Ayya Soma and Bhante Suddhaso in Cisternino. Image courtesy of Ayya Soma Ayya Soma is a Theravada Buddhist bhikkhuni and co-founder of the non-profit Buddhist Insights. Recently, she, fellow co-founder Bhante Suddhaso, and members of her organization arrived in Italy to share the richness of the Theravada life, aspects of which would be commonplace in Southeast Asia. […]
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Mexican Buddhism: A Meeting of Cultures, Beliefs, and Perspectives
In our last Hispanophone Buddhism post, we spotlighted Ezer R. May May, a pioneering scholar of the Mahayana Buddhist presence in Mexico. Although Mexico is the most populous nation in Central America and the second-most populous in Latin America, the number of scholars examining the life of Buddhism in the country is extremely low. It […]
For Sri Lanka: Assistance and Friendship Amidst Crisis
Sri Lankans are facing their worst economic crisis since 1948. The country’s prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa, resigned on 10 May. His brother, president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, is under renewed pressure to quit as well. The country is in talks with India, China, and the IMF for debt relief and further loans. And it has been less than […]
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 […]
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 […]
A Laywoman’s Calling: A Vocation in Teaching and Livestreaming
Part One of Gotami’s journey I believe that now, more than ever, we need to talk about the Dharma, and to spread a message of hope for all the people who are suffering during this pandemic. The idea of talking about Dharma, however, came about by chance. By May 2020, I had started writing about […]
The Lay Perspective: A Journey into the Dharma
Being Buddhist is wonderful, knowing the Dharma is even more so, and spreading it on social media, creating a small oasis of peace in a historical moment when these platforms have become places of pain, toxicity, and fake news, is a blessing. My name is Martina, but people call me Gotami, the Dharma name that […]
Delusions and Diversions
A direct experience of death speaks to the heart in a way that philosophical musings never can. There was a time when I was struggling with my meditation during a stay at a forest monastery on the East Coast of the United States. I was experimenting with a wide assortment of techniques to calm my […]
The TLKY International Conference 2021 Interview Series – Ven. Bhikkhuni Dhammadinna
Welcome to our series of conversations with participating speakers at this year’s Tung Lin Kok Yuen International Conference – Buddhist Canons: In Search of a Theoretical Foundation for a Wisdom-oriented Education (27–28 November 2021). In each blog post, I talk to keynote speakers and paper presenters about their subject at this conference. This conference has […]
Reading Chinese Buddhist Texts and Honouring Different Traditions
Leshan Buddha. From chinaclickgo.com I have recently co-authored a reader in Chinese Buddhist texts (Lock and Linebarger 2018) . The reader is intended for students who have basic literacy in Chinese but need a lot of help in reading and understanding the difficult language in which most Chinese Buddhist texts are written. I would of […]