The monastic social movement that emerged from the Axial Age in India swept throughout Asia, transforming the landscapes, the cultures, and the politics of all its nations, as well as countless individuals. It is quite likely that it influenced even West Asia, North Africa, and Europe by lending its institutional style to Aramaic and Egyptian… Read more »
Years ago my original teacher, the Venerable Geshe Ngawang Wangyal of the Labsum Shedrub Monastery, gave me a copy of a Tibetan volume printed in India, entitled The Tibetan Book of the Dead. He had a way of saying certain things so that you remembered them long afterward, giving them a special impact, as if… Read more »
No sane person fears nothingness. It might be boring. It might not be delightful. But at least it should be restful, peaceful, and painless. And relative to all the troubles of wakefulness, it is pleasant and much sought after by every one of us. The Sleep of Death: New Situations for Consciousness What we do… Read more »
The Dalai Lama continues to inspire restraint and nonviolence among the Tibetan youth in exile and all the Tibetans in Tibet, in spite of their mounting frustration at the lack of progress made in achieving economic self-sufficiency, religious freedom, and human and other rights due to the Chinese government’s oppressive and destructive policies. Dalai Lama… Read more »
When I have attended His Holiness the Dalai Lama giving Buddhist teachings to large assemblies, I have had an odd sensation lately: it feels as if I have entered a time warp, and am actually witnessing Shakyamuni Buddha himself in all his glory as a teacher. As the Noble Vimalakirti Sutra puts it, “Dominating all… Read more »
One of the main leaders of the enlightenment movement in India was a great monk-teacher called Nagarjuna, who lived sometime between the first century B.C.E. and the second century C.E. By this time, India had developed enormously, with large numbers of enlightened individuals working to transform the whole society gradually. Nagarjuna became a monk as… Read more »
When some people hear the word “reincarnation,” they automatically think that the person speaking is a nut, a weirdo, or some kind of New Age hippie. It’s so ingrained in our heads by our scientific, materialistic culture that the idea is absurd. Carl Sagan thought the belief in future lives was wishful thinking by religious… Read more »
I am deeply honored to present to the English-speaking world His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s fifty-year-long, sustained, emergency appeal to the world community for help, on behalf of his beloved people of Tibet, skillfully arranged and powerfully elucidated by Sofia Stril-Rever, originally published in French, and ably translated by Sebastian Houssiaux. The brave people of… Read more »
The American Institute of Buddhist Studies, nonprofit 501c3, was founded in 1972, at the request of H.H. the Dalai Lama and the late Geshe Ngawang Wangyal with the mandate to translate and publish the originally Indian Buddhist scientific, spiritual, and artistic works collected in the Tengyur (bstan ‘gyur) collection of Tibetan translations from Sanskrit and… Read more »
