From this month till December, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Centre for Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto is running a workshop series on the relationship between tea and Buddhist culture, history, and practice, along with tasting and sampling sessions with tea sommeliers. In the diverse regions covered in this series (the […]
Buddhism
May the Force Be Unnecessary With You
One needs wisdom, strength, and ethics to pursue a Buddhist life. It’s a discipline and a challenge. It’s a journey through the internal world. The Star Wars film series depicts worldly struggle: lightsaber duels, space battles, galactic journeys, and political intrigue. How can a close examination of the movies deepen our appreciation of the Dhamma? […]
The Right Balance: Negotiating Buddhist Power in Sri Lanka
After a mob attacked a UN safe house for Rohingya refugees on 26 September near the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, cabinet spokesman Rajitha Senaratne came out with some of the strongest public words I’ve seen leveled by a Buddhist public servant against fellow, self-proclaimed Buddhists. “As a Buddhist I am ashamed at what happened,” […]
No Easy Answers: Bangladesh’s Buddhists and Rohingya Refugees
The tragedy of Myanmar’s displacement of Rohingya Muslims, aside from its complex ethnic, historical, and religious backdrop, is exacerbated by two essential political realities. The first is that Western media and governments erroneously saw what it wished to see in Aung San Suu Kyi throughout her difficult struggle against the Burmese junta. When she decided […]
What Happens to Our Karma If We Fall Into a Black Hole?
Crossing the event horizon of a black hole (astrophysical bodies born from the inward collapse of a massive star) means no coming back, because a black hole is not just an invisible object, but the collection of happenings that we, who are outside of the black hole, say don’t happen at all. This extraordinary and literal […]
Buddhist Studies: A Vital Academic Tradition
Is Buddhist Studies elitist? Short answer: ideally, although it depends on how one defines the word. Like every humanities subject, Buddhist Studies can feel like an insular field if it’s not careful. Much of my work as a journalist who loves Buddhist Studies, a subject of which I was a devoted but hardly competent student, has […]
Shaolin (2011): A Guilty Pleasure
I have mixed feelings about films that have an overtly religious element, especially when the religion plays a central role in a movie focused on bone-crunching action, head-crushing martial arts, and temple explosions. I class Shaolin, which is an overwhelmingly positive portrayal of the martial art masters in Republican-era China, as one such guilty indulgence. […]
The Middle Way in Love
The doctrine of the Middle Way (Skt. madhyama-pratipad, Tib. ume lam) is one of the fundamental teachings of Buddhism. According to Theravada Buddhism, the term “Middle Way” is used for the first time in Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, which is perceived as the first teaching that Buddha Shakyamuni delivered after his awakening. In this text the Buddha […]
The Importance of Interreligious Dialogue and Goals for the Encounter: From the Buddhist Perspective
A speech given by Ven. Hin Hung, director of the Centre of Buddhist Studies at The University of Hong Kong, on 27 July 2017 at The University of Mysticism in Avila, Spain. Our world is rapidly changing. With the advances in science and technology, modern means of communication and transportation bring us closer together, but, […]
Embodied Women
What does it mean to be a woman in the Buddhist tradition? To me, even a question as important as bhikkhuni ordination in the Theravada and Vajrayana schools is not as basic as the question of “the woman” in Buddhism. Nor am I convinced that gender is inconsequential to conventional Buddhist life just because gender […]