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Last month, we greeted the Gregorian New Year of 2025. We can also look forward to the Chinese New Year of the Snake later this month, an animal that represents transformation and wisdom. In Buddhism, we have legends of nagas, enlightened beings with (usually) serpentine lower bodies. The 2023 exhibition “Tree & Serpent” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, supported by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global, highlighted the presence of snakes in pre-Buddhist and early Buddhist art.
This year, Buddhistdoor Global will be celebrating its 30th anniversary. Throughout 2025, you can look forward to celebratory content commemorating this milestone. In our New Year’s Buddhistdoor View, we suggested how the snake represents change and transformation, most clearly through shedding its skin: its “old self” falls away and reveals a “new self.” Like a snake, we can allow problems and vexations to slough away, while being “reborn”—even as we maintain continuity. Fresh from riding the scaly back of 2024’s dragon, we can now ground ourselves on solid earth, as intimate as the snake’s belly on the soil and grass, and put transformation into practice.
Speaking of early Buddhist art, one piece of trivia that might not be immediately apparent is the historical fact of Buddhism and the Hellenic world’s interconnectedness. For a significant period in Buddhist history, there arose a cultural complex called “Greco-Buddhism” in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. In her interview with Prof. Georgios Halkias (director of the University of Hong Kong’s Centre of Buddhist Studies), columnist Rebecca Wong takes a deep dive into how, from Alexander the Great to the Common Era, the worlds of Buddhism and Hellenism mutually influenced one another, leading to a cultural fusion and dialogue unique in all of world history.
January has already gotten off to a busy start for the global Buddhist community. From 28 December into the New Year, the tenth Annual Drukpa Council (ADC X) was held in Kathmandu, with more than 50 Drukpa Lineage masters and teachers from across the Himalayas and thousands of members of the Drukpa Kagyu sangha participating. Over 100 Bhutanese monks, devotees, and volunteers also journeyed to Nepal, signalling how ADC X is a soft diplomatic event between Nepal and Bhutan—Bhutanese society follows the Southern Drukpa, while the Northern Drukpa is led by the 12th Gyalwang Drukpa.
On the front of heritage preservation, Treasure Caretaker Training, led by conservator Ann Shaftel, visited Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in the province of Qinghai in China. This was a special, three-day series of workshops for representatives in some of the important monasteries in the Amdo region, including the Tana, Zurmang, and Thrangu monasteries. Topics covered important things like risk assessment, planning for emergencies, and safer storage. Interviewing elders to preserve their oral stories, using simple apps for digitization and documentation, and other low-cost techniques were all part of the teaching program so as to help local institutions preserve their spiritual material heritage for generations to come.
Throughout the years we have striven to make the platform impactful and enriching. Apart from its Chinese-language sister site, we also offer the only website devoted entirely to covering Buddhist developments in the Hispanophone world. Our Spanish-language platform is called Buddhistdoor en Español (BDE), and it has been at the forefront of driving and shaping awareness about Buddhist developments in the Hispanophone regions—for Spanish and non-Spanish readers alike.
Since 2019, Barcelona-born Daniel Millet Gil, who earned his PhD in Buddhist Studies at the University of Hong Kong, has been bringing together an online community of Hispanophone Buddhist writers, assembling what I think is fair to call the most reliable and resourced team covering “Buddhica Hispanica.”
What do we mean by “Buddhica Hispanica?” Certainly, when we speak of geography, we are referring to the region of the Americas below the United States, from Central America to South America. We also mean Spain itself, although the European country is a fundamentally different society to its former colonial regions—just as those regions, now diverse and independent nation-states, are complex and culturally rich societies, distinct from one another.
Through translated features, and an ongoing series of posts on Tea House, we have been sharing, with the help of our friends at BDE, the wonders of the Hispanophone Buddhist world. This series is called “Hispanophone Buddhism.”Along with selected features from BDE, “Hispanophone Buddhism” explores topics covered by BDE’s contributors (with links to the original Spanish-language articles) and contextualizes them in the broader world of Buddhism’s development in Spain and Latin America.I hope you will find our quality coverage, both on BDG and BDE, of interest and inspiration. A very Happy New Year to you, your loved ones, and all beings!
Raymond Lam
