‘Buddha’s Teaching: Just a few things that have fallen into words..’ Zen Graffiti

The night nurse said I should come right away. At 2 a.m., I arrived by Sam’s bedside. The nurse on call said he had “taken a turn for the worse.” He stopped breathing; his heart gave out. There was nothing more they could do. Lying there, he looked so peaceful, quiet....

‘One comes across a weed, and it turns out to be an orchid.’ Zen Master Yunmen

‘Thoughts arise and pass away, The preceding no different from the succeeding. If the succeeding thought does not arise, The preceding thought cuts itself off.’ Niutou Farong

‘Virtue is so feeble; Vice is so powerful and terrible! How can good ever triumph over evil Without the resolve to awaken?’ Acharya Shantideva

Photo by MemoryMan / stock.adobe.com 1. Wat Rong Khung, Thailand By the end of the twentieth century, Thailand’s Wat Rong Khun was in disrepair. As an offering to the Buddha, a local artist used his own money to rebuild it—in white.  Photo by William R. Pugsley /...

Bhikkhu Bodhi knows hunger not as a metaphor, but as a memory etched into his body. As a young American monk in the early 1970s, he began his monastic training in rural Sri Lanka at a time when the country was facing a severe economic  crisis. This forced the...

The rain clouds receded, and the October sun finally broke through as I was practicing walking meditation on a deck overlooking a small pond—my favorite place to walk during the seven-day retreat at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center. Red and gold leaves blanketed the...

What happens to us after we die, if anything, is perhaps life’s biggest mystery, one all the world’s religions try to address. The Buddhist text popularly known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead offers us a unique and very specific answer. It gives us a step-by-step...