“There is a lot of irony in the fact that the monk Wirathu and his followers are using fear in order to incite acts of violence that are precisely against the spirit of so much Buddhist teaching,” says Eyal Aviv, a professor of religious studies and international affairs at George Washington University. More →

August 22, 2013

Watch Buddhist teacher and author Lewis Richmond explain a Buddhist approach to old age and read an excerpt from his book “Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser.”
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August 16, 2013

“Kindness is one of the gifts older people can bring to a society, because they have seen what happens when kindness disappears from the world. It’s not pretty.” More →

August 16, 2013

Economic prosperity and modernity are beginning to have an impact on religious life in Thailand, a country that is 95 percent Buddhist but that in the last 30 years has seen the number of Buddhist monks decrease by about half. More →

May 24, 2013

When former Microsoft executive John Wood discovered the world’s need for books, he was trekking in Nepal and recalling what he had read in the Dalai Lama’s book “The Art of Happiness” about the importance of giving something to someone in need. More →

May 3, 2013

We ask attendees at the opening night of the BuddhaFest film festival to talk about their attraction to Buddhism. Watch an audio slideshow of the interviews and listen to a Buddhist chant performed during the opening ceremony. More →

June 22, 2012

“I am a human being, I’m a Buddhist monk, I am a Westerner,” says this sophisticated photographer, and the Dalai Lama has also asked him to lead one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most important monasteries. More →

June 15, 2012

“Buddha” is a title meaning the enlightened or awakened one. Inspired by Tricycle magazine’s Buddhafest Short Films Showcase invitation for video responses to the question “What does it mean to be awake in the world?”, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly asked … More →

June 8, 2012

“The message is that the Buddha is within and moving about in very mysterious ways,” says James Ulak, senior curator of Japanese art at the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. More →

May 11, 2012

Monks from the Dalai Lama’s private monastery in India spent five days building a sand mandala at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. The mandala is a symbolic structure that represents a Buddha’s dwelling. It is said to bring peace and harmony to the area where it is being made. Karen Humphries Sallick, who organized the monks’ tour, explains. More →

July 8, 2011