Lanka.

What do we expect when we say something to someone, and what do they expect when they hear it? When is a conversation successful? The book considers a wide set of two-person conversations, and a bit of game theory, to show how conversational statements and their interpretations are governed by beliefs.

The book describes the theoretical framework and empirical measurements of misunderstandings—written by an economist, but in simple words and using interdisciplinary concepts.

Leaders of New Thought were first exposed to Buddhism and Vedanta philosophy through the publications of European Orientalists and the Theosophical Society and, later, though personal contacts with Asian Buddhist and Hindu missionaries. In addition to D. T. Suzuki, who helped to spark American interest in Japanese Zen, other important early missionaries were Anagarika Dharmapāla, a Sri Lankan Buddhist and Theosophist, and Swami Vivekenanda, an Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order who launched the Vedanta Society in North America. New Thought leaders, Theosophists, and Asian missionaries met in person at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and continued to develop relationships for more than a decade, particularly at the Greenacre conferences in Eliot, Maine. This chapter reveals the transnational nature of New Thought, which is typically considered to be an American metaphysical religious movement.

Describing their experiences participating in PoC group sits and activities, a recurring sentiment was the embodied feeling of being relaxed, and feeling safe and comfortable.

Drawing upon ethnographic research conducted in California with BIPOC practitioners of mindfulness, this article examines their efforts to create “safe spaces” to collectively experience and process painful embodied emotions around racialized trauma. These collective spaces, I argue, help meditators move from experiencing painful emotions as internal to their personal experience as individuals, and instead help relate their difficult emotions with those experienced and shared by other racialized minorities.

Empirical data indicate that the so-called “Buddhism of yellow color” that is predominantly associated with Japanese “immigrant” Buddhism, is constantly in decline in terms of “explicit” adherents. After some methodological observations, this article gives an overview of the relevant statistical data.

For a brief synopsis of the book’s chapters, see the introduction on Lion’s Roar.

The celebrations, you can see, were not subdued meditation events. Dancing, instruments being played and so on. This is hardly restrained. This is extatic worship.

All of us exist within a world of deep forces that we navigate at a level that is not what we term rational. All of us exist within a context, a late capitalist world, that is by no means rational. And in such a world, are untapped, unharnessed, undirected energies and longings going to be funneled and directed by those who figure out how to do so? Absolutely. And we’re not above that.

‘Reason’ isn’t just ‘trust scientists’ and ‘check your sources’; it is a deep re-evaluation of what life is for…

Meditators’ brains responded to the coupling of death and self-stimuli in a manner indicating acceptance rather than denial, corresponding to increased self-reported well-being. Additionally, degree of death acceptance predicted positively valenced meditation-induced self-dissolution experiences, thus shedding light on possible mechanisms underlying wholesome vs pathological disruptions to self-consciousness. The findings provide empirical support for the hypothesis that the neural mechanisms underlying the human tendency to avoid death are not hard-wired but are amenable to mental training, one which is linked with meditating on the experience of the embodied self’s impermanence. The results also highlight the importance of assessing and addressing mortality concerns when implementing psychopharmacological or contemplative interventions with the potential of inducing radical disruptions to self-consciousness.

[Children in these picture books] have qualities that differ from what mature adults have, but they are valuable none-the-less. And actually, in the case of 一休 (Ikkyū) especially, he is often shown as being wiser in a certain way or at least more clever than the adults. [… They show that] naughty or mischievous behavior isn’t necessarily an endpoint, and that change and growth are possible. [… So,] you can think about how these stories work for both children and for the adult caregivers who might be reading them.

The present study extrapolates six distinct themes related to the experiences of racialized inclusion and exclusion [by eleven participants of color]. These themes are: 1) Interpersonal Barriers to Full Participation, 2) Institutional Barriers to Full Participation, 3) Strategies for Coping with Racialized Exclusion, 4) Failures of Leadership Support for People of Color, 5) Range of POC Experiences, and 6) Promoting Equity and Inclusion. Following the explication of themes, the authors offer recommendations for primarily white meditation communities to help guide their efforts toward greater inclusion

Given the growing dilution of Buddhist identity and its tendency toward syncretism in Brazil, this paper works with the heuristic concept of a ‘Buddhism in Syncretic Shape.’ Since this concept is useful for better understanding some groups in Brazil, it is suggested that it can also provide interesting insights for the study of Buddhism in the West. This concept will be developed through a detailed description of Shingon in Brazil, which has undergone a religious synthesis with Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian religions.

The production of cheap talk relies everywhere on the depoliticisation of communication. Cheap talk displaces a shared traversal of difference with a technocratic exchange of messages. […] This is a thoroughly sterile ecology of communication: minds making speech to transfer information to other minds. […] It is not [stuttering] but fluency that ensnares life with a type of deathly repetition.

This book explains how information capitalism commodifies and dehumanizes speech through the contrasting examples of speech pathology and television punditry. Written before the explosion in generative AI, the book is helpful for explaining the market logics underlying LLMs and for understanding what such “cheap talk” does to people and society.

There are political and existential questions at stake here that are difficult even to articulate within a surge of cheap talk: What might a dysfluent event become if not immediately managed? How might we relate differently? What might we become?

Drawing from interviews, participant observation, and online research, I examine two interconnected issues. First, how temple food practices—offering alms to monks and operating newly invented temple food courts—sustain temples spiritually and financially. Second, how temple food, which is consistently integrated into various events and rituals, enables Thai Americans and a diverse assortment of other participants to connect and work together.

In their open-minded attitudes toward a wide range of Buddhist practices and multivalent interpretations of various Buddhist beliefs, these young adults challenge simplistic representations of Asian American Buddhists and present an inclusive vision of Buddhism that embraces nuance, ambiguity, and change.

By attending to the ways in which young “heritage” Buddhists approach religion in ways similar to “converts,” this article further erodes the “two Buddhisms” explanation of Buddhism in America.

Ministers in the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA) began performing same-sex marriages approximately forty years ago. These were among the first clergy-led religious ceremonies for same-sex couples performed in the modern era, and were apparently the first such marriages conducted in the history of Buddhism. In this article, I seek to explain why Jodo Shinshu Buddhists in America widely and easily affirmed same-sex weddings in the later 20th and early 21st centuries. My argument is that there are three factors in particular—institutional, historical, and theological elements of American Shin Buddhism—that must be attended to as contributing reasons why ministers were supportive of same-sex marriage.

Texts are more amenable to alteration than people.

[Sassa Seisetsu was] keen to counter the image—perhaps the result of victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—of the Japanese as a race of battle-hungry samurai. The true Japanese is a lover of beauty, a person of gentility and feeling—in other words, a Heian courtier. The Tale of Genji, as the “epitome of this culture,” thus had important tasks to perform: to make “every citizen” aware of his or her “true national character” and to provide proof of a certain cultural superiority. The Tale of Genji, in short, ought to be one of the prime movers in the Meiji project of forging a new national identity:

[But] the Shinshaku project was never completed; nor would it have been a readable, modern Genji even if it had been. […] In the end, it was Yosano Akiko—self–taught, a disciple of no one, and with no ideological axe to grind—who actually achieved what the scholars of ‘National Literature’ had been aiming to do.

Today you have to understand charity if you want to understand Buddhism.

[Charities in the event-network style] emphasize not staying to talk… so you’re not creating more karmic entanglement… whereas the Cherish Children Fund… created long-term sustained relationships… as a form of collective karma.

People are doing very different types of projects for very different reasons… [But] feelings of care, feelings of selflessness were key ways that people demonstrated themselves as good people… ensuring that they were making merit.

This dissertation looks at the political behavior of three Taiwanese Buddhist organizations from 1989 to 1997: the Buddhist Association of the Republic of China (BAROC), the Buddha Light Mountain monastic order (or Foguangshan) and the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Association (or Ciji). It concentrates on trying to understand the rationale behind the different strategies that each of them has adopted in its interaction with the government.

The BAROC has adopted a strategy of lobbying in an attempt to remedy the steady decline of its status throughout the 1990s: it has tried to sway the government to adopt a law that would restore the authority over Buddhists the association held before 1989. Foguangshan has resorted to a strategy of remonstrance to advance its religious ideals between 1995 and 1997: its founder Xingyun supported the bid of his lay disciple Chen Lii’an for the presidency of the Republic of China (ROC) and launched large public demonstrations critical of the government that followed that election. During the same period of time, Ciji has steered away from the controversies over the law on religion and conspicuously avoided supporting Chen, while continuing to grow to become the largest organization of its kind in Taiwan.

Bhikkhus, saying ‘a heap of the unwholesome,’ it is about the five hindrances that one could rightly say this.

We examine the extent to which domestic political developments can be understood through a US–China great power lens. Are politically progressive Thais more likely to be pro-US, and more politically conservative Thais likely to favor China? While we find some relationship between liberal domestic political leanings and sympathy for the United States, we also show that conservative domestic political leanings do not automatically translate into support for China.

The mp3 linked above is to a Talking Thai Politics conversation between the article’s first two co-authors discussing their paper and its implications.

1. South Asian Drumming Beyond Tala: The Problem with “Meter” in Buddhist Sri Lanka
2. On the Sonic Materialization of Buddhist History: Drum Speech in Southern Sri Lanka
3. along with numerous Audio and Video examples.

In this way, we should view Sri Lankan Buddhist drumming not as a simple application of pre-Buddhist rites to a nominally Buddhist context but rather as a unique, and uniquely Buddhist, art form in its own right.

Born in 1957, Rurui 如瑞, the abbess of Pushou Monastery 普寿寺 on Mount Wutai, in Shanxi province, belongs to the generation of Buddhists that became monastics after the opening up of China in the 1980s and came to leadership afterwards. She has been building Pushou Monastery, and the Mount Wutai Buddhist Institute for Nuns (中国五台山尼众佛学院) that it hosts, since 1991, as part of the institutionalised system, and negotiating with both the political authorities and the laity.

The case-studies are of two of the largest Western convert Buddhist movements in the UK—the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) and Soka Gakkai International-UK (SGI-UK)—and focus on their branches in the multicultural inner-city location of East London. The findings suggest that most Buddhists of colour in these movements come from the second generation of the diaspora.

For the FWBO, there is an apparently hegemonic discourse of middle-class whiteness that people of colour and working class members of this movement have to negotiate as part of their involvement. In contrast, for SGI-UK, the ethos is one of a moral cosmopolitanism that encourages intercultural dialogue thus facilitating the involvement of a considerably more multicultural and international following.

People of colour find that their practices of the techniques of the self provided by each movement enable them to feel more empowered in relation to their quotidian experience of racisms and racialisation, as well as encouraging them in a more anti-essentialist approach to identity that sees it as fluid and contingent.

little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they
were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—
by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag…

This is the world I want to live in.

Buddhist Geeks is an online Buddhist media company and community that launched in 2007. It consists of a weekly audio podcast and a digital magazine component and since 2011, has hosted an annual conference. I will discuss the main characteristics and concerns of the Buddhist Geeks community and explore how it can be situated both in relationship to traditional Buddhism and Buddhist modernism. In conclusion, I reflect on whether Buddhist Geeks signals the emergence of a new, distinctly postmodern stage in the wider assimilation of Buddhism in America.

While often associated with a liberal demographic, the increasing online visibility of rhetoric such as “snowflakes,” “politically correct,” “postmodern identity politics,” and “cultural Marxism” demonstrates the presence of right-wing sentiments and populations in American convert Buddhism.

We chart this backlash across a broad right-wing spectrum that spans from “reactionary centrism” to the “alt-right.” We illuminate the ways in which participants both de-legitimate “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” as political rather than Buddhist and naturalize their own position as Buddhist rather than political. We show how American convert Buddhist lineages have become a site of the “culture wars”…

These universities provide education in liberal arts and professional fields, while employing the time-tested methods of traditional Buddhist pedagogy. Because these universities are generally unknown to the public, I have provided information about their history, academic programs, and the educational success created on their campuses.

In each country to which it historically spread, Buddhism created schools, universities, and various centers for learning, meditation, and moral practicea. In the USA, a great variety of Buddhist-based institutions of learning were created during the last half of the 20th century. These include, but are not limited to kindergartens, elementary and secondary schools, institutes for vocational training, and universities granting professional degrees. In this article, we will investigate one particular type of Buddhist educational institution, which we refer to as a “Buddhist University.”

The people with dyslexia proved significantly faster at recognizing the impossible figures.

Theravada as practiced by most converts in the West is distinguished by the absence of monasticism, its dominant institution. Nevertheless, Thai Forest monasticism has managed to gain a foothold in the convert West, thanks to the efforts of convert monastics trained in Thailand. This article analyzes the missionary project to “monasticize” Western lay converts through the history of Birken Forest Monastery in British Columbia, Canada, founded in 1994.

To establish a monastery in Birken’s isolated, non-Buddhist environs, the abbot, Ajahn Sona in effect created a lay village to attract converts to and to teach them their role in orthodox Thai Forest monasticism. The all-consuming nature of the monasticization project among laypeople has cut short the training of a homegrown Sangha at Birken, demonstrating the challenges of establishing a domestic convert monasticism and the continuing dominance of the laity in North American Theravada.

Taking as its focus twentieth- and twenty-first-century semiautobiographical writings by black American Buddhists, this article explores how black American Buddhists engage with Buddhist teachings to understand themselves as racialized subjects on local, national, and transnational levels.

They portray the Buddha as a social reformer enlightened to the operation of racial, gender, and sexual inequalities. This portrayal of the Buddha allows black Buddhists to articulate a counter-narrative to hegemonic Western authority while paradoxically constructing their own romantic vision of Asia as the “Other” to the West.

This essay focuses on Albert J. Edmunds, a British-American Buddhist sympathizer, and it considers the ways that Western occult traditions, especially Swedenborgianism, moved back and forth across the Pacific and shaped the work of D. T. Suzuki.

Ultimately, then, religions derive their power from the depth of their spirituality. The power of Zen, for example, flows out of Tokusan’s “Thirty Blows” or Rinzai’s “Katsu!!!” or Jōshū’s “Mu” (“Emptiness”). The power of Jodo Shinshu also originates from one single point of absolute depth: from the nembutsu.

Unno examines how religious power and influence emerge from deep inner spirituality rather than external institutions, illustrated through historical figures in Zen and Jōdo Shinshū Buddhism.

Subjective feelings are a central feature of human life, yet their relative organization has remained elusive. We mapped the “human feeling space” for 100 core feelings ranging from cognitive and affective processes to somatic sensations; in the analysis, we combined basic dimension rating, similarity mapping, bodily sensation mapping, and neuroimaging meta-analysis.

Feelings formed five groups: positive emotions, negative emotions, cognitive processes, somatic states, and homeostatic states. Feeling space was best explained by emotionality, mental experience, and bodily sensation topographies.

In response, Buddhist leaders divided traditional Buddhist cosmology and practices into the newly constructed categories ‘superstition’ and ‘religion.’ Superstition was deemed ‘not really Buddhism’ and purged, while the remainder of Buddhism was made to accord with Westernized ideas of ‘religion.’

Although he is highly critical of a hybrid culture in which Westernized values are on the ascendant and traditional Asian/Thai values wane, he is by no means hostile to the building of a hybrid culture of resistance where Buddhism and Christianity join hands in confronting injustice.

The founder of Fo Guang Shan is one of the most influential Buddhist monks in Taiwan and around the world. This study examines the biographies of Hsing Yun as depicted in Fo Guang Shan’s popular media to elucidate the uses and significance of Buddhist hagiography in contemporary Taiwan. I argue that unlike the Buddhist hagiographies of earlier times in which eminent monks were depicted as transcendental beings with superhuman powers and spiritual attainments, the informal and intimate portrayals of Hsing Yun in popular media seek to portray the monk as a worldling bodhisattva

Orientalist tropes are pervasive in current tibetological work published in China, including articles in purportedly scholarly journals. This work is closely connected with government propaganda, and it is often explicitly directed by members of the government to further agendas of suppression.

Equally importantly, the article examines the ways in which Tibetans are presented with a version of their religion that bears little or no resemblance to how they traditionally have understood it; but it is also an image that Tibetans are increasingly being coerced to endorse.

Within the context of Ravanisation—by which I mean the current revitalisation of Ravana among Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka—multiple conceptualizations of Ravana are constructed. This article concentrates on two different Ravana conceptualizations: Ravana as a warrior king and Ravana as a healer.

