Andrea Miller: What is consciousness? In what way is the soul a good definition for it, and in what way is it not? Michael Pollan: Consciousness and the soul have an old relationship. The people who talk about the soul are often doing it in a religious context, and it...

A few months ago, despite all that was going on in America vis-à-vis politics and our usual preoccupations with sports and entertainment, it was a group of Buddhist monks that captured the country’s attention.  Starting from Texas, the monks of Huong Dao Vipassana...

With red faces and steaming breath, more than two hundred faith leaders from across the country climbed back onto the buses. Dressed in brightly colored regalia, they’d just completed a forty-minute patrol monitoring ICE in ten-below-zero weather on Lake Street in...

As a young woman, I found the peacefulness of Buddhist teachings deeply attractive. But I felt myself stumble psychologically when they were called the “middle way.” I believed life was a bold and daring adventure, whereas the middle way sounded conservative and...

I was ten years sober when, in 1996, I first checked out the California Diamond Sangha at the urging of several AA friends. Early on, when I told its leader, John Tarrant Roshi, that I was sober and in AA, he replied that the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous “was a...