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 […]
Conservation matters to China. It should be a core Chinese Buddhist concern
If one seeks to understand better the general direction of Buddhist priorities in China, clues can be found in the National Cultural Heritage Administration’s (NCHA) blueprint of preserving China’s ancient grottoes in early December last year. During the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–25), the NCHA released its own plan that would, by 2025, result in an […]
The Bodhi Stupa in Gelephu, Bhutan: A To-Be-Completed Structure of Beauty and Compassion
Stupa projects are often initiated by an aspiration or prophecy. A modern-day example of this is in Gelephu, a town (thromde) in Sarpang District, southern Bhutan. It shares a border with India, and one can cross into Bhutan here through Assam. It is a hub for Indo-Bhutanese trade, with a pleasant, moderate climate and rainy […]
What Is Life?
Translated by the Pure Land Translation Team; edited by Householder Fojin. From purelandbuddhism.org By Master Huijing In the Buddhist Parable Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha explained to us “What exactly is life?” with a famous metaphor. The metaphor is like this. On a lonely autumn evening, in the endless wilderness, a traveler hobbled on his way. Suddenly, […]