At the Sri Devram Maha Viharaya, a recently constructed Buddhist complex in Colombo, Ravana has become the object of devotion. In addition to erecting a Ravana statue in a shrine of his own, two annual rituals for Ravana are organized by this temple. In these rituals we can clearly discern the two previously mentioned conceptualizations: the Ravana perahera (procession) mainly concentrates on Ravana’s martial side by exalting Ravana as warrior king, and in the maha Ravana nanumura mangalyaya, a ritual which focusses on healing, his benevolent side as a healer is stressed.

The focus on ritual invention in this article not only directs our attention to the creativity within the rituals but also to the wider context of these developments: the glorification of an ancient civilization as part of increased nationalistic sentiments and an increased assertiveness among the Sinhalese Buddhist majority in post-war Sri Lanka.

Founded in Taiwan in 1989, the Modern Chan Society was a community of lay Buddhists that challenged monks’ religious privileges and put forward the idea of equality between monks and lay believers. It asserted an independent authority from that of the monasteries in managing “salvation goods” and accordingly recruited its own clergy.

In tracing the history of the Modern Chan Society, this article assesses modern Chinese Buddhism: the role of the prophet in symbolic power, the conditions governing the emergence of a prophet, the legitimisation of religious reforms in modern practice and the paradox of institutionalisation.

It examines how the fascination with marble, which is vernacularly categorized as ‘white jade’ in Chinese, motivated such endeavors and how these icons shaped the perception of a developing Buddhist cosmopolis among Chinese Buddhists by helping them locate Burma in the Buddhist world in a spiritually and materially meaningful way.

Shinnyo-en’s founders and their successors envisioned a particular strategy for being Buddhist in modernity, one which aligns with some, but not all, scholarly characterizations of Buddhist modernism. As a result, Shinnyo-en and other lay organizations have largely remained on the margins of Buddhist studies despite their apparent popularity and proliferation. This article offers a new category for theorizing and positioning such organizations as contramodern—connected with, but divergent from mainstream forms of Buddhist modernism.

So the bear became synonymous with the cycle of the seasons, even the cause of the cycle. And the willful, ritualized little death that the bear undertakes every winter a sacrifice for the world itself. The world reawakens because of this sage-like, artistic, visionary, powerful figure who secludes himself in a cave and puts himself in a dream-like state of deprivation so that spring might once again come to the world. Sound familiar?

This study examines the early career of the renowned Buddhologist Lü Cheng as an aspiring revolutionary. My findings reveal that Lü’s rhetoric of “aesthetic revolution” both catapulted him into the center of the New Culture Movement and popularized a Buddhist idealism—Yogācāra—among thinkers who sought alternative social theories.

Buddhist soteriology supplied powerful tools for theorizing the social: The doctrine of no-self refuted philosophical solipsism and curtailed individualism; dependent-origination refashioned social evolution as collective spiritual progress.

The importance of Abhidhamma (higher doctrine) in Myanmar Buddhist society is well known. However, it is only within the last century that this doctrine has become more accessible to the laity, and specifically to women devotees.

During the colonial era, a considerable number of literate women were part of a “growing reading public,” and I argue that Burmese laywomen created a “demand” for learning Buddhist doctrine, with monks then creating a “supply”.

This article examines how modern Chinese Buddhism has been influenced by Christianity. For our purposes ‘modern Chinese Buddhism’ refers to a form of what has become known in the West as ‘Engaged Buddhism’, but in Chinese is known by titles which can be translated ‘Humanistic Buddhism’ or ‘Buddhism for Human Life’.

We differentiate between conscious imitation and analogous development due to similar social circumstances, and show how Protestant Christianity and Roman Catholicism have had different effects. In Part four, we examine Fo Guang Shan as a missionary religion.

Even the remote mountain monasteries have broadened their access to lay visitors. Nowadays monastic and lay Buddhists have more occasions to meet than before and the current intensification of their relationships brings important redefinitions of their respective identities.

I focus on a one-week retreat for laity in a Buddhist monastery dedicated to meditation. This case study examines the ambiguous goal of this retreat programme that combined two aims: initiating lay practitioners to the monastic lifestyle and the practice of kanhwa son meditation; and establishing a group of lay supporters affiliated to the temple. This temporary monastic experience was directed towards an intense socialisation of the participants to the norms and values of an ascetic lifestyle, blurring some aspects of the border between lay and monastic practices of Buddhism. However, this paper suggests that this transitory rapprochement contributed to both challenge and strengthen the distinction between the renouncers (ch’ulga) and the householders (chaega).

Using complementary analyses, we show that representations of pain and orgasm are distinct in each culture. We also show that pain is represented with similar face movements across cultures, whereas orgasm shows differences. Our findings therefore inform understanding of the possible communicative role of facial expressions of pain and orgasm, and how culture could shape their representation.

It is three in the morning and another day has begun at the Korean Buddhist monastery of Songwang-sa…

Based on years of engagement with Korean Buddhist history as well as observation of this particular monastery, this monograph describes, in intimate and honest detail, what it is like to be a monk in Korea.

Scholars have observed that Korean Buddhist nuns have a relatively high social status compared to nuns of other Asian countries, much like their sisters in Taiwan. It is a source of great pride for many Korean bhikṣuṇīs that their community operates with a high degree of autonomy, bringing them to an almost equal standing with their male counterparts. However, this claim of equal status is challenged once the nuns step outside their own communities and into the hierarchical system of the Order, an institution dominated by male monastics.

This paper aims to report on the gender disparity between male monastics and Buddhist women, both nuns and laywomen alike. I will first explore Korean Buddhist nuns’ experiences of gender discrimination imposed by the current institutional and cultural practices of the Buddhist Order, and their battles to challenge the legitimacy of this power structure. Next, I will introduce various episodes, including the Buddhist administration’s conflict with progressive women’s groups, to showcase the gender dynamics and current status of women in Korean Buddhism.

This article examines the education and ordination that a laywoman undergoes in order to join the Buddhist monastic life in Korea.

It is difficult to overestimate the role that The Life of Milarepa has played in shaping the way Buddhism developed in Tibet and later came to be understood in the West. The present version, composed by Tsangnyön Heruka in the late fifteenth century, almost four hundred years after Milarepa, draws upon these early works. But the resulting narrative eclipsed them all, serving as the canonical record of Milarepa’s life ever since. It is now famous for its themes of sin and redemption, faith and devotion to the guru, perseverance in the face of hardship, dedication to meditative mastery, and the possibility of liberation in a single life.

An alternate English translation by Lobsang Lhalungpa (1982) can be found here.

Nostalgia is for feeling, not for expecting to be real.

As we get more influential, we can expect more scrutiny and criticism.

The Konjaku monogatari shu (今昔物語集) is a Japanese anthology dating from the early twelfth century. The original work contains more than one thousand systematically arranged tales from India, China, and Japan. It is the most important example of a genre of collections of brief tales which, because of their informality and unpretentious style, were neglected by Japanese critics until recent years but which are now acknowledged to be among the most significant prose literature of premodern Japan.

What we mean by maps that have ‘gone wrong’ is maps with big, stinking, awful map blunders, like a country that’s gone missing, or a fictional mountain range, or a mis-drawn border that crosses all sorts of boundaries – the sort of mistakes that could lead to the unfortunate map-user getting hopelessly lost. We love them because they provoke the question: What on earth happened here? And the answer is most often a fascinating story.

Care typically emerges in the context of close personal relationships, and it is not well suited to either utilitarian or Kantian accounts of morality, or to “social contract” accounts of cooperation. Markets and states both have difficulty providing and supporting care, and as a result, care is overlooked and undervalued. I sketch alternative ways of thinking about the morality and politics of care and present alternative policies that could help support carers and those they care for.

Translators of short Buddhist chants in Southeast Asia, including Hộ Tông and his Siamese and Khmer predecessors, tend to follow three unstated principles:

1. the translation may be longer than its source, but rarely vice versa
2. even when translated into the vernacular, the Pali source ought to be retained, and
3. the resulting bilingual Pali-vernacular chant should bring its performance practices—gestures, melodies, and rhythms—into harmony.

These principles are crucial for understanding the historical processes that made the transmission of Theravada Buddhism across Southeast Asia possible.

The bilingual character of Theravāda Buddhism is no accident. It emerges from deliberate cultivation by Buddhist intellectuals in these regions over the past two millennia. The Theravāda transmission of texts is notably bilingual; scriptures in Pāli are often accompanied by vernacular translations and Pāli-vernacular bilingual texts, or “bitexts.”

Among these are an impressive variety of didactic poems, or cpāp’ (chbap), short, aphoristic verse compositions that were traditionally studied, copied, and recited by children studying at Khmer Buddhist temples.

To give a precise account of how the living complexity of Pali unfolds, the findings in this article are based on the phonetic transcription and analysis of fifteen multimedia recordings of Pali liturgical chants in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Cambodia. The range of major and minor variations in Pali pronunciation witnessed during this period, and the contentious debates behind these divergencies, open new paths for understanding the past and present of Pali as a Buddhist language.

Participants were more aware of Present Moment Experience (PME) when they had an activated intention to be mindful and when they felt good, and not very busy or hurried, and were not involved in social interaction. They were more reactive to PME when they experienced unpleasant affect, and when they were hurried or tired.

A scientific study confirms that the hindrances are indeed hindrances.

What role does gossip play in human societies?

On the basis of a large set of diverse stylistic markers, this paper argues that the Ekottarikāgama T 125 was translated by Zhu Fonian, and not by Saṃghadeva. The paper also considers implications of its findings for the broader corpus of texts ascribed to Zhu Fonian, and for methods in assessing ascriptions of Chinese Buddhist texts on the basis of internal evidence.

The Other Translation of Saṃyuktāgama 別譯雜阿含經 exists in two versions. The version preserved as text no. 100 in the Taishō edition of the Chinese canon is divided into sixteen fascicles, a format carried over from the Korean edition on which the compilers of the Taishō mainly relied. The other version, found in most editions produced in China itself, is instead divided into twenty fascicles. These two versions contain almost the same collection of sūtras, but differ in their arrangement. As regards the grouping into Saṃyuktas, the twenty-fascicle version is in good order while the sixteen-fascicle version is in disarray. This article examines the proposition by Anesaki (1908) that the sixteen-fascicle version resulted from accidental disarrangement of a text that closely resembled the twenty-fascicle version, and seeks to identify how and when this could have come about.

Despite heterogeneity of outcomes across studies, there is evidence that brief MBIs can impact numerous health-related outcomes after only one session and with interventions as brief as 5 min.

This meta-analysis of 85 meditation interventions shows that even a small amount of meditation is beneficial.

Where Japanese Zen is given to aesthetic considerations in multitudinous forms, Korean Zen is earthy, natural and unpretentious.

This book presents the history of Korean Zen from the “insider” perspective of an American ordained in the tradition.

Kinesthetic genius exists. Intuitive genius exists. It’s simply that we may not always identify it as ‘genius.’

Josh interviews famed anthropologist Wade Davis about the ‘genius’ of other cultures and how anthropology can teach us to listen more deeply to each other and to thus expand our notion of what it’s possible for a human to be.

Wonhyo examined the broad range of Mahāyāna doctrines in a systematic, rational, thoroughgoing, and insightful manner. In addition to the breadth of his scholarly mastery of the Mahāyāna system, he possessed excellent skills in literary Chinese, and the combination of these talents allowed his writings to bring a profound influence on the development of Buddhism in East Asia.

This volume brings together key writings and prefaces of Wonhyo that present his integrative approach to Mahāyāna Buddhism—systematising multiple doctrinal strands into a unified framework and emphasising the harmonisation of apparent conflicts.

The crown prince asked:
“Where do you come from?
What are you looking for?”
The brahmin said:
“I come from Dunnivittha,
And I am begging for two children.”

A translation of the Worin Cheongang Jigok by Sejon the Great, the fourth monarch of the Joseon. The work celebrates the life of Shakyamuni Buddha and is noted for being one of the first works printed in vernacular Korean.

The significance of this book within the history of research lies in its comparatively rigorous and objective interpretation of the entire history of Korean Buddhism, from the Three Kingdoms period to modern times.

The English translation of Joseon Bulgyosa-go, a book on Korean Buddhist history by Gim Yeongsu. This work delves into the development, struggles, and societal impact of Buddhism in Korea, exploring its relationship with politics, culture, and the broader historical context.

Some scholars connect the verbs ujjhāyati, khīyati, and vipāceti to negative emotional states (especially irritation and anger). Others connect the verbs to judgmental appraisal and the spreading of ill-fame. I show how both interpretations are valid.

The cockfight (tetadjen; sabungan) is a means of expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but, in a medium of feathers, blood, crowds, and money, to display them. […] Attending cockfights and participating in them is, for the Balinese, a kind of sentimental education.

Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations.

This is the first important function of Sangha: it carries and conveys the many components of the Buddhist tradition that can’t be shared through writing.

A talk on the importance and benefits of practicing in community.

In themselves, the forms are indeed empty and many of them are utterly arbitrary, but they are also profound and precious.

A short exploration of Buddhist rituals and objects, the work that they do for the Saṅgha, and the various ways people relate to the religious aspects of communal Buddhist practice.

… a critical assessment of naturalism and a reevaluation of the most recent forms of Buddhist modernism, including the extraordinary success of Mindfulness. It argues for a more balanced and encompassing approach that would extol the richness of the Buddhist tradition.

This article focuses on the relationship between Buddhism and science illustrated by 一行 Yīxíng’s (683–727) participation in [Chinese] calendar formulation.

A shinbyu is a religious donation in the full sense of the term, crucial in the lives of the Buddhist Burmese. While the shinbyu has been studied for its symbolic and ritual aspects by various anthropologists, this article proposes to analyse it through the social scenes in which different types of transfers intertwine with the religious donation. It focuses especially on “The Plate Scene”, an ambiguous moment where uncertainty about the meaning of the staging reveals the political work at play in interpreting transfers when an elderly lady refuses to be caught in the game.

An anthropological analysis of a single gesture at a community meal offering.

Wars of the heart always take longer to cool than the barrel of a gun… we must heal through love… and we must go slowly, step by step…

A brief but touching biography of the Cambodian Saṅgharāja during and immediately after the Khmer Rouge era whose “peace walks” (Dhammayietra) helped to restore hope to his embattled people.

Buddhist temples were meant to be halls of truth, places where the Buddha’s teachings are imparted and practiced and centers where those whose lives are sustained by that truth can gather. But in the Edo period, temples came to be supported not by individual believers but by the parish, or danka, system. Temples became places where memorial services for parishioners’ ancestors were held…

This short and easy-to-read cultural history pays especial attention to the wider, non-Buddhist forces and trends which shaped the history of Buddhism in Japan.

We explore how Japanese Buddhists of varying contexts drew upon Buddhist ideas and practices to make sense of their lives, to solve problems, and to create a meaningful world – a cosmos – out of chaos.

This academic overview of Japanese Buddhist history serves as an excellent launching pad for further study as it makes passing reference to a large number of historical events and figures showing how they fit into the larger evolution of Buddhist thought in Japan.

But because consciousness is painful—soaked and steeped in pain and not steeped in pleasure—sentient beings do grow disillusioned with it. Being disillusioned, desire fades away. When desire fades away they are purified. This is a cause and reason for the purification of sentient beings.

Mahāli the Licchavi reports to the Buddha that the rival teacher Pūraṇa Kassapa asserts that there is no reason for beings to be either defiled or pure. The Buddha denies this, and goes on to explain how it happens.

Correlational analyses showed that emotional intelligence was positively related to emoji use

Wanderers of other religions advocate three kinds of seclusion. What three? Seclusion in robes, almsfood, and lodgings.

While other religions’ monastics focus on external seclusion, the Buddha taught his monastics to be inwardly restrained.

In the Northern and Southern Dynasties, there were many types of Buddhist scripture-interpretation literature, including xuányì 玄義, xuánlun 玄論, yìshū 義疏, yìzhāng 義章, etc. These exegetical forms are related to Chinese traditional literary style, but mainly inherit the tradition of Indian Buddhist hermeneutics. In this paper, all such types would be summarized as yì (義, exegesis), lun (論, treatise) and shū (疏, commentaries), which are described as follows…

During the Chosŏn period (1392–1910), the discussion of precepts all but disappeared from the religious discourse in Korean Buddhism. Not only were the precepts left unstudied, but even the performance of official ordination ceremonies for new monks based on the precepts ceased.

