Although I’ve visited India several times, I’ve never been to Dharamshala before. This cramped but beautiful city, which shot to international fame as a community for Tibetans, is home to a cozy new café called Café129. This beautiful establishment is under the stewardship of journalist-turned-restaurateur Yeonsuk Ka, who in the short span of less than […]
Raymond Lam
Spiritual Melodies: Tully MacKay-Tisbert
The landscape of America is dotted with Christian influences, from the lamentations of oppression and hope of liberation that fused with African influences to form the melancholy blues, to the Christian rock that arose in the 1960s to become a formidable force of conversion in mega-churches. It is extraordinary that the culture of a republic […]
The Vigil of Silence
Photo by Poorna Jayasinghe The media deals in words as a trade. Words are what media professionals sell, in a sense. Words are penned in a paper or on a website, broadcast through radio and podcasts, or spoken by a personality through the telly, smartphone and tablet, or YouTube. Yet there are those occasions in […]
M. R. Pimpare: A Full Life and a Rich Legacy
On Monday morning I received the sad news of M. R. Pimpare’s passing just the evening before, on 7 April. He and his family had been fresh on my mind, as we had done an interview for Buddhistdoor Global only a few weeks ago. His life’s passion and enduring love, the ancient caves of Ajanta and […]
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.
Exemplary Buddhists: Hong Kong’s Sri Lankan Community
I was unfortunately out of Hong Kong and missed my chance to attend the Sri Lankan community’s 71st celebration of Independence Day. 4 February, like the equivalent commemorations of so many postcolonial societies, is critical to modern Sri Lankan identity, and in many ways the opinion makers and influencers of Hong Kong—scholars, journalists, writers—have not […]
Oyungerel Tsedevdamba’s “The Green-Eyed Lama”: A Literary Window into Mongolia’s Pain and Healing
One does not usually expect a politician and policymaker to be a breakout novelist, but that is exactly what Oyungerel Tsedevdamba has managed to achieve. Her novel, The Green-Eyed Lama, is for many Mongolians the first novel about Mongolia itself, specifically the Mongolian experience of a particularly painful period: the 1930s purges under Stalin. Ms. […]
Let the Lotus Bloom Forth: Buddhism in India
2019 marked the 70th anniversary of the promulgation of India’s constitution: itself a complex and multilayered story in which Buddhism is interwoven. This year’s reception bid farewell to Mr. Puneet Agrawal as India’s consul-general in Hong Kong and Macau. Buddhistdoor Global first began collaborating on Buddhist projects with his predecessor. Under Shri Puneet Agrawal’s consulship, […]
Shortcomings and Spiritual Renewal
In the March of 2017, during a conference trip to Nalanda in India (the old site of this long-lost seat of Buddhist learning is particularly dusty during this time of year), I came down with a terrible hacking cough. I remember my diaphragm aching with each breath I took, even as I felt the overwhelming […]
The Tech Question Concerns Us All
In a letter dated 6 January to Monsignor Paglia for this month’s 25th anniversary of the Pontifical Academy for Life (which was founded in 1994), Pope Francis noted: “Relying on results obtained from physics, genetics and neuroscience, as well as on increasingly powerful computing capabilities, profound interventions on living organisms are now possible . . . Even […]