When my niece’s invitation to her eighth birthday party said 1 p.m. at Skateland, I knew what that meant: Vietnamese Standard Time. Sure enough, my family strolled in late. Fifteen minutes late, to be exact. But that’s okay; by then, I’d already laced up my own...

Mindfulness brings many benefits, and perhaps the greatest of all is insight. Insight is knowing what is happening around us and inside us, why it is happening, and how to make it better.  These insights help us let go of the confusions and misunderstandings that make...

In September 2009, as back-to-school season raged around the nation, I found myself on the ledge of my eighteenth-floor apartment window, about to jump off. Looking at the Midtown Manhattan traffic below, I became aware of many stereotypes I’d been reduced to...

Shunryu Suzuki was a Soto Zen priest who came to America in 1959 and founded the San Francisco Zen Center and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, both of which are still thriving today. He was also the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, one of the most influential...

Like many, I’ve experienced the past months as an unrelenting, reckless assault—not only on people, especially the most vulnerable among us: immigrants, the poor, the disabled, LGBTQIA+ individuals, BIPOC communities, women, children, veterans, students, and the...

Many of us hold this idea that Buddha was always revered and loved by everyone. But during his lifetime, Buddha was actually perceived as a very radical spiritual teacher, and there were people, especially from the religious establishment of the day, who thought he...

Steve Aoki stands at the stage’s edge, balancing a sheet cake in one hand. The atmosphere is electric. With the aim of a seasoned archer and the glee of a kid chucking a water balloon, the world-renowned DJ launches the confection into a sea of fans (one holds a “CAKE...

When my son, Joshua, died in a car accident at the age of eighteen, it felt more traumatic and painful than facing my own death. Although I was a close student of the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, I had no conscious understanding that I’d received...

One of the most intense spiritual experiences I’ve ever had was at a loud rock concert in the middle of an amusement park. In 1986, at age eighteen, I went with my sister to see The Smiths one drizzly evening at Canada’s Wonderland, outside of Toronto. Our family had...

It’s eighth-century India. On the vast, steamy Indo-Gangetic Plain sits Nalanda University, a Buddhist center of learning that’s also a monastery with some ten thousand students and two thousand teachers. Among them is a young monk named Shantideva. While other monks...