This article examines the challenges the modern Chogye Order of Korea faces in applying traditional monastic discipline. It shows how modernization has led the Order to modify or abandon key Vinaya principles, increasingly turning to secular rules and norms instead.

Unaffiliated with any particular school or doctrinal tradition, Wonhyo applied himself to the explication of all the major Mahāyāna source texts that were available at the time, and in doing so had a major impact on East Asian Buddhism.

This paper explores Wonhyo’s role in harmonizing Mahāyāna doctrines and his extensive commentarial work, while also discussing his hagiography—which likely reflects the folk hero he became rather than the historical thinker himself.

Government has become something that happens to us in service of the economy rather than a vehicle driven by us to realize what we can achieve together. To save the planet and live meaningful lives, we need to start seeing one another not as competitors but as collaborators working toward shared interests.

We see all kinds of orientations, where someone’s neck is twisted, you can see their chin is pointing right, the chin is pointing left, the chin is pointing up… I see everybody misaligned in some gross or subtle way. When they get activated and the Qi is flowing in deep meditation, the Qi is going to want to jump that gap, pass through that gate into the brain. And what’s going to happen there?

A scholar and practitioner of Chinese medicine talks about how the psychological problems that can arise in meditation often have their start, or at least early warning signs, in the body, and how a more careful attention to our bones and muscles—as well as our physical and social environments—can prevent many cases of “meditation sickness.”

No one enters Burmese traffic with any assumptions about fundamental rights. Pedestrians, certainly, enjoy no “right of way.” No one, by the same token, is ever excluded from the game as long as they remain in motion. […] If you get ahead, you were right to try. If you don’t, you were right to yield. What’s to argue?

When it comes to hierarchies, Southeast Asia can be frustratingly (even scandalously) foreign for those of us raised in egalitarian, Western democracies. This is a book which explains clearly and sympathetically, but not uncritically, the logic behind Burma’s hierarchical arrangements with a close focus on the unique role of monks and gender.

Their tools to create their own Buddhism are quite limited. And yet, the tale is one of success, as these children often find ways to affirm their own religious identities in contradistinction to their parents. Paradoxically, they do this by identifying their parents as the primary source for their encounter with Buddhism—theirs is a familial lineage.

Convert (typically White) American Buddhists largely hold to (racialized) narratives that denigrate “heritage” Buddhists-by-birth. But where does this leave their children?

In this highly theoretical book of post-colonial critique, Drew Baker (himself a second-generation Buddhist American) analyzes how scholars have missed this group of American Buddhists and then tells us about their experience of growing up Buddhish in America.

This book is recommended for parents in the West who are comfortable with jargon and are into Buddhism, but who aren’t sold on “labels.”

The parents are more comfortable with the ambiguity because they chose it, while their children are overtly driven and haunted by the question “well, what am I?”

Seemingly, we might have boundless knowledge, all derived from study and reflection, but if our fundamental character is not attuned to the Dharma, we will not tame the enemy, the destructive emotions.

Longchen Rabjam urges practitioners to go beyond mere study and rituals, to rest in pure awareness free of grasping, dedicate all virtue to others, and thereby realize the ultimate meaning of the Dharma.

Rest the mind (of discrimination) and walk the path, so that the ancient style does not collapse, and then your own matter (of original endowment) will be clear and bright. The flowering mountains and spring begins invariably. I laughed once.

This book provides historical background on Kanhua Chan (hwadu practice) in Korea, explains key terms, and contains an annotated translation of the “Seon Dialogues” text, which outlines the practices of various Seon masters.

The belief that one’s religion trumps other faiths precipitates the stance that it trumps science too. This psychological process is most likely to operate in regions or countries with low religious heterogeneity.

How a lack of religious diversity in a place engenders fundamentalism.

Therefore, in Wŏnhyo’s One Mind philosophy, enlightenment is the act of returning to the One Mind. This can be achieved through the practice of the six paramitas—generosity, discipline, patience, diligence, meditative concentration, and wisdom—or by chanting to Amitābha with faith in the One Mind and the three Buddhist treasures.

This encyclopedic introduction to Korean Buddhism shows how Buddhism entered the Korean peninsula from China in the 3rd to 6th centuries and then developed uniquely through doctrines like Hwaŏm and Sŏn, becoming deeply embedded in Korean cultural, political, and philosophical life.

The stand-alone practice of memorization of dhāraṇīs appears to have increased in recent years, as evidenced by the mass production of small inexpensive books and series of books for copying and chanting dhāraṇīs and mantras.

This essay explores the contemporary use of dhāraṇīs and mantras in South Korean Buddhism, particularly among lay practitioners, through literature and ritual materials. Since the early 2000s, interest in dhāraṇīs has grown alongside the revival of apotropaic practices, with laypeople employing them in devotionals, merit-making, rituals for worldly benefits.

Nakatsukasa did not do the pilgrimage just once but kept going around the island on a journey lasting some fifty-six years until his death in 1922. In this time he completed 280 pilgrimage circuits of Shikoku and left the island just twice.

Many Japanese Buddhists become “addicted” to the beautiful life of the pilgrimage circuit.

See also the NBN interview about the book.

Together with the Silla dynasty scholiast Wonhyo (617-686), Chinul is one of the two most important figures produced by Korean Buddhism. Chinul was the inheritor of a mature tradition already rich after seven hundred years of symbiotic development with its Chinese counterpart.

This pivotal work in Korean Buddhist Studies provides an extensive introduction to Chinul’s life and thought alongside the complete translations of all his surviving writings.

By the end of the 15th century, a major syphilis epidemic had swept Europe…

As well as hiding syphilitic sores, merkins could help to mask the scent of the rotting flesh…

Templestay has become popular among Koreans struggling to cope with an ever more competitive and precarious social and economic environment.

Drawing on ethnographic research and an examination of the history, statistics, marketing, and program content of Templestay, this article challenges the polarized view that posits socially engaged Buddhism as the opposite of traditional monastic Buddhism and suggests that Templestay facilitates Buddhism’s engagement with the prevailing psychological predicament of society.

Our novel findings provide preliminary evidence that self-compassionate people are less likely to engage in bedtime procrastination, due in part to their use of healthy emotion regulation strategies that downregulate negative mood.

Multiple mediation analysis in study 1 revealed the expected indirect effects of self-compassion on less bedtime procrastination through lower negative affect but not higher positive affect. Path analysis in study 2 replicated these findings and further demonstrated that cognitive reappraisal explained the lower negative affect linked to self-compassion. The direct effect of self-compassion on less bedtime procrastination remained significant.

Kings and ministers thus boasted among themselves over their exclusive fidelity to orthodox Confucian values, even as they worked to assure that the Buddhist institution was aligned with the practical needs of the kingdom.

In this book chapter, Evon explores the enduring interplay between Buddhism and statecraft in Korea, tracing how Buddhist institutions and ideologies have been leveraged by rulers from ancient times through the modern era, emphasizing the adaptive nature of Korean Buddhism in legitimizing political authority.

The nunneries and monasteries are trying to respond to these critiques and to this question of identity but, as often times with religious institutions, the changes are slower than the changes in the societies around them.

A former Tibetan nun talks about the slowly expanding opportunities for education available to women in Tibetan monastic institutions and the challenges adapting tradition to the modern world.

[This article discusses…] the perceptions of Tibetan identity within and outside of the Tibetan community, the influence of sponsorship programs in India that are based on identification, the importance of marriage, political engagement, and whether it is important to be Buddhist or not. Lastly, the role of the Dalai Lama in the eyes of the research subjects is also explored.

To gather information about the association of second-generation Tibetans with their parent’s home country, interviews with Tibetans in Switzerland and India provided valuable insights. The interviews were supplemented with data acquired from experts who were involved with the Tibetan diasporic community while the research was being conducted.

Common difficulties included finding time to practice formally and falling asleep during formal practice. Content analysis revealed “practical resources,” “time/routine,” “support from others,” and “attitudes and beliefs,” which were supportive factors for maintaining mindfulness practice. Informal mindfulness practice was related to positive wellbeing and psychological flexibility. Frequency (but not duration) of formal mindfulness practice was associated with positive wellbeing.

There was a significant improvement on the Digit Letter Substitution Test, the Perceived Stress Scale, and three subscales of the Emotional Competencies Scale. Analysis of non-normal data on the Wilcoxon sign-ranked test revealed significant improvement in the Adequate Depth of Feeling subscale of Emotional Competence and all subscales of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire.

Some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons.

The harmony between the master and the disciple was as fortunate as a mustard seed falling from the sky hitting the point of a needle.

This work offers English readers a threefold insight into Korean Buddhist hagiography by presenting three major compilations of biographies of eminent monks. The translations and annotations were based on an annotated Korean manuscript, with reference to the Hanmun originals held at the Archives of Buddhist Culture at Dongguk University.

Early texts, like the Vimalaprabhā or the Lam yig of Man luṅ pa, do not describe Śambhala as a paradise on earth. They rather stress the spiritual qualities of the country and its inhabitants. Later works, especially the smon lam, the most popular texts on Śambhala among the Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhist lay people, concentrate on the paradisiac nature of the hidden kingdom.

The paper explores how the Tibetan Buddhist vision of Śambhala functions as both a utopian ideal and political symbolism. It traces the myth’s evolution from spiritual paradise to political metaphor, compares it with European utopian traditions, and cites key Tibetan and Mongolian sources.

Science and scientists can learn much from religion when it comes to how to deal with scientific fundamentalism.

Contrary to popular assumption, the thought world of the Pali discourses is well populated with gods and spirits, demons and ghosts, as picturesque as the imagination of a reader of Tolkien’s novels could wish for.

On how the Pāḷi Suttas embrace Brahmā, and not.

Students who are well-trained in Mindfulness cope with dukkha in a very different fashion from the rest of us whose minds are still at the “drunken monkey” stage.

Dr. Ashby explores how human suffering (dukkha) is not merely an external condition but is compounded by our internal responses, such as clinging, aversion, and self‑identification. She argues that by understanding and transforming these reactions, one can see suffering clearly and move toward its cessation.

Tantra is an important part of the path to liberation in the Geluk tradition. It is a path to liberation that is held to involve distinct, esoteric methods, but without diverging from the philosophical view of emptiness, which is indispensable.

Known for its rigorous academic approach, the Gelukpa school integrates philosophy, ethics, meditation, and tantric practices according to the 14th century principles outlined by Je Tsongkhapa.

This encyclopedia entry gives a brief overview of the school with a special focus on putting its philosophical stances into context.

Jane Goodall started asking people to consider whether we are alone on this planet.

A short tribute to an incredible scientist.

Another interesting source of ‘slavery’ in Buddhist temples in historic Sri Lanka was donating oneself voluntarily as a slave to gain merit attached to the deed…

Temples in medieval Sri Lanka had a range of laborers from volunteers to serfs to prisoners of war who laborered under conditions that ranged from the purely symbolic to the truly harsh.

These commentaries, known as sūtra sannayas, and/or as sūtra vistara sannayas, were composed in large numbers beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century. In what follows, I present the historical context for this change in Buddhist textual practices…

The revival of the Bhikkhu Saṅgha in eighteenth century Sri Lanka was accompanied by a renewed focus on study of the Pāli Suttas and Vinaya. This necessitated (and, eventually, facilitated) the creation of a large corpus of vernacular commentaries aimed at educating novice monks.

This paper is critical of any Buddhist environmentalism that fails to give due attention to both dimensions, and it emphasizes that both the relational and developmental dimensions must be held in balance in order for a genuine Buddhist environmentalism to be possible.

Scholars of Chinese Buddhism have given much attention to vilified foodstuffs such as meat and pungent vegetables and less attention to celebrated foods. While proscriptions are important for their role in constructing boundaries used in group identification, we should not overlook the celebration of particular foods such as congee (zhōu 粥).

Socioecological models for agriculture provide an opportunity to explore feedbacks, trade-offs, and synergies that can optimize and strengthen emerging connections between farming and society. With the right incentives, innovative research, and political will, a sustainable agriculture is within our reach.

The position of the family-priest is legitimated by the application of a fundamental [Tantric] Buddhist idea: the hierarchy of Disciples’ Way (śrāvakayāna), Great Way (mahāyāna) and Diamond Way (vajrayāna). Thus the family-priesthood in Newar Buddhism, exercised by the Vajrācāryas alone, is justified in terms of the images of bodhisattva (altruistic saint) and siddha (accomplished one), the ideals of Great Way and Diamond Way respectively. Vajrācāryas are monks, householders and priests all at once and the contradiction this seems to entail in modern eyes is avoided traditionally by viewing this sequence as a hierarchy.

Taking the verses in the Dasanipata of the Theragatha as examples, this article focuses on the stylistic interplay of rhythmic uniformity and change in the expression of core messages in a Pali poem. It aims to unveil the poets’ strategies in the use of various types of metres and prosodic elements to create the narrative style of each poem and draw the audiences’ attention to the Buddha’s key teachings in the verses.

You live in the mountains a few years and then you go into town, you sit on the bus… you look at all those people and you feel, ‘Who are you struggling for?’

It’s not easy I tell you.
If you can live here,
you’re sure to arrive
in the Pure Land.

A disciple of the hermits of the Zhongnan Mountains introduces us to the lifestyle and wisdom of his masters.

… because I have discerned the teachings by perceiving my own mind, I feel respect for the tradition that bases itself on mind [i.e., Chan]. Moreover, because I have understood the cultivation of mind by discerning the teachings, I have reverent regard for the meaning of the teachings.

This paper provides a close reading of a few lines from the beginning of Zongmi’s Comprehensive Preface to the Collected Writings on the Source of Chan (Chányuán zhūquánjí dūxù 禪源諸詮集都序), written in 833.

This passage is of special interest because in it Zongmi gives an account of what might be called an ‘enlightenment experience’ that he had, which provides the basis on which he claims unique authority to be able to resolve the central problem that the text addresses: to bridge the gap between textualists and meditators so as to make the tradition whole again.

So when in deep, rapturous meditation, we enter the state of flow, when we are one with the present moment, this is the ‘immortal nectar.’ This is why the Tibetan texts speak of amrita as the elixir of timeless awareness. It’s not an external liquid. It’s a byproduct of steeping in the awareness of the present moment which, when all the hormonal centers of the brain kick in, feels like being soaked in honey, basking in the nectar of the eternal ‘now.’

This podcast episode explains the meaning of honey in myths from around the world by appreciating it as an apt metaphor for the experience of trance.

Orientations of temples at Ayutthaya seem to have been determined by magnetic compass

By correlating the exact orientations of different historical temples in Thailand and their construction dates to the known drift of the magnetic north pole, scientists have been able to confirm that Thais had the compass centuries earlier than previously thought.

The present note is concerned primarily with the translation and interpretation of the final summary paragraph, both in the sutta and its commentary

An exploration of the somewhat unusual summary at the end of MN 136.

This article examines a poem in the Kaludayittherapadanavannana which expands on the poem attributed to Kaludayitthera in the Theragatha; the poem in the Kaludayittherapadanavannana did not make it into the final canon. The hypothesis of this paper is that the poem may be a popular Dravidian song adapted to Buddhist use and translated into Pali, and this is the primary reason it was excluded from the canon.

This conclusion is based on several factors. 1) The author of the Pali poem was not well versed in the Pali language and made constant mistakes in translation. 2) Gratuitous repetition; the poem itself is not very good poetry, containing the kind of needless repetition one associates with a popular song. 3) 13.4% of the words in the poem are direct lifts from Dravidian words; this compares to only 3.9% of the words in the Theragatha poem itself, of which this poem is an extension. While this does not prove that the source was a Dravidian poem, it raises the probability quite significantly. In addition, this kind of literature—making lists of biota in the natural world for comparison, personification and poetic effect— is common in Dravidian Sangam literature. 4) The poem contains wrong or awkward phrases in Pali which can be better understood as Dravidian imports, and 5) an extensive and growing body of linguistic evidence shows that the adoption of Dravidian terminology into Buddhist thought and practice was not an uncommon occurrence.

