When my mother or grandfather (爷爷/爺爺) needed a break from cooking in the kitchen, my family would eat out at fast food restaurants when I was a child. McDonalds and Subway were popular options, and KFC was a favorite of my grandparents for many years. But there were times when we’d opt for a casual […]
Mahayana in Cuba: Chinese Forebears
Lined by small restaurants, shops, laundromats, cultural societies, medicinal establishments, and leisure and education clubs, Barrío Chino in Havana is perhaps the largest “Chinatown” in the Latin American world, with a history dating to the 19th Century. This is the locus where the earliest recorded presence of people practicing Buddhist customs in Cuba can be […]
The Presence of Theravada Buddhism in Cuba
Think of Cuba, and one might see in the mind’s eye fine cigars and cocktails by the beach, ironic and decontextualized Che Guevara art, and romantic hotels and bars in the midst of Havana’s scenic buildings and streets. Yet there is something unusual developing in this misunderstood and oft-romanticized country: an interest in the Buddhist […]
A New World: Hispanophone Buddhism in Europe and the Americas
The term “Buddhism in the West” can be rather misleading. Too often, this umbrella term denotes Buddhism in the Anglophone world; namely, Buddhism in the US, Canada, and possibly Britain and Australia. But below the US, in Central America and South America, as well as in the former colonial heartland of Spain, the sphere of […]
Eating Pains
By turning pain into pleasure, I was simply feeding on pain in a more delicious form. There’s a peculiar satisfaction that comes with being able to endure pain that’s similar to the perverse satisfaction that comes from inflicting pain on others. If we look closely, this elevated feeling isn’t that different from indulging in our […]
Life Religiously Lived: A Biography of Choje Lama
The early life of Choje Lama Wangchuk and Part One of his biography – discussing Nepal, home, and monastery
Why Am I Still Hungry?
I sat cross-legged in meditation for several hours in pain. And I liked it. I was staying at a forest monastery and wanted to better understand how I perceived and reacted to pain in the body, so I decided to spend my entire afternoon sitting through whatever aching arose. In the process, a strange feeling […]
Watch, listen, and remember. He is all around us
No one can predict the time of one’s passing. More accurately, no one can predict when one dissolves into the bloom of a flower, or returns to the sky as a cloud that is beyond creation and destruction. It was therefore natural that the Hong Kong Buddhist community’s commemoration for Thich Nhat Hanh on the […]
Goodbye, Thay
In the early hours of the morning, the Hong Kong Buddhist community received the sad news of Thich Nhat Hanh’s passing at midnight on the 22nd of January, 2022. He was 95. I last saw him in 2013, on a Plum Village retreat in Thailand. As is typical of Plum Village, we happened to take […]