With noisy neighbors and the homeless camped on street corners, city life offers many opportunities to practice kindness. Dzigar Kongtrül Rinpoche on how urban living can open our hearts. Spiritual practitioners often aspire to live alone in the mountains among wildlife, yet a city can be an equally or an even more supportive environment for practice. Unlike the [...]
Google digitally preserves ancient Buddhist sites in virtual reality
The project was inspired by the destruction of the monumental Bamiyan Buddha statues by the Taliban in 2001. Google has collaborated with CyArk, a California-based nonprofit, to preserve heritage sites in online 3D libraries. The Open Heritage project has posted 3D models of 26 heritage locations in 18 countries, including ancient Buddhist temples at Bagan in Myanmar and three [...]
5 Reasons to Meditate
Yes, it's a strange thing to do — just sit there and do basically nothing. Yet the simple act of stopping, says Pema Chödrön, is the best way to cultivate our good qualities. Here are five ways meditation makes us better people. The mind is very wild. The human experience is full of unpredictability and paradox, joys and sorrows, successes and failures. We can’t escape any [...]
My Child Fears the Future
Sylvia Boorstein on how to give our children — and ourselves — hope in a worrying time. Question: I grew up under the shadow of nuclear war. Today, my children fear for the future of the world because of climate change and Donald Trump — and nuclear war too! While I know that Buddhists are supposed to transcend hope and fear, I don’t think it’s good for children to grow with [...]
Emptiness and Existence
The Dalai Lama takes us step by step through the famed logic of Madhyamika, the Middle Way that defeats all extreme views of reality. To generate the type of love and compassion that motivates you to seek buddhahood, not for yourself but for the sake of others, first you must confront suffering by identifying its types. This is the first noble truth. From the time we are born [...]
Up in Smoke: A Buddhist pot-smoker on quitting weed
Pot use is finding new acceptance across America. So why, after a long love affair with weed, has this Buddhist kicked it to the curb?I’m pretty pro-marijuana. Certainly people can have problems with it—people can have problems with just about anything—but lots of people are able to use pot more or less harmlessly, and have enjoyable, even fruitful experiences doing so. But [...]
Doing Nothing
Karen Maezen Miller on how meditation helps her bring "doing nothing" into everything she does. There must be something in the connotation of the word "being" that makes it seem like the opposite of "doing." I say that because I'm sometimes asked how, as an avowed meditator, I ever get things done. Perhaps they picture me curled up in a corner. A regular meditation [...]
Lama Willa Miller’s advice for climate change activists
Lama Willa Miller talks to Lion's Roar deputy editor Andrea Miller about how to build a movement that can change the world. Lama Willa Miller offers advice for activists on working with emotion, community, and uncertainty. Read Lama Willa Miller's article from the May 2018 Lion's Roar magazine "5 Buddhist Practices to Face the Truth of Climate Change and Take [...]
Integrating Yogacara in Your Practice
Yogacara provides us with a useful conceptual framework for understanding the mind that can transform our thoughts and emotions, says Guo Gu. He offers a practical four-step process for integrating the Yogacara teachings in your practice. Buddhist practitioners are all too familiar with the ups and downs of meditative experience, but most have no idea why certain experiences [...]
Irish Buddhist Union established to represent Buddhists in Irish society
The newly-formed union is the first organization speaking on behalf of Irish Buddhists. Seven sanghas have come together to establish the Irish Buddhist Union (IBU), a new organization that will represent Buddhist ideals and principles in Irish society. “The IBU intends to lobby government to ensure that the Buddhist point of view is included in areas such as religious [...]