Conflating religious practice with ethnic culture is considered to carry the risk of breeding “splittism” – especially in Tibet and Xinjiang. While in the post-Mao era the outright hostility against religion has given way to a religious revival, keeping religion and politics separate has remained a major concern for the Chinese Communist Party. Religion is supposed to be a private matter that does not interfere with politics. Against this backdrop, a recent phenomenon in the Tibet Autonomous Region is all the more remarkable: the (re-)fusion of ethnicity and religion under the label of cultural heritage and its protection.

I argue that endorsing religion as an attribute of Tibetan heritage corresponds to the concept of defining public spaces and events in which religious practice is legitimate and expected. Simultaneously, religious practices outside these dedicated spaces and events become even more problematic, leading to everyday Buddhist practices, such as circumambulation, being seen as (and performed as) political acts.

Many rural crime sprees punctuated the last two decades of King Chulalongkorn’s reign, but one of the worst broke out in early 1903. A violent gang of robbers repeatedly made off with herds of water buffaloes, consistently eluding the newly established provincial police force…

The interrogation of this group of robbers yielded such a wealth of information about bandit practices that Damrong concluded that it ought to be written down and distributed to the kingdom’s administrators so that they would be better informed in dealing with rural crime.

A Thai prince’s manual on how crime worked in rural Thailand, written in an elevated question-and-answer style no doubt inspired by the Theravāda exegetical tradition.

In this article, after focusing on one particularly radical group, whose beliefs consisted of worshipping one’s own future Buddha (法身) residing within oneself (the Dilun school 地論宗), I show that all three schools born of the northern region—the Huayan (華嚴), Chan (禪) and the Three Stages Movement (三階教)—succeeded the radical group…

I compare the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices (二入四行論), considered the most prestigious early Chan text, with various texts from the Three Stages Movement, and demonstrate that there are some common elements. Both Schools were heavily influenced by the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra (涅槃經), which emphasized the importance of perceiving the Buddha-nature, and the Three Stages Movement practiced the same method of contemplation. The Huayan school of Zhixiang Monastery (至相寺), located next to the holy ground of the Three Stages Movement, propagated the theory of “originally achieved Buddhahood” (舊來成佛) and criticized both Chan Buddhism and the Three Stages Movement.

One who regards the 南泉 (Nánquán) gōng’àn as antinomianism is doctrinally confused, yet one who assigns feasibility to it is practically mistaken.

The study first unveils the pivotal role of the tathāgatagarbha and the central objective of “enlightening the mind and seeing the nature” (míngxīn-jiànxìng 明心見性). It then elaborates on the “two-tier scheme”—a metaethical structure suitable for explicating Chan philosophy. Following this, the study carefully analyzes three critical aspects of Chan morality: (1) The Chan attitude towards rules and precepts, which forms the practical basis for Chan ethics; (2) The characteristics and rationale of the spontaneous morality of enlightened beings; (3) Violence in Chan public cases (gōng’àn 公案), which transcends mundane ethics and epitomizes the great compassion of the Chan masters in transmitting the highest truth.

Focusing on the shock (saṃvega) that may occur when one is reminded of things one has forgotten, the paper argues for the ethical significance not so much of remembering the past as of remembering that one has forgotten it. The colorful tales from the Divyāvadāna serve as brilliant and humorous reminders of the enormity of all we have forgotten.

This article presents research on one traditionalist group, Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT). It describes FPMT’s engagement, identifies its motivations, objectives, and activities, and examines the possibility that it represents a type of engagement that can be called “traditionalist.”

This article builds on Beyond Queen and King’s theoretical work by considering one such under-studied “traditionalist, engaged” Buddhist organization.

Being intentional with your interpersonal contact and maintaining a variety of conversation partners are crucial to supporting a healthy social life.

After many years of observation I begin to perceive in Siamese religion a wise and generous pattern that accommodates the teachings of the Sage together with Hindu state-craft, and the fertility concerns of rice farmers, without doing violence to any one of them. It is a system that works, and has worked for many centuries, but today it is threatened by a new generation of thinkers, reformers, well-intentioned and well-educated, who have forgotten how symbolism works.

A brief word on how to view Thai religious “syncretism.”

We found a large number of different categories that go beyond those identified in previous research. Reasons changed with increasing meditation practice, although spiritual goals tended to become more important only for practitioners with a spiritual background.

Perhaps to the ordinary believer the very idea of upholding the precepts themselves promised safety as much as moral improvement…

In 1240, Köten famously summoned the Central Tibetan Buddhist polymath Sakya Pandita, by then already an old man, to his court at Liangzhou. Examining Tibetan and Mongolian accounts about their meeting from the last seven centuries, this study shows that it was neither compelling philosophy nor some turn of faith that converted the Mongols. It was, rather, Sakya Pandita’s violent therapeutic intervention into the space of Köten’s ill body that wrenched the Mongol body politic into the Dharmic fold.

Why not
tend to your own horse

A poem in response to Auden’s poem about Bruegel’s painting about the fall of Icarus asking what it is that we owe one another and what is the correct response to the tragedy of craft.

In this unstable balance of power, greater emphasis was placed on the dynastic pedigrees of consorts and wives brought to the island from powerful mainland kingdoms, from which Lanka’s kings could borrow prestige, and on whom they could potentially call on for military support. Once on the island, however, it seems that many of these women were not content to merely be accessories to their husbands’ claims to power. Their inscriptions speak to the considerable economic, political, and religious influence they wielded throughout the interregnal period.

MBCT was associated with decreased emotional reactivity to social stress, specifically during the recovery (post-stressor)

when the thread of the warp is stretched out
And the weft is woven through, back and forth
In the end the thread runs out:
Like this is the life of mortals.

In Sarvāstivādin and Mūlasarvāstivādin circles the Udānavarga was as popular as is the Dhamma-pada in Theravādin circles, and it circulated widely in South and Central Asia.

Monks, it is herein that consciousness comes, that it goes, that it stands, that it departs, that it grows, that it increases, that it flourishes.

Although Jeantel, a close friend of Trayvon Martin, was an ear-witness (by cell phone) to all but the final minutes of Zimmerman’s interaction with Trayvon, and testified for nearly six hours about it, her testimony was disregarded in jury deliberations. Through a linguistic analysis of Jeantel’s speech, comments from a juror, and a broader contextualization of stigmatized speech forms and linguistic styles, we argue that the lack of acknowledgment of dialectal variation has harmful social and legal consequences for speakers of stigmatized dialects.

Is the one who acts the same as the one who experiences the result?

Of course, one who dies while sitting in zazen will never be unhappy. But it is nearly impossible to die in this manner if your body is suffering the pain of sickness. My own master (Gudō Kokushi) said, ‘Your zazen for one sitting is a lifetime of zazen.’ How edifying these words of his are.

A collection of short teachings to “seekers who would desire to go in the same way” originally compiled in 1670.

The translation here was published by The Eastern Buddhist in three installments in 1970 and 1971:

1. New Series vol 3 n 2, pp. 89–118
2. New Series vol 4 n 1, pp. 116–123
3. New Series vol 4 n 2, pp. 119–127

They are gathered here into a single PDF for your convenience.

Monks, I shall teach identity, the arising of identity, the cessation of identity and the path leading to cessation of identity. Listen and bear in mind what I shall expound…

Monks, one who meditates and develops patient acceptance with regard to this dharma with limited wisdom is called a ‘faith-follower’…

Totally focused on the specific, yet transported into the universal at the same time. This rapturous focus, in its sublime triple aspect, is the heart of human ritual experience.

Paralleling the reinvention of Christmas in the modern period, Buddhists reconfigured the Buddha’s birthday as a symbol of their religious identity and power. The Buddha’s Birthday festival should be understood in the context of increasing contact and exchange among Buddhists in the East and the West. The festival’s prominence was the result of complex negotiation and collaboration between Korean and Japanese Buddhists who both hoped the festival would advance their overlapping visions of Buddhism. The festival was not so much an imposition of the colonizer on a native culture as it was a dynamic, creative feature of modern Korean Buddhism in a colonial context.

A total of 536 Hong Kong university students completed questionnaires measuring their experiences of compassion from others, self-compassion, resilience, psychological distress, flourishing, and meaning in life. Serial mediation analyses showed that compassion from others was associated positively with self-compassion, which was, in turn, linked to greater resilience and consequently lower levels of psychological distress and higher levels of flourishing and meaning in life.

Because sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, producing this text has required bringing together over twenty experts from a variety of fields….

By covering a wide range of topics with a uniformity of style, and by including glossaries, review questions, case studies, and links to further resources, the text has sufficient range to perform as the core resource for a semester course. Students who cover the material in the book will be conversant in the language and concepts of sustainability, and will be equipped for further study in sustainable planning, policy, economics, climate, ecology, infrastructure, and more.

Collectively, the 12 eligible studies suggest that incorporating the Buddhist wisdom practices of contemplating interdependence, emptiness, and perspective-taking on self and others may enhance prosocial behaviour through various mechanisms, such as (i) developing a sense of interdependence and common humanity, (ii) fostering the altruistic desire to help others, and (iii) experiencing a state of oneness. However, concerns were raised about the overuse and reliability of self-report measures for accurately assessing prosocial behaviour

正坐端然如泰山、
巍巍不要守空閑。
You should sit properly and uprightly, like Mt. Tai,
Imposing and solitary, without dwelling in vacuous quiescence.

The Peak’s pluralism should not be read as pure romanticism. Some speak of the Peak as uniquely harmonious, but in reality it operates like any other human space, with continual negotiations and alliances among groups evolving over time. At present, the Peak is controlled by Buddhists, who make some accommodations for pilgrims of other religions, but still place many restrictions over the summit. Religious tensions can exist, as do divisions between Sinhala and Tamil ethno-linguistic groups. Nevertheless, the mountain can also encourage cooperation. The difficulty of the climb is a source of solidarity among strangers

A 97-slide Prezi presentation showing what it’s like to climb Sri Lanka’s most famous mountain along with teaching materials and a short bibliography of further resources.

the ritual texts and proselytizing efforts of Jōkei 貞慶 (1155–1213), a prominent monk in the Hossō 法相 school of the early medieval era in Japan. I will seek to interpret his personal devotion and evangelism in the context of broader ideological clashes taking place. More specifically, this study will ask how we should make sense of Jōkei’s gradually evolving devotional allegiance to Kan-non 観音 in the last ten or so years of his life. I will contend that Kannon served as the perfect symbolic foil for Jōkei to counter the popular senju nenbutsu 専修 念仏 (exclusive practice of the nenbutsu) teachings expounded by Hōnen 法然 (1133–1212) and the threat it represented to established Buddhism in Japan.

Our search identified 19 relevant studies of adolescents (10–19 years; N = 7049) for inclusion. A large effect size was found for an inverse relationship between self-compassion and psychological distress indexed by anxiety, depression, and stress.

After articulating the array of “the practice of the same” that dictates every corner of our civilization, this paper proposes to turn to gong’an (Jp. kōan) to dismantle that dysfunctional habit of repetition. The soteriological practice aiming at realizing one’s Buddha nature provides a way to think about what I call “critical Chan liminality,” which deconditions us from the practice of the same.

The Jataka may have been deliberately hidden to prevent them from being permanently lost in the year 2000 of the Buddhist Era.

Technologies are only obvious in hindsight.

Early Buddhism, as embodied in the Pali Nikāyas and the Chinese Āgamas, is radically different from all these schools, at least as far as their philosophical content is concerned.

A brief overview of the development of Buddhist metaphysics from the Early Texts to the Mādhyamikas.

This paper investigates the impacts worldviews have on the nature and trajectory of meditation-related challenges, as well as how worldviews change or are impacted by such challenges. […] We identify and discuss the various impacts that religious and scientific worldviews have on meditation practitioners and meditation teachers who navigate periods of challenge associated with the practice.

Is there a story that could be told that isn’t ultimately about the experience of being in a body?

This is the yogic process: a churning ocean, a rumbling mountain, a game of cosmic tug-of-war, transmuted poison, and a pot of nectar … all within one body—yours, mine. Imagine that.

Horse myths are almost always related to the breath. Xanthus (Ξάνθος) and Balius (Βάλιος), the two horses of Achilles (Ἀχιλλεύς), are born from the generative wind. Two horses, born of the wind, that the hero must control. The journey of the hero, in the esoteric, yogic sense, is to be a “breath-controller” or a “horse-tamer” (ἱπποδάμοιο) which is what Homer called all his heroes.

Native American horse trainers tamed their steeds sometimes by getting nose-to-nose with the horse and trading breath. Imagine standing nose-to-nose with a wild horse—the fear in its eye, the fear in yours—and breathing together. It’s a precarious place, that place between tamed and untamed, between breath-power being harnessed and being unharnessed.

Fed and fuelled by that, the great tree would stand for a long time.

When Ānanda suggests that dependent origination is simple, the Buddha rebukes him and explains how stable and hard to eradicate it is with the simile of a great tree.

They arouse faith in things that are dubious, and they don’t arouse faith in things that are inspiring. When a foolish, incompetent untrue person has these four qualities they keep themselves broken and damaged.

After reflection, you should criticize those worthy or criticism, and praise those worthy of praise.

Where our individual perception meets the external world: that point of focus is the juncture between inner and outer space. It’s where we and nature find union. It’s the home of the muse, of inspiration, even of what have been called ‘angels’ which the visionaries saw shining in that meeting place between the eye of the observer and the light of the observed.

if we consider the Buddha’s hagiography, romantic love proves to be a significant feature of the story.

Although she is abandoned by the Bodhisatta as he makes his Great Departure, the Yasodhara of South Asian hagiography cannot be defined by her abandonment. She is regularly represented as a powerful character with a voice of her own — one who challenges, cries, speaks, and commands. But above all else, the Yasodhara of many of these sources is regularly described as the Buddha’s match.

The notion of chunghwa 中華, an ideology that points to China as the place of cultural origin, was commonly adopted by both the Confucian scholar-officials and Buddhist monks during Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910).

Paekgok’s composition [the Taegak Tŭnggye jip 대각등계집] is a further example of how no division between Korean and Chinese history was perceived.

It was after the Sino-Japanese war of 1894 that such conceptions of China were shattered, leading the Koreans to be more open to western influences.

the burning of organic carbon warms the Earth about 100,000 times more from climate effects than it does through the release of chemical energy in combustion.

The Theragāthā of the Khuddakanikāya has only ten stanzas (vv. 527–536) uttered by the Elder Kāḷudāyī. However, the Madhuratthavilāsinī (Bv-a) preserves 64 stanzas ascribed to the Elder while the Visuddhajanavilāsinī (Ap-a) quotes a different series consisting of 48 stanzas ascribed to him.

The underlying idea of improving and extending through time (xiū 修) linked renovations and rituals. Managers viewed both as ways to renew the temple community, to protect temple buildings, and to pass liturgical and craft knowledge to future generations.

At all those locations stood former temples/shrines that gods and ghosts used to occupy but were demolished to make way for urban infrastructure. Despite repeated banning and purging of deities and temples, worshippers burn incense and paper money, make offerings, and become possessed in those places. The gods’ agency seems to be exercised even after their temples and bodies are destroyed.

it’s damaging the planet, it’s poisoning our bodies and, worst of all, we kind of have to participate in it because not participating in it is even worse.

There is sincerity here.

The two communities discussed in this paper are very different—the Buddha Center, a cybersangha, only exists in a virtual world, while the other, Daifukuji, is a hundred-year-old actual life temple with increasing digital engagement. Still, they both offer opportunities for community members to participate in online meditative ritual, prayer, and memorialization.

deathbed practices in nineteenth-century Siam were structured to flow seamlessly from chanting for the dying to chanting for the dead, a sequence reflected in the physical layout of the manuscripts themselves.

a multicriteria assessment of 24 meat and milk alternatives that integrates nutritional, health, environmental, and cost analyses with a focus on high-income countries.

Our findings suggest that a range of food products exist that when replacing meat and dairy in current diets would have multiple benefits, including reductions in nutritional imbalances, dietary risks and mortality, environmental resource use and pollution, and when choosing unprocessed foods over processed ones also diet costs.

A denominative verb is one that is usually formed from a synchronically occuring noun (or an adjective) to which verbal endings are appended. Denominative verbs, in a way, can be seen as nouns (or adjectives) which have metamorphosed into verbs formally and semantically.

