I’ll try again at my semi-regular posts on news that has caught my eye recently. Today I see that I have 27 items tucked away in my ‘news’ folder. Many are political. Some are blog posts by Buddhists. Some are actual news stories. Others are just kind of fun. Let’s start with the blogs: How I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement is a wonderful, lengthy blog post detailing a woman’s journey out of the pro-life movement. One link in... Read more
Žižek, what can I say? He’s at it again. Last month Žižek was in Vermont, not far from where the Dalai Lama himself was giving a talk on his latest US tour. His topic: “Buddhism Naturalized” (video below). At least that was the title of the talk. In fact he only talks about Buddhism for about a quarter of the talk. The rest, while interesting, is a bit all over the place. And while he twice notes his appreciation for Buddhism, especially... Read more
Be sure to change the quality to 1080 HD and expand to full screen for the best viewing. This is my first attempt at time lapse photography; shot on a Nikon D90 with the 8mm Rokinon Fisheye lens using the free DCamCapture software and (also free) Picasa to create the video (and also free) Windows Live Movie Maker to tweak the audio fade. The shots go from noon until 2:20pm and then restart at 3:40 and run until 4:30. With this... Read more
You can see this and more at https://philosvids.wordpress.com/. And this has been floating around the net recently and corresponds well to some of Dr Webster’s points: Happy Halloween. Try to keep your dukkha to a minimum. Read more
This week we present an interview with Lama Surya Das (bio at bottom, though well known to most of you). For the interview I solicited questions from friends and colleagues and chose a few to present to Surya Das. My great thanks to Lama Surya Das for taking the time to answer these questions and to the wonderful Erica Taylor for helping to bring this together, as well as to my friends Nick M, Nick W, Katherin, Emily, Warren, and... Read more
In just over two months, a Chinese-owned mining company is scheduled to begin work in NE Afghanistan. If they go forward, they could create the world’s second largest copper mine. But they would also destroy an unknown number of ancient Buddhist (and other, earlier) artifacts. The site, in the rugged and arid mountains of Afghanistan, was once a hot spot on the Silk Route, home of thriving communities of traders and monks. The site was only rediscovered two years ago,... Read more
As is often the case, there has been too much going on of late in the world of Buddhism for me to give justice to most of it. Here’s a quick roundup of topics I wish I could have devoted more time to recently: Achim Bayer, a scholar currently based in Seoul, presented an article describing the unlikelihood that the recent “Buddha from Space” (BBC) (DiscoveryNews) (National Geographic) is authentic. In his paper (available free here) he lists 13 characteristics... Read more
My friend Jeffrey Kotyk* of the Flower Ornament Depository 華嚴藏 blog has another interesting post worth reading this week, discussing the visibility, if not overall popularity of Tibetan Buddhism in America. His post is titled Why is Tibetan Buddhism more popular? As you can see by my title, I’m not so sure that it is, though I wouldn’t be surprised if Tibetan Buddhism as a whole had more adherents in America than Theravadin or Zen. But the methodology of counting who’s who gets tough. Do... Read more
It’s hard to know just where to begin with the question of relics in Buddhism. To believe, or not to believe, perhaps. I find that I, as an ex-Catholic, ex-anti-everything, quasi-Buddhist practitioner, don’t buy into relics that much. To be honest, they look creepy and remind me too much of the odd veneration of dead people that I found so very disturbing in my teens as a quasi-Catholic. Do such ‘relics’ really validate a religion? The site hosting these images... Read more
Yesterday’s Daily Princetonian ran a story on Roach unlike most we’ve seen in the past few months. Focusing on Michael Roach as a former student, class of ’75, the article is essentially a ‘feel-good’ piece about a former activist, who “briefly landed in jail for helping to disrupt napalm weapons research at the Institute for Advanced Study” and is doing interesting things in the world today. “These days, he runs a three-year Buddhist retreat in the Arizona desert, in which retreaters... Read more
American Buddhist Perspectives
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In