The Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF), along with Indian, Japanese, and Mongolian partners, hosted its third Samvad (which, in Hindi, means “dialogue”) conference in Ulaanbaatar over last Friday and the weekend. As reported in BDG’s news article on the conclave, Mongolian political and religious leaders took this event very seriously. In his closing speech on the […]
myanmar
Simon Hui’s Mindful Studio for Life
Simon Hui is founder of Mindful Studio HK, a yoga studio offering courses to seekers of physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. Try imagining someone born in Hong Kong who grew up in Nigeria, was educated in the US, learned yoga in India, and ordained as a monk in Myanmar. That is my continuously unfolding adventure, and […]
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 […]
Myanmar: Another Square on the Buddhist Chessboard
From 5-6 August, the Vivekananda Foundation and the Tokyo Foundation will be hosting the second Samvad conference* at Sitagu International Buddhist Academy (SIBA), Yangon. I reported on Samvad’s first symposium two years ago in New Delhi, and it was then that it became clear India’s government was trying to manoeuvre among different Asian countries – […]