Etymological, lexical, commentarial, and philological notes on 162 Pāḷi verbs.

I will concentrate on the intellectual exchange between Buddhism and Chinese culture and outline the major issues from the historical perspective.

A basic introduction to Buddhism’s introduction into China.

This episode is about what it takes for a poor kid to get a college degree. Strange as it may sound, campus food at a place like Bowdoin College is a big part of the problem.

For part one of this miniseries, see Carlos Doesn’t Remember.

Venerable P’ŏpt’a 法舵 (b. 1945), AKA ‘the Bodhisattva of Reunification,’ maintains that it is imperative to keep engaging North Korean Buddhists as they are, and to keep providing material help to Northerners—especially food—through Buddhist channels. Doing otherwise would not only be counter to the spirit of universal compassion which typifies Mahāyāna Buddhism, but also leave Southern Buddhists unprepared in the case of unexpected political changes in P’yŏngyang.

48.5 percent of children in the countries surveyed have blood lead levels above 5 µg/dL.

High lead exposure reduces measured intelligence substantially.

Our bodies and our minds are built for the pace of walking. When we use machines, they’re built to do things faster than our normal pace. Even if you’re able to accomplish a task faster, for that period it’s not as easy to accomplish the task of being in yourself. So, if it takes you 10× as long to get somewhere walking, but your goal is to be present every moment, then walking is the better way to go as opposed to taking the car

It’s the same vows, but the volume is turned up, if I may say so.

An anthropologist and Buddhist practitioner discusses her field work at the meditation center of Lapchi in Kham ཁམས (Yushu ཡུལ་ཤུལ་ Prefecture, Qinghai 青海). She discusses how the strict ascetic practices of Master Tsultrim Tarchen are inspiring a new generation of Tibetan Buddhists, touching on the role of charisma in perpetuating the Dharma and on the paradoxically social nature of renunciation.

those wanderers who followed other religions, unable to bear the esteem of the mendicant Sangha, abused, attacked, harassed, and troubled the mendicants…

How a wise meditator views abusive speech.

An increase in the concentration of particulate matter (PM10) by 10 μg/m³ reduces the vote share of incumbent parties by two percentage points

The most striking rock formation at Phū Phra Bāt is locally known as Uṣā’s Tower, named after the stone chamber where the beautiful princess would have been forced to live in isolation. It is a natural rock formation, restructured into a chamber with one door and two side windows standing in the centre of an open space and marked with a circular ring of vertical stones.

Some odd rock formations in Udon Thani have been the focal point of religious practices from prehistory through to modern times.

when you use the law and science to change the mind, it can change tomorrow. But when you change the heart, it is forever. In the midst of the ongoing climate and COVID-19 crises, I believe that we can change the story of the world if we change the storyline. “The seeds of goodness live in the soil of appreciation for goodness.”

When you live with good friends, good companions, and good associates, you should live supported by one thing: diligence in wholesome qualities.

Results indicate smartphone involvement (a compulsive pattern of use and cognitive preoccupation with one’s smartphone) to be significantly associated with lower trait mindfulness.

Interestingly, time spent on the phone did not correlate with decreased mindfulness when controlling for compulsion.

In elaborating the character of contemporary sūtra worship, the study considers the organisational structure of the worshippers of the sūtras, the sūtras’ popular significance in Nepal, and the manner in which their power is conceived of as related to the presence of life in the manuscripts, after which the practices of display (darśan yāyegu) and recitation (pā thyākegu) are explained.

Depending on the context, they could be perceived as annoying, filthy, or useful. They were associated with improper behavior, seen as helpful or even indispensable, or viewed as the innocent victims of human misbehavior. Yet, all these considerations were overshadowed by the Buddhist proscription against harming or killing any sentient being.

En-‘chanted’ land is not only land that has been sung to, but land who has had its own song listened to and sung back to it: land that is understood for its own specificity. And through that understanding, the land radiates back in true expression of itself, the same way a child beams when understood—or, when sung to.

When a mendicant has faith, approaches, pays homage, asks questions, actively listens to the teachings, remembers the teachings, reflects on the meaning, and practices accordingly, the Realized One feels inspired to teach [them].

How we should approach the Dhamma and Dhamma teachers.

Monks, just as a large floating lump of foam is carried along by the current of the river Ganges…

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat…

I bring together such a large congregation by using the four ways of being inclusive

the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Just as a fine thoroughbred steed…

Bhikkhu, if one teaches the Dhamma for the purpose of revulsion towards the eye, for its fading away and cessation, one can be called a bhikkhu who is a speaker on the Dhamma.

a man must do more than sell roses
where the bums go and beg—
he must keep something holy.

if occasionally, due to a lapse of mindfulness, evil unwholesome memories and intentions connected with the fetters arise in him, slow might be the arising of his mindfulness, but then he quickly abandons them, dispels them, puts an end to them

The Buddha urges mendicants to be free of desire for the six senses, giving a series of vivid similes.

Would we be nearly as intelligent without animals to teach us about ourselves?

Objectives of state redaction as set forth by Muriel Rukeyser’s redacted file:

1. Render information illegible to make the reader aware of her/his position as one who will never access a truth that does, by state accounts, exist
2. Isolate text in time and instance
3. …

Not grasping what’s impermanent, suffering, and perishable, would people think ‘I’m better’ or ‘I’m equal’ or ‘I’m worse’?

Conceit stems from clinging to the senses and their impressions.

“As the tulku tradition developed, there was a lot of corruption. There were wars, and all sorts of things went on. But there was also a social structure that developed to contain that privilege.”

A short clip from Ruth Gamble’s New Books Network interview, discussing the challenges of the Tulku system in Tibetan Buddhism.

We find that verbal conflict initiated by governments not only failed to deter ISIS but in fact increased the frequency of ISIS’s attacks on civilians.

In an effort to solidify their reputations, extremists engage in further violence toward civilians, thus leading to worse humanitarian consequences.

Under pressure, it’s a liquid at room temperature. If I open the valve, it’ll shoot out of this pipe and evaporate very rapidly back to a gas. The cooling effect is quite dramatic.

A brief history and explanation of refrigeration.

These states cannot compare to anything experienceable in everyday life. Calling them the utmost meditative bliss, peace, and release is not an exaggeration.

An experiential description of the “nine jhānas.”

The Sakya Tradition has the distinction of having a close connection with the other three major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The Vajrakila lineage, which the Sakyapas follow, originates from Guru Padmasambhava, the founding master of the Nyingma school. The Kagyu and the Sakya schools originated almost at the same time, and both received important lineages from Naropa.

This brief essay outlines the origins and development of the Sakya Tradition, which began in the eleventh century and has been closely associated with Tibet’s Khon family.

You needed rails and these huge engines. You needed timetables and organization. That encompassed everything that industrialization was about.

The meditation was followed with the answers to a few questions, including whether “sending metta” to an ill person makes a difference, on having many teachers, and the role of ethics (“sīla”) in meditation.

In the evening I crossed the river and started for home. Then I saw the corpse running on the other side of the river. It was completely naked, but carried its belt in one hand and its boots in the other. Then I saw a wolf coming after it, felling it to the ground.

Four stories from the Ro-langs narrative tradition explore the Tibetan belief in reanimated corpses—Ro-langs—brought back through sorcery or spirit possession, embodying the intersection of Tibetan folklore and religious beliefs of death and the supernatural.

Bruges in the 15th century was the hub of international trade, and people came from all over the world wanting to get rich, including the Arnolfinis

It is through the generosity of King Trisong Detsen, the monastic ordinations given by the abbot Shantarakshita, and the spiritual transmissions given by Guru Padmasambhava, that the Buddhist tradition was able to spread and flourish in Tibet from early times up to the present.

A brief introduction to the Nyingma (Ancient Translation) school of Tibetan Buddhism, founded on the tantric and terma traditions of Guru Padmasambhava and Śāntarakṣita in the 8th century, written by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, who was head of the Nyingma school from 1988 to 1991, and one of its most revered modern masters.

Thus, the particular feature of the Kagyu lineage is that the teacher, having mastered the instructions, clears away defects - relating to intellectual understanding, meditation experience and the various levels of realisation.

A brief introduction to the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, rooted in the tantric transmissions of Tilopa and Naropa, passed through Marpa to Milarepa, and emphasizing the experiential path of Mahāmudrā and guru devotion as keys to realization.

Engineers have done amazing things to turn this plentiful, shiny rock into the century’s most impactful piece of technology.

The famous cultural hero, King Sejo (1455–1468), at first he put in place, on the advice of his officials, very punitive and strict regulations around Buddhism. But as time went on, he got sick of the [Confucian State Council] he was dealing with. He started to think that his officials were nuts, I mean actually crazy. You can see in his documents, he himself was being driven crazy having to deal with these people. And the whole issue was Buddhism. They want the recurring thing: to convince a King to go the whole way and kill off Buddhism once and for all.

[By the 16th century], they kind of succeed in [stripping Buddhism of legal recognition] but there’s an unhappy conclusion: it didn’t atrophy and die. In fact, something worse happened: because they removed the government oversight of Buddhism, it started to flourish!

Historical meditation practice (accumulated lifetime hours) was significantly associated with favorable psychological outcomes.

retrospective cross-sectional design precludes our ability to make causal inferences about the impact of meditation on psychological outcomes. So, while meditation practice may lead to improved psychological outcomes, it is also possible that people with better mental health may be more likely to engage in meditation, and/or sustain a meditation practice over a relatively long time duration

Tsongkhapa saw the study and practice of such Indian classics as the Bodhisattvacaryavatara of Shantideva and the Ratnavali (Precious Garland) of Nagarjuna as highly supportive to an individual’s path to Buddhahood.

A brief introduction to the 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist school founded by the philosopher and saint Tsongkhapa.

Language is dealt with in Tibetan epistemological treatises in terms of the relationship between “what expresses” (rjod byed) and “what is expressed” (brjod bya)—two notions that come quite close to the Saussurian distinction between “signifier” and “signified.”

The Tibetan tradition of epistemology and philosophy of language focuses on how knowledge is defined, validated, and expressed. This article explains the rich tradition and examines key concepts like “reliable cognition” and the influence of Indian Buddhist thinkers such as Dignāga and Dharmakīrti on Tibetan thought.

How did a packaging company get into the publishing business — into the containment and distribution of information? How were geographic imaginations changed in the process?

An exploration of the history of paper as a container for both goods and advertising.

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Transporting Images conference in 2023 and can watched on YouTube here.

the evidence about the causal influences of identification on pain highlights a self-related factor of relevance in pain experiences that can be modulated by mindfulness.

A scientific attempt at investigating the Buddhist theory of pain which unfortunately suffers from several methodological flaws: foremost among them that the participants likely understood the point of the study and thus had an incentive to produce self-reports showing the desired correlations.

And, even worse, the paper used violin plots.

body scan led to the greatest state increase in interoceptive awareness and the greatest decrease in thought content, loving-kindness meditation led to the greatest increase in feelings of warmth and positive thoughts about others, and observing-thought meditation led to the greatest increase in meta-cognitive awareness.

These Buddhist traditions are often labeled as “Tibetan,” as they are believed to have originated historically from Tibet, to share narrative traditions with Tibetan Buddhism, and to use Classical Tibetan as the language of their recorded canons. The organization of these traditions into what we might call “orders” is, however, complex in the Tibetan cultural world.

Shakya Shri’s students and patrons chose to adopt and promote his lineage in the Himalayan region. It explores how new Buddhist lineages were integrated into existing religious frameworks without causing disruption, focusing on the cultural and ritual continuity that facilitated this process. these new transmissions were accepted smoothly because they utilized familiar Buddhist forms, rituals, and cosmological ideas, making them appear as extensions of established traditions.

If you are a viewer in Canada you are very likely to own a type of screwdriver that viewers outside of Canada are very likely to have never seen or even heard of in their life.

The history of the Robertson screw.

Participants in the concentration condition benefitted more if they had a high motivation to develop certain skills and a low motivation to seek spiritual experiences. Participants practicing humming showed greater treatment gains if they had a motivation to [relax]. In contrast, participants practicing observing thoughts benefitted more if they sought spiritual experiences and less if they aimed for relaxation or reduced stress. Finally, participants in the walking meditation condition experienced significantly better treatment effects if they were motivated to reduce stress, but benefitted less if they wanted to reduce suffering or sought spiritual experiences.

This study of 42 novice meditators also found that the extraverts did best with walking meditation but that walking meditation was not effective for those with a high degree of agreeableness.

Notwithstanding the long history of Buddhism in the peninsula, it was far from certain at the dawn of the twentieth century that the tradition would be able to secure a viable and legitimate place in modern Korean society. This book argues that a key factor in the effort to revitalize the religion was the concerted and sustained attempt by a wide variety of Buddhist organizations and individuals to systematically propagate (p’ogyo 布敎) Buddhism.

Minds need a context. Mind needs fire and water, breath and ritual, it needs stories and song… it needs to establish a living relationship with those that came before and those yet to come, to offer in devotion and to enact its place in the cosmos. Such realizations return us to the sacredness of form. We find that all of the supposedly ‘non-essential’, ritual, form-based aspects of tradition actually architect a mind that has true fullness

Meet the people, the hoarders, not as bearers of mental illness but as differently-abled bodies that might have special sensory access to the call of things.

The most frequently co-occurring keywords were meditation, depression, stress, and anxiety. Co-citation analysis of the early period (1966–2015) revealed how scholarly work on spiritual themes inspired early mindfulness research. Recent trends (2016–2021) revealed a rising interest in mechanisms and moderators, long-term meditators, neuroscientific studies, and smartphone/online delivery of interventions.

We meditate on ordinary mind by recognizing it as ordinary mind. We know it for what it is—empty and luminous.

A wonderful collection of key texts in the Mahāmudrā tradition.

A second volume of even more selections can be found can be found here.

Vatika bottle sits in the bathroom,
contents solidified by London’s night.

All the rage.

The prospect of embodied divinity was not uncommon in Tibetan discourse and practice in general. The point is that this choice of terms forces the issue. To assert a human god’s ongoing karmic dependency is to define divinity and mortality in terms that are direct inversions of one another.

In this final part of a two-part study the 5th Dalai Lama’s divine kingship, the author explores how the concept of residual karma explains the Dalai Lama’s mortality despite his spiritual perfection. Drawing on scriptural sources and the writings of the Desi—a secular regent in Tibetan governance—the essay shows how this concept helped reconcile divine kingship with the human realities of suffering and death.

Part one of this study can be found here

The fifth Dalai Lama was figured as the state’s absolute ruler on the basis of a power in excess of his own person. In technical terms, he was the latest in a rebirth line of Avalokiteśvara, here assuming the novel identity of a “renunciate king” or vow-bound sovereign.

In the first part of his two-part study, Ian MacCormack examines the theological foundations of the Dalai Lama’s divine kingship as articulated by the Desi Sangyé Gyatso (1653–1705), the 5th Dalai Lama’s regent. This nuanced depiction underscores the complex interplay between ultimate truth and conventional reality in Tibetan political theology.

Part two of this study can be found here

The influence of สิ่งแวดล้อม¹ are directed out from the individual to his environment; the influence of สิ่งแวดล้อม² are directed inward from the environment to the individual.

If you have no merit there will be no wind. But either way, if you do not open the window you will get no breeze.

To the villager, a person is shaped—he does not shape himself—and, therefore, relating properly to one’s environment is of the first importance. You cannot think or will yourself into being a particular kind of person; you can only select and relate wisely to the influences impinging upon you. This implies a sort of limited free will; one can choose among available alternatives, but cannot create new alternatives.

¹: This first sense of sing waetlom (“environment”) is as the resources that one has around.
²: This second sense of “environment” is as our context—that which holds and shapes us.

Among the nature-deities the tale under discussion depicts as confronting Padmasambhava, two (see below) are among the nine deities known as bod kyi srid pa chags pa’i lha, meaning the original deities of Tibet, whose function is to protect the land and people of Tibet.

This paper analyzes the depiction of nature-deities in the 14th-century Padma bka’thang, focusing on the supernatural conflict between Padmasambhava and Tibetan deities resisting his arrival. It interprets this confrontation as a reflection of deeper cultural and religious dynamics during Tibet’s early Buddhist era.

With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley

Two English professors discuss this ode to new beginnings.

