End of the workday -- the day itself is tired, a lost cause. Just go home and have a drink. Make it a double. I don't drink, but that's how I felt. A...
End of the workday -- the day itself is tired, a lost cause. Just go home and have a drink. Make it a double. I don't drink, but that's how I felt. A...
The danger of tying our self-identities to something external to ourselves is how fragile that identification can be. What happens when we retire, we lose our jobs, or we change careers?
With bare-knuckle book titles like Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up, author Brad Warner is not your hippie Aunt's idea of a tranquil, exotic spiritual master.
Individuality and relationship, autonomy and intimacy, separation and joining support each other. They are often seen at odds with each other, but this is so not the case!
If what I think I have to offer isn't needed and yet I insist on giving it, then I have to suspect that something other than generosity is at play.
I go to Kyoto once a year. I get lost in Kyoto once a year. Kyoto makes no sense to me. I'm more of a Tokyo girl. Give me a handful of subway lines and trains to navigate and I'm fine. Give me just two and I'm lost.
Khandro Tsering Chödron, one of the few Tibetans whose unusual biography offers a glimpse into what life in an untouched, intact Tibet had been like, passed away last Monday.
Tuning into the present, the moment, is curative, a natural medicine. It heals us because it allows us to connect to the holy now -- the sacred within mundane, conventional time.
Given that the vast majority of American Buddhists are converts and spend years circling around meditational deities such as Tārā, how do we listen to songs written with her mantra as the lyrics?
Wouldn't we do better to ask why the apocalypse is so compelling? What is it about the times we live in that would make rational people accept the idea that the end of the world was upon us?
In every image that I have ever seen, the Buddha is smiling. Not just ha ha, but grinning from ear to ear. He is in fact laughing. He knows something that we don't.
When you walk into a 12-Step meeting you drop a big part of your identity. The Buddha takes this idea even further when he declares that the very idea of a separate self is a misperception.
We actually know very little about the life of Jesus, a fact not often discussed by church leaders. What experiences might have shaped Jesus into the man he became?
The whole truth is not so simple. At the heart of the Buddha's teaching is something not graspable by intellect alone, not expressible in words alone, not comprehensible by logic alone.
Enlightenment is not restricted to ancient monks living in harmony with nature. It is an experience open to all, regardless of where or when they live.
It is not recommended to use meditation as a way of repressing our emotions by forcibly silencing them in order to achieve a superficially imposed sense of peace and quiet.
I imagined a father-son film where the son would wake up and recognize his reincarnation, return to Tibet and be enthroned in the monastery waiting for him. But when I told Yeshi of my filmmaking dream, he said I should forget it.
American Buddhist music has not had any breakout stars or even viral songs, but in the coming weeks I hope to introduce readers to more artists that are musically accomplished and lyrically devoted to the dharma.
It may come as a surprise to many that despite its peaceful and somewhat progressive image in the West, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition does not know full ordination for women.
My Zen colleagues may object that it is a stretch to call Zen meditation "prayer," or to describe it as a method "to reach our divine nature." But we must never stop trying to find common ground.
India continues to mystify scholars. While most Americans are familiar with the terms such as "yoga" and "Bollywood," Indian perspectives toward the ecology seem to be largely unknown.