From australianmuseum.net.au Insects are on your family tree. Ladybug ancestors and crustacean offspring. A family tree is years of hesitation. From microbes to plants. A chain ofinnumerable mutations. Flatworms andsponges following the design of turtle arms. We are part of a family tree that is more thana metaphor. The birds feed off our limbs. The Cycads and Conifers […]
Author: Teahouse
When Everything First Began to Begin
The future is extinction, or has thatalready been said before? The drinking water is filtered with toxic rain and thetemples are draped in missed opportunities. There is a war in the future. There is a war over the future. A molten core bursting forth,it will not stop once you flip the channel. No, this illness called the […]
The Image of Sarasvati in Buddhist Art
White Sarasvati, mural at the Namdroling Monastery in South India. Image courtesy of the author Sarasvati (Tib. yang chenma) is the goddess of knowledge, education, music, poetry, and culture. Her name can be found in the Vedic hymns. In these ancient Indian texts, she is worshiped as the divine power of ritual chants and sacrificial […]
The Spiral Staircases of Corinth
When I look up at you,I feel like the glass shieldaround the flames of a candlestick chandelier, as your tears fall like drops of frozen crystal. When I hold you, I feel setlike a carved mahogany tablewith pink and creme coloredcarnations as the centerpiece. When we trust each other, our lovefeels driven by the winds, and […]
Dalits: A Community Excluded from the Common Good
By Sangita Bauddh The word dalit is an Indian Hindi word that represents a unique class of Indian society with few parallels in any other social system. Dalit means “depressed class,” which included scheduled castes, scheduled tribes, and other backwards classes in British India but now includes only scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Caste is […]
Meditation and Mediation
While Buddhism teaches us about our own suffering and the cessation of suffering, it also instructs us on how to live with others in harmony. As I get older, it becomes increasingly ironic to me that so much time and energy is spent struggling with people, when in fact being at peace with and feeling […]
All About Owls
This is a poem, as promised,all about owls. Hamlet wrote toOphelia, appealing to the same stars as owls do when they stripaway the tall grass, looking forthe present finality of vermin. This is a poem about owls. Neither theoretical or astronomical. It is about 1,000 million years ago,when the ancestors of the owls flewwithout a compass or […]
The Auspiciousness of Right Now
We’re all blessed to live in an age of the Dharma. There is an ocean of helpful video, audio, and print resources that expound Buddhist beliefs and practice, and it has never been easier to engage with skilled teachers from all traditions, even in parts of the world far from Buddhist homelands. The canons of […]
A Buddhist Cosmopolitanism
It should make us realize people unlike us were humans just like us, and replace superstition and suspicion—the pillars of tribalism—with curiosity and compassion.”
United State of Buddhist Minds
Buddhistdoor Global is presently in New York, accompanying representatives from Woodenfish Foundation and Amitofo Care Centre officers from both Hong Kong and elsewhere for the sixty-third session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW63), which begins today on the 11th and finishes on the 22nd of March at the UN headquarters in Manhattan.