The data presented here seems to support the theory that first generation migrants generally occupy the lower strata of the community while second generation migrants find the opportunity to move up the social scale.

If your spirituality is just that you want to take yourself beyond, of course this is just illusion. But imagine that for, say, an Amazonian tribesperson. If they were to say that the forest they live in is ‘just illusion,’ they’d be dead within a day, right? Ecology requires us to have a deep attentiveness to the [relational] way reality manifests

Nature is full of intermediary forces. Traditions will always find their way back to intermediary beings because I think we need them.

‘Animism’ is just a Western term to describe the way everybody sees the world.

For those great beings who desire
Supreme enlightenment
I shall explain the perfect methods
That the gurus taught

Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, written by Atīśa Dīpaṃkara, is a key text in the Kadampa tradition and respected across all Tibetan Buddhist lineages. It provides a concise outline of the full Buddhist path, covering both sutra and tantra. This edition includes a new translation along with a commentary by Jamgön Kongtrul Lodrö Thaye, which presents the main points in a clear and practical manner.

the sanitation department is the most important workforce in the city of New York

Some experts think Beijing wants to bring Buddhist holy sites, like Tawang, under its control to cement its authority over Tibet. When the current Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, he reached Tawang first after crossing mountains by foot.

Tawang, home to India’s largest Buddhist monastery, has been claimed by China as part of its ‘Southern Tibet.’ The region remains a hotspot for India-China tensions, with recent clashes near the Line of Actual Control (LAC) underscoring ongoing border disputes

The way of the Vajrayāna is the Way of Power that leads to the mastery of good and evil. It is also the Way of Transformation, whereby inward and outward circumstances are transmuted into weapons by the power of mind.

Originally published in 1970, John Blofeld’s work explains the techniques, purpose, and underlying theory of Tantric forms of meditation commonly practiced in Vajrayana Buddhism. In this revised edition, Sanskrit terms have been added, and new material has been incorporated from various sources, along with explanatory footnotes and editorial comments.

Jhāna practice is deeply embedded within other practices that help with the reemergence—The Noble Eightfold Path, the Saṅgha—so that once you come to these moments of malleability, the momentum of living a certain way will carry you through and allow you to come out of these states more beautifully.

Despite its successful Buddhist polemics, Sōtō’s Buddhist teachings in Korea were basically political propaganda viable only within the framework of Japanese colonial imperialism.

83% of Earth’s farmable land is used for livestock; for example as pastures or to farm fodder crops like corn and soy. That’s 26% of Earth’s total land area.

This article first examines three interrelated aspects of Korean monastics: (1) the stigmatization imposed on monastics during the Neo-Confucian Joseon dynasty, (2) the persistence of these stigmas in the minds of Koreans, and (3) their internalization among Korean monastics themselves. The article then draws out the impact of these three aspects on the late and limited emergence of lay leadership.

The following discourses were attempts to deal with the problems faced by the Buddhist community during modernization: the discourse on secularity and social participation, the discourse on modernity centering on the issue of modifying precepts, and the discourse on identity contemplating the originality of Korean Buddhism.

The paintings are considered neither neutral nor representational media but rather places of uncanny presence and sources of inspiration for the mansin, which may be experienced with greater or lesser intensity and clarity depending on the current state of favor an individual mansin enjoys with her personal deities.

The transformation of god pictures into collectable, marketable folk art has required both overcoming a fear of objects believed to hold souls, or “ghosts,” and a renegotiation of the ways that god pictures were traditionally disposed of.

Han wrestled with the task of bridging the gap between institutional Buddhism and lay Buddhism, which had resulted in the deterioration of the Buddhist ideal. In an attempt to find a middle ground that could connect these two extremes, Han’s strategy was to focus on both the Buddhist notion of expediency and the caring spirit of bodhisattva. He was not particularly successful.

According to the Jogye Order’s 2018 periodic report, the average age of monks is increasing and the number of monks is decreasing. In order to offer solutions to these problems, the report presents and analyzes by dividing those themes into six sub-topics, namely: decrease of births; decrease of postulants; aging of postulants; rapidly changing educational environment; teaching aptitude of educators; education budget.

This article critically scrutinizes the Jogye Order’s latest report to identify and correct some data misinterpretations and offer new insights that the authors believe would help our leaders come up with better solutions.

18% of samples exceeded relevant health guidelines or regulatory limits. Metal foodware (51%), ceramics (45%), paint (41%), toys (13%), and cosmetics (12%) were the most common culprits.

While the developed world has (mostly!) eliminated lead from consumer goods, lower-income countries are still producing contaminated items.

This article will survey the issues and events surrounding three protests: the 2003 samboilbae, or ‘three-steps-one-bow’, march led by Venerable Sukyong against the Saemangeum Reclamation Project, Venerable Jiyul’s Anti-Mt. Chonsong tunnel hunger-strike campaign between 2002 and 2006, and lastly Venerable Munsu’s self-immolation protesting the Four Rivers Project in 2010.

Since this is an extraordinary method for completing the transcendent perfections and pacifying obstacles anyone and everyone should take it to heart.

The Sur offering within Tibetan Buddhism involves the burning of fragrant substances to aid beings in other realms and dispel the obstacles they can cause. In this text, Mipham Rinpoche presents a concise and powerful version of the ritual, complete with its accompanying chants.

The trouble is that the same carbon-fluorine bonds that make PFAS so stable and useful in consumer products also make them incredibly persistent in the environment. Which is why you might also know PFAS under a different name: ‘forever chemicals.’ They have been found everywhere from bustling cities to untouched areas of wilderness. Every continent, including Antarctica, has PFAS all over it. Almost every living creature, from polar bears to birds to fish to humans, this stuff is now everywhere.

Behind this marriage of the court and Buddhism, however, were the outstanding Buddhist monks who offered the ideology for it.

From 1982 through 2016, Korean media outlets have reported over 120 instances of vandalism, arson and harassment targeting Buddhist temples and facilities in South Korea. An extension of on-going tensions between South Korea’s Buddhist and Evangelical Protestant communities, this one-sided wave of violence and harassment has caused the destruction of numerous temple buildings and priceless historical artifacts, millions of USD in damages, and one death.

[This article] examines the responses from South Korea’s Buddhist and Evangelical communities and various government agencies, as well as the effects of these responses, before investigating the relationship between these incidents and the mainstream Evangelical doctrines of religious exclusivism, dominionism and spiritual warfare.

These dull-edged blades-to-be are called ‘blanks.’

One of Alak’s disciples, a 73-year-old ngakpa, explained in an interview the traditional (and previously pervasive) view about caterpillar fungus. He stated that the problem with collecting caterpillar fungus, from the Buddhist point of view, is that one cannot be sure when digging whether the caterpillar is actually dead or not. By killing the caterpillar, a collector may entail a breach of his or her vow to not kill any sentient being.

Tibetan villagers in Amdo balance their tantric Buddhist commitments—particularly the vow against taking animal life—with livelihood practices like caterpillar fungus collection that often involve killing insects. Through fieldwork and interviews, the author highlights the villagers’ religious lives, especially of women, and the moral negotiations they navigate in their daily survival.

In the teaching of my Guru, my mind is always happy.
Singing songs of inspiration, my mouth is always happy.
Wearing cotton from Nepal, my body’s always happy.
In delight I accomplish all and everything—
To me there is but cheer and joy.

This work is a collection of 60 songs by Milarepa, Tibet’s revered 11th-century yogi and saint. Translated by Garma C.C. Chang, the work displays Milarepa’s spiritual insights in accessible verses, covering themes like impermanence, renunciation, and the nature of suffering.

That’s the last war you’ll ever fight. So we need to find a way of avoiding total war. ‘And here’s the way,’ Clausewitz says. We can avoid it if we allow the political rational to govern war.

How the Napoleonic Wars rewrote the rules of warfare and on how Clausewitz’s two, very different takes on what he saw defined warfare before—and after—World War 2.

One of the distinguishing features of Himalayan Buddhism is that it has accommodated within itself a good number of elements and traits of the pre-Buddhist indigenous religions and folk traditions.

This paper explores how practices from Tibetan indigenous religions, particularly the use of spirit mediums and oracles, have been incorporated into Himalayan Buddhism. It argues that these pre-Buddhist elements continue to exist within Tibetan Buddhist institutions, highlighting a syncretism between the two.

Generally, even if we are attached to our own tradition, it is important that we have no antipathy towards other traditions.

A humorous, but insightful, analysis of Tibetan Buddhism’s four schools.

Slowly rotating scraper blades continuously remove the combined sludge and sand layer from the bottom of the tank while clarified water flows upwards into collection troughs.

An introduction to Tibetan Buddhism written specifically for people with little or no previous exposure to the tradition.

A thorough introductory textbook covering the history, practice, beliefs, and schools of Buddhism in Tibet.

I especially appreciate the book’s organization: the chapters are arranged as the tradition often explains itself and each chapter is further subdivided into short sections, making it easy to pick and choose from or to reference later. Each chapter ends with reflection questions and pointers to additional reading, making this a perfect teaching resource.

electrical current, in nearly all cases, doesn’t flow into the earth; it flows through the earth. The ground is really just another wire. Although not a great one. Let me show you an example…

Bless me, so everything that obstructs the attainment of enlightenment may be pacified

A short hymn, praising Padmasambhava, a central figure in the transmission of Buddhism to Tibet.

May he free the kind ones immersed in misery’s ocean
So that all may come to resemble Mañjughoṣa himself.

A hymn of praise to the great Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī, written by the 12th century Tibetan monk, philosopher, and yogi Je Tsongkhapa.

This is why you need a weird obsessive nerd somewhere on your staff!

How door closers work and how to mount and adjust them.

old altars are increasingly encountered as surplus goods by those who lack the space, ritual expertise, or inclination to care for them. Like other forms of sacred waste (like human corpses), disposal is complicated for practical and moral reasons, and often requires the performance of special rites (供養 kuyō).

Some gods are bad and some devils are good. There are, in fact, almost as many kinds of good and bad phi as there are of men…

An overview of Thai ghosts.

There are thus a great many systems of Dharma teaching in Tibet,
But aside from their nominal variations,
There is really no significant difference between them
All share the crucial point of seeking ultimate awakening.

In this concise work, Chökyi Lodrö offers a clear and accessible overview of the four major Tibetan Buddhist traditions—Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya, and Gelug—highlighting their unique lineages, practices, and shared objectives. He emphasizes the universal path to enlightenment through ethical discipline, meditation, and wisdom, providing practical guidance on cultivating virtues and accumulating merit to achieve lasting happiness.

‘The wheel and axle’ revolutionized human technological history by transforming linear to rotary motion and causing parts of devices to move. While its ancient origins are commonly associated with the appearance of carts during the Bronze Age, we focus on much earlier wheel-shaped find: an exceptional assemblage of over a hundred perforated pebbles from the 12,000-year-old Natufian village of Nahal Ein-Gev II, Israel. We analyze the assemblage using 3D methodologies, incorporating novel study applications to both the pebbles and their perforations and explore the functional implications. We conclude that these items could have served as spindle whorls to spin fibres. In a cumulative evolutionary trend, they manifest early phases of the development of rotational technologies by laying the mechanical principle of the wheel and axle.

mGur (pronounced gur) denotes a specific type of religious poetry that has played an important role in the expression and transmission of Buddhism across the Tibetan cultural world. The term mgur is usually translated as ‘song’ and it has been used to refer to a wide variety of oral and literary creations.

Tibetan Buddhism has historically included non-monastic practitioners who used religious poetry (mGur) to share their spiritual teachings. Through the life and works of Milarepa and Tsangnyön Heruka, this work explores how wandering yogins revitalized Buddhism by presenting it in accessible, creative ways beyond traditional institutions.

Milarepa spent the rest of his adult life practicing meditation in seclusion and teaching groups of disciples mainly through spontaneous songs of realization (mgur).

The life of the great Tibetan yogi Milarepa, beginning with the story of his parents and birth, then tracing his journey from sorcery to spiritual awakening, highlighting his devotion to Marpa, solitary meditation, and legendary songs.

What more protection do I need? What else could serve as my protection?

A journalist buys a bulletproof vest and travels to war zones in the Middle East to report. He learns what a bulletproof vest can and cannot do for you.

The danger in utopian thinking is that it can easily turn you into a pointless vandal. The more useful thing is to think of betterment as a process rather than thinking that we just have to get rid of the bad people and then everything will be okay. If you could have enough utopianism to question the world as it is and imagine how it could be better, I think that’s a wonderful thing, but if you take it too far, you actually undermine yourself. So, I would say, a like “homeopathic utopianism” I will support.

A sweeping interview about Silicon Valley and the possible shapes of the future with the man who coined the term “virtual reality.”

This work however introduces the ten transcendent perfections and eleven bhūmis on the basis of relative truth and, on the basis of the ultimate truth, explains how there is no arising even conventionally according to the four extremes. Thus, this commentary on the intent of the Middle Way includes several uncommon features not found in the works of other scholars.

Khenpo Shenga’s prologue to Madhyamakāvatāra emphasizes that Candrakīrti’s text serves as a comprehensive introduction to Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā, elucidating the two truths—relative and ultimate—and their interdependence.

The inconceivable qualities of this sacred place
I have sung in the form of a joyful song.
I have spoken of them as an oral instruction.

A song by Milarepa, praising the sacred place Kyangpen Namkha Dzong.

These days, however, if you consult followers of Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen and the like, they will not make even the slightest acknowledgement of instructions that suit people’s actual capacity, such as the way to progress in tranquillity and insight taught in the scriptural approach of the great pioneers.

In this work, Dongak Chökyi Gyatso emphasizes that advanced teachings like Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen are most effective when tailored to an individual’s capacity, distinguishing between general instructions and those suited for exceptional practitioners. He critiques the indiscriminate application of these profound methods, advocating for a gradual approach rooted in scriptural tradition to ensure proper understanding and avoid potential misapplication.

As long as one remains with a tenet system that accepts outer [objects], it is not tenable for the object and the [apprehending] consciousness to be of a single substance. In that case, the [object that is] the cause that casts an aspect [upon the consciousness] is called the apprehended object.

In this excerpt from “The Word-By-Word Commentary on the Treasury of Valid Reasoning,” Jamyang Loter Wangpo, an important Rime Sakya master, explains that knowable objects are those that can be apprehended by the mind. He distinguishes between object generalities and non-existent clear appearances, arguing that while both can appear to the mind, they lack substantial existence and are not valid objects of cognition. Though a non-sectarian thinker, he respectfully examines competing views from other schools, critiquing their reasoning to clarify and strengthen the Prāsaṅgika-Madhyamaka position.

Air conditioning relieves us of having to think about the air, so that we can think about other things.

How climate control created and sustains the dualistic thinking underlying climate change and its inequities.

This podcast episode is a gripping summary of the true story told in David Grann’s book, Killers of the Flower Moon which was later adapted into an award-winning film of the same name.

Single embodiment of all the buddhas’ compassion,
Lotus King, chief of all sky-faring ḍākas and ḍākinīs,
Miraculously born nirmāṇakāya, untainted by a womb —
To this great eternal bearer of the lotus, I bow down!

In this devotional poem, Jamyang Khyentse Chökyi Lodrö praises Tso Pema (Lotus Lake), a sacred site in Rewalsar, India, associated with Guru Padmasambhava. The poem extols the miraculous transformation of a funeral pyre into a lotus-filled lake and praises Padmasambhava’s enlightened qualities and compassionate activities

frozen by design
our calling becomes all calling.

a study of avadāna narratives found in two related anthologies, the Za piyu jing 雜譬喻經 (T207) and the Zhong jing xuan za piyu 眾經撰雜譬喻 (T208). […] These narratives are carefully constructed literary productions that offer a window into both the world of the Indic society in which they were initially composed and the Chinese society which translated them.

The old court eventually fell to a new military government which brought about the Kamakura period (1192–1333). The increasing discord and chaos of the times led to disillusionment and a call for the revival of faith. It was during these troubled time that Hōnen (1133–1212), Shinran (1173–1262), Eisai (1141–1215), Dōgen (1200–1253), Nichiren (1222–1282), and other Buddhist leaders appeared and expounded their teachings of salvation for all.

A concise history of Buddhism in Japan, tracing its development from its arrival to the present day. The work also explores the relationship between Japanese daily life and Buddhist rituals. It concludes with a hopeful message of fostering world peace through an understanding of oneness.

But the real innovation was coming up with a preserved protein. Ancient Egyptians went to war carrying dried fish…

How military needs drive culinary innovation.

The following is an attempt to provide the reader, particularly those of you who come to this in a distant and certainly different era, with plain facts about American life at the beginning of the twenty-first century…

A memoir arranged, amusingly, in alphabetical order.

Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it. […] new institutions can make new kinds of thinking possible.

Thoughtful state intervention is critical for both the invention of new technologies and for scaling them up to solve pressing, societal issues. This idea forms the core of the authors’ proposed “supply-side progressivism”: “a liberalism that builds.”

A ruler had no power to enact law. He was born to maintain order and peace and to protect his subjects from dangers…

The fascinating history of the law: first as it was understood in ancient India, then as it was practiced in medieval Burma, and finally how it was enacted in modern Thailand.

I have seen, bhikkhus, the hell named ‘Contact’s Sixfold Base.’

Gelugpas, on the other hand, were antagonistic to other-emptiness, and in their Mahamudra system, the emptiness of mind that must be discovered through insight meditation is a negation pure and simple, without any implication that mind’s ultimate nature includes positive qualities, not even luminosity

Roger R. Jackson explores how Dzogchen and Mahamudra, two prominent Tibetan Buddhist traditions, approach the nature of mind. Both traditions emphasize the recognition of the mind’s inherent qualities—emptiness, purity, luminosity, and awareness—as essential for spiritual liberation. While Dzogchen focuses on direct recognition of the primordial mind, Mahamudra offers a more gradual path, blending meditative practices with philosophical insights. Despite differences in methodology, both traditions ultimately aim to uncover the same underlying reality, highlighting a profound unity within Tibetan Buddhism.

firm in texture,
brimming with natural juices.

So, like children of the same father and same mother,
Cultivate mutual accord, devotion, and pure perception,
And, while focusing on your own tradition, avoid belittling others.

A brief poem on the four schools of Tibetan Buddhism.

No one visiting a Siamese monastery, popularly known as a ‘wat’, would fail to notice a certain structure, pyramidal in form with a slender tapering spire at the top…

A few pages on Thai Stupas and Cetiya.

he was still petting the puppy’s wet head,
and I cried like I’d never known …

a crow
Shook down on me…

The Angkor Borei images of Buddha indicate that after the late seventh century, there is a hiatus of nearly 400 years before Buddhist imagery re-appears in the late twelfth to thirteenth century.

the vows of a bhikṣu,
The root of the teachings,
guard them as you would your very own eyes.

Some life advice to an unnamed Tulku.

It’s not entirely clear when Japanese women began to fear attacks by the spirits of their vengeful aborted fetuses, but it is clear that beginning in the late 1970s, women began requesting and paying for a new religious rite called mizuko kuyō (water child memorial) that Buddhist and Shinto priests had never heard of before.

​This podcast explores the phenomenon of mizuko spirit attacks in 1980s Japan, where middle and high school girls reported hauntings by the spirits of aborted fetuses. It delves into the media’s role in amplifying these stories and examines the cultural and spiritual practices, such as mizuko kuyō rituals, that emerged to address the grief and guilt associated with abortions in Japan.​

To learn more about Yuki Kawae and his approach to Zen gardens and art see his 2021 interview with Whitewall.

In Buddhist traditions, mindfulness is not limited to meditation; it applies to the entire path. Moreover, mindfulness cannot be regarded as something purely instrumental…

Mindfulness functions as a foundational ethical practice in Patrul Rinpoche’s Words of My Perfect Teacher. Sustained mindfulness, meta-awareness, and self-examination are essential to cultivating moral agency and embodying the ethos of the Great Perfection, ultimately leading to the realization of Dzogchen’s “instantaneous awareness.”

Pigment presses out
you in
you
laurel
not yet in the wind

A monk disjoined from the fetter of delight is said to be a person who is living alone.

The Buddha defines “living alone” as living detached from relishing the six senses and their objects.

Therefore, since it is extremely incongruous to kill and offer up sentient beings to pure gods who are kind and caring, it is only right and proper that you renounce such practices and worship these deities with abundant clean offerings instead.

In addressing Hindu worshippers who engage in animal sacrifice, Jamyang Khyentse highlights the karmic repercussions of taking life and challenges the notion that compassionate deities would ever endorse such a practice.

Here, take this palmful of raspberries…

Bhikkhus, these six bases for contact—if untamed, unguarded, unprotected, unrestrained—are bringers of suffering.

A series of verses encouraging us to guard well our senses.

… one camera
for every ten heads.
Most of the time,
I can’t even recall
my own reflection …

There are no deliberate austerities or penances associated with such journeys; over-crowded buses or trucks seemingly without springs are common modes of transport in Northeastern Thailand. One informant stated that if people took a journey solely to make merit somewhere, then the trip would be no fun. However, if people went traveling purely for their own pleasure, with no planned stops at holy shrines, then merit would not be obtained.

An ethnographic investigation of pilgrimage in Thailand focusing on the Wat Phrathat Phanom Stupa in Isaan.

the abbot Shadeu Trulshik wrote down whatever came to mind and offered it from Māratika cave.

Four simple, but direct, instructions on cultivating the Dharma.

Devoured in secret,
she was punished for eating it
but loved the bitter wave…

A poem attempting to explain what depression and self-harm feel like.

Inside me lived a small donkey…

A poem on the everyday labor of living and the inner strength we find to go on.

There are 400+ deities herein, and 4,000+ photos of statuary from Kamakura, Nara, Kyoto, and elsewhere in Japan.

The site also includes an extensive bibliography of other resources useful for researching Japanese Buddhism.

Look at you two, he said. And we did.

A poem about finding dignity and connection in illness and dying.

Mendicants, the eye of the past and future is impermanent, let alone the present.

We used to ditch them after school…

The paper explains how the hierarchy emerged historically out of the attempts by the Siamese government to exercise control over the monasteries and how its rigid hierarchy is tempered by the Thai sense of “suitability” leading to an organization that balances central goals against local concerns. Each level of the hierarchy and the parallel system of royally-bestowed honorifics are explained in detail, including their qualifications and responsibilities.

1. Huangbo Xiyun’s Essentials of the Transmission of Mind
2. Myōan Eisai’s A Treatise on Letting Zen Flourish to Protect the State
3. Eihei Dōgen’s Universal Recommendation for True Zazen
4. Keizan Jōkin’s Advice on the Practice of Zazen

Together, they offer a rich introduction to the texts of Zen practice and philosophy.

Tyrant, why swell’st thou thus,
 Of mischief vaunting?

An analysis of a poetic (prophetic), sixteenth century translation of Psalm 52 which shows how religions can provide a dignified response to times of tyranny.

The khwan may therefore be described as something in the nature of a principle of life, vital to the welfare of man and animals.

An exploration of the Thai belief in animating spirits (ขวัญ) and the various rituals and ritual implements that attend them, including a thorough description of the บายศรี offering.

Everything has the potential to support and realize spiritual life.

Amida Buddha’s vows form the foundation of the Pure Land tradition’s vision of universal salvation. While emphasizing that these vows create the Pure Land as an ideal realm for awakening, Bloom underscores that Amida, as dharmakaya, represents the buddha-nature inherent in all things—making awakening possible anywhere.

Called เล่นแชร์ (“Sharing Games”) in Thai, a group of neighbors or family members take turns bidding on a communal pot. The resulting game facilitates efficient peer-to-peer loans without bookkeeping or needing to predict when money will be needed, allowing those living on the margins of society to easily pool their risks and navigate precarity together.

Our passions, while remaining just as they are, become one with great wisdom, so that they are gradually transformed like ice melting into water through the working of the wisdom.

This article explores the concept of “deeply entrusting mind” (shinjin) in Shin Buddhism. It highlights Amitabha Buddha’s compassion, the expression of his name, and the transformative experience that follows the awakening of shinjin.

Spirits, ghosts, fairies, demons, or speaking collectively, ‘pi’ (ผี) may be divided into three classes: ‘Pi’ which are the ghosts of the dead or living; ‘pi’ which exist on their own account, and do not originate from human beings; and thirdly ‘pi’ belonging to other worlds…

Some field notes on Thai ghost beliefs and related rituals at the turn of the twentieth century.

For ผี beliefs in Thailand half a century later, see Rajathon, 1954.

I keep
a beautiful garden, all abundance,
indiscriminate, pulling itself
from the stubborn earth: does it offend you

the Dhamma for abandoning all

Take a picture and tell the world
what it means, only I wasn’t sure…

The faculty of conviction, the faculty of persistence, the faculty of mindfulness, the faculty of concentration, & the faculty of discernment.

The Buddha defines the Five Spiritual Faculties (indriya).

through nonclinging find delight
In the relinquishment of grasping

The eightfold path leads from the near to the far shore.

they were in the middle of a lake in the middle of a desert in the middle of a war zone…

How fourteen ships of different nationalities trapped in the Suez Canal quickly formed a community.

Learn more about the original, here. And you can watch two videos of Allen Ginsberg chanting this translation, here.

In this situation, the king had two alternatives: either to confiscate all religious lands where the evidence for the original endowment was weak, and thereby increase the royal treasury, or to maintain the status quo…

An overview of the history of the Theravāda Saṅgha and its relationship with the state from the medieval period through the 19th century.

When these coins get given out, they are a physical reminder of the fact that the military is not some faceless monolithic structure. The coins show that the military is an organization made of human beings.

Decommissioning of karmically volatile materiality reveals the fragility of Buddhist care structures and highlights growing concerns about how religious activity generates waste. The management of religious materiality in the world’s fastest ageing society has extensive spiritual, moral, and practical implications.

This article examines how inherited Buddhist objects in rural Japan, such as altars and tombs, become burdensome due to depopulation and fragmented kinship. It highlights how temples like Fudōin in Hiroshima Prefecture serve as custodians for these spiritually charged items, navigating the moral and practical challenges of preserving cultural heritage amidst demographic decline.​

This surprising fact shows that the abbot was likely more interested in courtly trends than in Buddhist piety and was perhaps appointed for political reasons: a trend all too common in places where the state is entangled with the monastic Saṅgha. These panels also demonstrate how trends in non-Buddhist art and fashion can come to influence Buddhist temple art proper.

How poised it is!
Petal and leaf
curving like a fan

Those bhikkhus who are accomplished in virtue, accomplished in concentration, accomplished in wisdom, accomplished in liberation, accomplished in the knowledge and vision of liberation: even the sight of those bhikkhus is helpful

A description of the path, from hearing the good teachings up to enlightenment explained via the seven awakening factors.

Bhikkhus, I do not see even one other thing that, when developed and cultivated, leads to the abandoning of the things that fetter so effectively as this

What fetters one? And what leads to release?

Defeat, my Defeat, my shining sword and shield,
In your eyes I have read
That to be enthroned is to be enslaved,
And to be understood is to be leveled down

Bhikkhus, when the mind becomes excited, it is timely to develop the enlightenment factor of tranquillity…

Yellow Bull: ‘Didn’t you tell me you were a ghost?’
Ghost: ‘People can be afraid of other people. And dogs can be afraid of dogs, can’t they?’

A collage of characters from street dogs to a hand model, from an amputee to religious statues all find themselves lost in Saṃsāra.

the embedding can be leveraged to quantify changes in stereotypes and attitudes toward women and ethnic minorities in the 20th and 21st centuries in the United States. We integrate word embeddings trained on 100 years of text data with the U.S. Census to show that changes in the embedding track closely with demographic and occupation shifts over time.

In Tibet sounds can heal, make ill, protect, challenge, appease, defile, purify, seduce or even liberate from worldly attachments. Sounds of the natural environment merge with human-made music and chanting in soundscapes that are intimately interconnected. While the spiritual features and healing powers of Buddhist ritual music have been often described, what is perhaps less known is the kaleidoscope of natural and human sounds against which it has been developed and performed for centuries. In this portfolio we explore some of these sacred soundscapes, their history and impacts.

Tibetan Buddhism has long argued for the sanctity of life, condemning the killing of humans and animals alike. For just as long, however, meat has been a staple of the Tibetan diet. Individual religious leaders have dealt with this tension in different ways, but few have done so as revealingly as the eighteenth century master Jigmé Lingpa (‘jigs med gling pa, 1730-1798).

In his religious and autobiographical writings, Jigmé Lingpa draws on Buddhist ideals promoting compassion towards all beings and his own unusually strong love of animals to praise vegetarianism and condemn the killing of animals for meat. Jigmé Lingpa also recognizes, however, that vegetarianism is a difficult ideal. Rather than insisting on vegetarianism, therefore, he offers his students a variety of means through which to moderate the negativity of eating meat without fully abandoning it.

we show that long-term memory is capable of storing a massive number of objects with details from the image. Participants viewed pictures of 2,500 objects over the course of 5.5 h. Afterward, they were shown pairs of images and indicated which of the two they had seen.

The previously viewed item could be paired with either an object from a novel category, an object of the same basic-level category, or the same object in a different state or pose. Performance in each of these conditions was remarkably high (92%, 88%, and 87%, respectively), suggesting that participants successfully maintained detailed representations of thousands of images.

We cannot describe it completely. We call the state “ineffable,” or “dharma,” or “truth,” or “reality.” But even these words are inadequate to describe the simple and original state that we return to in Zazen.

A concise introduction to zazen, the central practice of the Sōtō Zen school, according to the teachings of Gudo Nishijima Roshi.

Since in the teachings of Shin Buddhism Obon itself is nothing special but provides one of the opportunities for listening to the Buddha Dharma, there is no reason to do something special for it. In traditions other than Shin Buddhism, however, Obon is a special, fancier and more serious event for people to welcome their ancestors back home.

A short and humorous explanation of the Japanese tradition of Obon.

To this day it is not unusual in Japan for the scholar to be a fine calligrapher and an accomplished poet in addition to possessing the pertinent intellectual abilities.

​This encyclopedia entry explores Japanese aesthetics, highlighting concepts such as mono no aware (the pathos of things), wabi (subdued, austere beauty), and sabi (rustic patina), which reflect a deep appreciation for impermanence and nature. It also examines the integration of art and self-cultivation in Japanese culture, emphasizing that artistic practices are often seen as paths to spiritual and personal development.

to work perfectly.
To simulate pleasure perfectly. To not cry at dinner

Take your time,
enjoy the fat chill
of each lick

A poem dedicated to George Stinney, Jr.

…the sign of the beautiful: frequently giving careless attention to it is the nutriment for the arising of unarisen sensual desire…

Just as the body depends on food, the hindrances and the awakening factors feed on specific nutriments. In this sutta, the Buddha gives the specific condition for each of these mental qualities.

Mendicants, there are four ways of practice. What four?

1. Painful practice with slow insight,
2. painful practice with swift insight,
3. pleasant practice with slow insight, and
4. pleasant practice with swift insight.

gazing into coals,
I skydive and pass through
stages of youth

On the one hand, it stands squarely upon a Mahayana Buddhist conception of enlightened wisdom as radically nondichotomous and nondual with reality. On the other hand, it directly confronts the nature of human existence in its ineluctable finitude: karmically conditioned, discriminative and reifying in awareness, and given to the afflicting passions…

From its origins in the Buddha Fields of the early Mahāyāna, to Hōnen’s twelfth century Nembutsu teachings, to Shin’s twentieth century engagements with Christian philosophy, this encyclopedia entry gives an overview of the history of Pure Land thought in Japan.

To strike the right balance of a benign enough violation without offending your audience requires some brains. Funny people are indeed smart

The free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen’s achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot be confined to either dualism or non-dualism

A lengthy introduction to Zen Buddhist practice and thought in Japan with a particular focus on their view of enlightenment.

‘Dying was beautiful, peaceful, and graceful. I have been dead. I know the truth. And I am not scared.’

Although this book is based on my forty-five years of scientific research into NDEs, it was not written specifically for other scientists. And although I hope people who have had NDEs will feel that I have done justice to their experiences, I have not written this book for them. Rather, I’ve written this book for the rest of us, for those who are curious about the incredible scope of the human mind and about the deeper questions about life and death.

Science can tell us what experiencers say about what happens after death, and about the consistency of their reports across different individuals and different cultures. But science at this point usually can’t tell us anything about the accuracy of what they say. I say “usually” because in some cases, we can investigate what experiencers say if what they say is related to things we can observe…

‘You were wearing a striped tie with a red stain on it,’ she repeated, glaring at me. She then went on to repeat the conversation I’d had [while she was dead]…

Among the experiencers I’ve studied, 90 percent said their attitudes and beliefs changed as a result of their NDEs, and…

It is not unusual for family and friends to find that their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors change as a result of intimate exposure to experiencers. And the same is true, I found, for near-death researchers.

On the basis of initial observations [at Sera Jey Monastic University], we propose that successful debating requires skills that include reasoning and critical thinking, attentional focus, working memory, emotion regulation, confidence in your own reasoning skills, and social connectedness.

Many modern Japanese women are bored with their lives and they use ‘organ language’ to express this frustration…

Medication and the small life-style modifications suggested by professionals for some women no doubt often help to ease the sense of oppression that patients experience. At the same time, medicalization can act as an ‘opiate,’ and can deflect attention away from the social origins of distress.

We want the clarification, we want the instruction, but we want it without the discomfort, but it doesn’t work that way. The discomfort is the source of the clarification and the instruction.

In Ulan-Ude, the multi-ethnic, multi-religious capital of Buryatia, most laypeople make use of “Buddhist counseling” (Rus. priyom u lamy ), or various ritual, medical and other services that ameliorate illness and misfortune. Laypeople consult lamas about a range of issues from economic to familial matters, from imp attacks to joblessness. Such Buddhist counseling is one of the most common kind of interactions with Buddhist institutions and practices in Buryatia. At the same time, it is a deeply contested practice, as local critiques refer to the rise of “consumerist”, “commercialized”, “utilitarian” or “bad” Buddhism.

I am just ‘who am.’ This ‘who am’ is never grasped as an object. To see this ‘who am’ without grasping or without using concepts is manifesting prajna (wisdom), just being present with ‘who am.’

This introduction to zazen is a collection of writings that includes reflections, instructions, a brief history of the Sōtō school, and translations of short foundational texts on the practice.

The tip of a pencil with a bit of graphite can hold within its pointed space all the potential words you can think of! I can produce a whole book with that pencil point! […] Right now I am just hyper-visualizing the tip, learning how to look; concentrated world of language on that tip.

Call it hyper-vision. Call it unrealistic. I follow the gypsy air.

All our two times two and definitions of photosynthesis, our political understanding and complaining cannot free us from the boundary of a dusty earth and so much brown of it.

Forget what the experts say about Autism; their knowledge is anything but solid. Autism flows: it doesn’t settle; it doesn’t shape.

female renunciation is a form of resistance to the norm which is household life, and a celibate jomo represents renunciation better than typically non-celibate Kinnauri male lamas do.

Legend has it that a ninth century Buddhist monk sailing back from China was caught in a storm. The monk, Kukai, appealed to a statue of Fudo for protection. The monk was rewarded with the vision of Fudo attacking the waves with the sword calming the storm and saving him the ship

Brief video introducing the guardian deity Fudo Myoo, an emanation of Mahāvairocana.

How observant were you?

A short ad demonstrating how our brains filter and compress information.

Hirakawa and Matsunami think that a moribund Buddhism can be revived by understanding traditional doctrines. Akizuki’s new Māhāyana turns out to be nothing but the old Zen. Endō is a harsh critic with no particular plan for reform. Fujii and Sasaki recognize that Buddhism must undergo rebirth, but suggest that current forms will suffice.

A scathing review of several recent books on the state of Buddhism in Japan by traditional Buddhists, suggesting that the “New Religious Movements” in Japan are where the real reforms are happening.

Even as Vajirayan criticized the supernaturalism of indigenous Siamese religious forms, certain ideas and practices were left intact. In particular was a focus on karma or merit and morality…

The Western-style murals adorning the walls at Wat Bovorn Niwet reflect Prince Mongut’s vision for a reformed Thai Buddhism that would adopt the rationalism and advances of the West but still place the Buddha at its center.

Over three repeated interviews, participants developed false memories of the suggested events under minimally suggestive conditions (27%) and even more so using massive suggestion (56%). We then used two techniques to reduce false memory endorsement, source sensitization and false memory sensitization. This reversed the false memory build-up over the first three interviews, returning false memory rates in both suggestion conditions to the baseline levels of the first interview.

Merely informing people about the possibility of having false memories implanted was enough to get them to second guess their false memories.

We are too spiritually weak and degenerate at this present time to carry out the earlier disciplines.

The two kinds of Japanese Buddhist schools are those that believe in jiriki (self-power) and those that rely on tariki (other-power) to lead to awakening.

Our results provide firm evidence that implicit and explicit memory have distinct functional neuroanatomies, and that strategic control of retrieval engages brain structures distinct from those involved in both implicit and explicit memory. They have critical implications for theories of memory and consciousness, which often equate consciousness with control.

Bashō was a sensitive poet whose values were firmly founded in Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist thought. Bashō, although having seriously studied Zen, was never a monk belonging to a monastery, but he often dressed as a priest and often stayed at temples and shrines.

Matsuo Bashō was a 17th-century, Edo poet and a true master of the Haiku form. His Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Interior) is one of the most celebrated, religious travelogues ever written.

the aim of the present book, which is based on the workshop “Wandering Religious Poets” held at Stockholm University in 2017, is to highlight some aspects of the religious poet for whom wandering is a lifestyle, as well as the religious poetry which has wandering as its subject – in a variety of religious traditions, societies and different periods of time. Besides Indian, Tibetan, and Japanese, some Indo-European comparative material is included, but we have not been able to cover certain neighbouring areas, like China, where the phenomenon of wandering poets can be found as well.

Because official monks were bureaucrats, they did not need to form orders that included secular believers. In contrast, reclusive monks needed to establish orders that included secular believers because they were not supported by the government. Because they were no longer official monks, they were freed from certain restrictions. They could pray for the salvation of women and lepers, conduct funerals, and collect contributions, all of which had previously been regarded as involving impurity.

In the Kamakura Era, several new forms of Buddhism emerged in Japan which broke with the existing schools. Kuroda Toshio’s “exoteric-esoteric” model understood these new schools as rejecting the esoteric ritual system which bound the old schools together. This paper sees the new schools’ rejection of the ritual system as a rejection of entanglement with the state and as a desire to return Buddhist monasticism to its ascetic ideals. By focusing on their relationship with the laity, these “new schools” survived the later withdrawal of government support and are the schools we now think of as constituting “Japanese Buddhism”: Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren.

We demonstrate that exertion of self-control for as little as 45 min can lead to an increased propensity for engaging in aggressive acts in the context of socially relevant choices, as measured by a set of economic games. Also, we show that such behavioral changes are associated with increased sleep-like (delta) activity within frontal brain areas related to decision-making and impulse control.

Theories of consciousness are not ethically neutral.

Peter Hershock makes his case for a Yogacara-inspired view of consciousness, especially in the face of emergent technologies.

Focusing on public hearings held in 2006 in which temple wives (jizoku) aired their grievances, the article examines the unique challenges that Japanese Zen must confront since the Meiji Reforms eliminated celibacy from the priesthood.

In 2025, in 1812, in 2000 BC, the death of a young child is the worst thing that could happen to any parent.

What happens to the meaning of Buddhist rituals in military spaces? Do the military confines and the political context alter the meaning of “non-violent” rituals? Can they become “violent” rituals?

During the Sri Lankan civil war, some extremist Buddhist monks espoused an explicitly violent “just war” ideology. While the majority of Sinhala monks did not go that far, they still demonstrated their support indirectly, through e.g. the chanting of pirits before major battles.

Buddhism in Burma is involved in a continuing and intense struggle against a repressive military regime.

While much continues to unfold, the struggle between the Burmese military and its Buddhist subjects has, regrettably, only deepened in the decades since this article was first published.

The charismatic and idiosyncratic Ajaan Man and his widely revered forest-dwelling disciples remained on the rim of the establishment for much of their lives — yet constituted the mystical core of orthodoxy

This book provides an analysis of the political and historical context in which the modern Thai Forest Tradition arose.

a concise history of amulets and an overview of amulet culture in Thailand.

The general introduction to the Siam Society’s special issue all about the topic.

Tantra finally gained official recognition and patronage during the reign of Sena 1 (833-853) who, we are told, had taken the bodhisattva vow. This monarch was interested enough in new trends in Buddhism to establish an ecumenical institute named Virankurarama, where 25 monks from each of the four major sects in Sri Lanka could study the new ideas coming from India.

While we usually think of Sri Lankan and Tibetan Buddhism as unrelated, this essay highlights that they have, in fact, had intermittent contact over the centuries.

a set of correspondences between his/her 32 bodily formations, the 32 consonants of the Pāli syllabary giving origin to those bodily formations, the 32 contemplative mūlakammaṭṭhāna and the 32 marks of a Buddha’s body. The key factor linking those correspondences is mūla-kammaṭṭhāna

How Tantric elements came to inform a premodern, Cambodian meditation practice.

I examine a corpus of documents belonging to the Dhammakāya text genre and its different functions, revealing how a single genre can, in fact, fulfil functions from meditation, on the one hand, to consecrations and protective chanting on the other. I then conclude that the disappearance of the Dhammakāya text genre from Central Thai practice is further evidence for the suppression of Siam’s “boran”, or pre-reform, Buddhism in response to modernist concerns about canonicity and textual authenticity.

Utilizing Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology, this article analyses how postcolonial states have built a national habitus that plays a decisive role in the politicization of religion. It focuses on examples from Islam and Buddhism and discusses how hegemonic types of politicised religions have negative impacts on democracy.

By using original documents this article shows the evolution of the Zen denominations within the larger context of the legal framework that shaped all Buddhist denominations, and depicts how the divisions between sects and branches were reshuffled several times before stabilizing in their present form.

Someone who experiences a kaicho as a child will have attained full status as an adult by the time of the next kaicho, and will have become an elder member of the community by the time of the one after that. […] The emotional significance of this time frame is not immediately obvious, but becomes clear through conversations with residents of Yokkamachi…

Perceiving is the process by which evanescent sensations are linked to environmental cause and made enduring and coherent through the assignment of meaning, utility, and value.

I intend that this offering will, however imperfect, stand as a memorial to the many Cambodian Buddhist monks and laypeople, both named and unknown, who lost their lives or had their futures traumatically altered by the tragedy that overwhelmed their country in the 1970s.

The essay asks what an enlightened moral sensitivity might require, and concludes in challenging the Zen tradition to consider reengaging the Mahayana Buddhist practices of reflection out of which Zen originated in order to assess the possible role of morality in its thought and practice

This essay responds to Brian Victoria’s critique of Zen social ethics by attempting to answer his question about Japanese Zen masters before and during the Second World War: how could they seemingly act without moral conviction in confronting the crisis of their time? How could Zen manifest itself in anything less than morally admirable actions? By assessing the role of morality in Zen tradition, the paper considers how the Zen tradition might extend itself in response to the moral impasse that these questions bring to light.

contemporary Buddhist women actively work through ritual to create meaningful relationships with one another.

The brain is estimating how much confidence it has in certain predictions or certain bits of sensory information. This is known as Precision Weighting.

How Bayesian logic explains the brain: its extraordinary successes and surprising failures.

When explaining their reasons for using such peculiar statues at their temples, the abbots state that these images brighten the atmosphere…

Jizō is a savior of beings suffering in the world without buddhas

The Zainichi tried to establish their own identity in Japan through their mortuary rituals, and thus to reorganize the Korean diaspora in Japan. Their ancestral rituals have been changed from a Confucian style to a Buddhist style.

Saliva, sweat, semen and body odours are among the strongest disgust elicitors. This results in the intriguing question of how people succeed in having pleasurable sex at all.

Scientific evidence that subha and asubha perceptions are indeed antagonistic.

Without a coercive village structure to enforce giving, the low-tension temples found themselves without their effective retainer. With the first-best contract unavailable, many temples have turned to fee-for-service arrangements of which the abortion-related ritual is merely the most notorious. Ironically, the new environment presents an entirely different challenge: temples now find themselves competing with internet-based priest-dispatch services.

For most of the history of Buddhism, “devotional” practices like prayer, invocation, and offerings have not been at odds or even very distinctly separated from “contempla- tive” practices such as meditation, sutra copying, and sutra recitation.

Only in one area was Tokugawa Buddhism innovative and successful: the development of a complete liturgical system for funeral services and remembrance of ancestors. For better or for worse, this feature henceforth became central in popular Buddhist piety.

A history of Japanese Buddhism, explaining how the Kamakura reforms (by such extraordinary individuals as Honen, Shinran, Dogen, and Nichiren) led, eventually, to the practices we see in Japan today.

Women bundled together and stitched their hair into the most sacred parts of the image—the deity’s hair or robes and Sanskrit seed-syllables—as a means to accrue merit for themselves or for a loved one.

This paper focuses on a set of embroidered Japanese Buddhist images said to incorporate the hair of Chūjōhime (753–781), a legendary aristocratic woman credited with attaining rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land. Chūjōhime’s hair embroideries served to show that women’s bodies could be transformed into miraculous materiality through corporeal devotional practices and served as evidence that women were capable of achieving enlightenment.

This report offers guidance about adopting subjective well-being measures in official government surveys to inform social and economic policies and considers whether research has advanced to a point which warrants the federal government collecting data that allow aspects of the population’s subjective well-being to be tracked and associated with changing conditions.

Through a study of three monks, Tōjū Reisō, Tairyū Bun’i, and Seishū Shusetsu, strategies employed to preserve Rinzai Zen spiritual legacy in the face of the turmoil of Meiji are highlighted. These monks did their best to continue their eremetic existence and to pick up the pieces left by the widespread destruction of Buddhist temples and monasteries in early Meiji Japan.

This [Meiji Era] movement resulted in the destruction of tens of thousands of Buddhist temples throughout the country together with their statuary, the forced laicization of large numbers of Buddhist priests and widespread attacks on Buddhist doctrine and praxis, among other repressive measures. In short, Buddhism was attacked as a superstitious, foreign religion that had no place in a Japan modernizing at breakneck speed.

This is the second part of an article concerning the ethical and doctrinal changes to Japanese Buddhism that occurred as a result of its centuries long, syncretistic connection to the indigenous religion of Shintō. The first part of this article, entitled “Counting the Cost of Buddhist Syncretism”, may be read here. While reading the first article is not required, its contents will nevertheless provide a helpful context for the events described in this article.

Experiment and have fun with it.

Rituals can be an artistic process, a meditation, a communal celebration, or a simple act of observation, according to Kate Southworth, a London-based artist whose works are rooted in ritual. “Rituals often have an intention,” Southworth said. “I think the framing of that intention to be as important as its enactment.”

The article explains that rituals—unlike productivity-driven routines—help people instill a sense of calm and sustain mindfulness by imbuing ordinary actions with intention and meaning. In this way, rituals can stabilize life and foster connection in an otherwise distracted, fast-paced world.

Despite the decimation of traditional culture during the Khmer Rouge period (1975–1979), Dharma songs remain an integral facet of Buddhist life among Khmers in Cambodia and in diaspora.

This article examines the role of Dharma songs in contemporary Cambodia, highlighting how their texts, melodies, and performances evoke the aesthetic experiences of saṃvega and pasāda, central to Buddhist art and practice. It emphasizes the significance of music in expressing and living Buddhism within the Khmer tradition.

Homeownership, as it has evolved in the United States, often turns its beneficiaries against progress and change.

How economic incentives drive the political emotions of American homeowners.

Theravāda Buddhism, once it had anchored itself in Cambodian soil, possessed a remarkable facility for assimilation and accretion.

An introductory overview of the history of Buddhism in Cambodia, from the earliest archeological evidence in 5th c. Funan to its tentative reemergence in the 1980s and ’90s.

how you experience life is a representation of what you believe about it. If you attack your core beliefs about yourself and your life, you can change your thoughts and feelings, which automatically changes your behavior.

Notice, in particular, the formal and ideological similarities to Thai Buddhism on display here.

Feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths, apparently because they lead to lower perceived risk and consequently less preparedness.

“We’re on the way to enlightenment”, he said. “And on this way, what should we do?”

This article presents the phenomenon of TikTok monks in Cambodia and the question of whether it’s appropriate to use social media to preach the dharma.