Mark Blacknell is a former Teamster, U.S. Marine, and entrusted Zen practitioner who now works in Florida without affiliation. He typically serves people outside usual Buddhist circles — veterans, ...

Land is being returned to native tribes. Renewable energy is taking hold as an obvious and cost-efficient choice. Women’s rights are so firmly entrenched there’s now a right-wing backlash against them ...

Rev. Mauricio Hondaku Ghigonetto is a Jodo Shinshu priest ordained in 2013 and a student of Yogacara philosophy. He leads a virtual sangha of practitioners across three continents and writes on the ...

In current American Buddhist life and culture, we are witnessing significant discomfort, if not outright condemnation, regarding the “right speech” of taking political stances. While the genocide in ...

As someone who’s tended to gravitate towards practices, teachings, and teachers that have a grounded, direct, and honest approach to life, I’m often inspired by recalling an exchange I once read ...

The Wheel of Life is an Indo-Tibetan teaching aid and meditation tool. It illustrates the workings of samsara—the painful cycle of birth, death, and rebirth—which we undergo due to ignorance, ...

Buddhism is often viewed in the West through a simplistic lens, usually defined by meditation, mindfulness, and a sense of calm detachment. The third season of writer-director Mike White’s The White ...

Chinese style painting on temple wall in Thailand. Photo by Saitt_Srihin / Adobe Stock. Mindfulness is the fulcrum of the seven factors of awakening, says Dawn Mauricio. It helps you balance the other ...

Melvin McLeod: When did you start practicing meditation? Jon Kabat-Zinn: My first experience of formal practice—or even learning about it—happened one day in 1965. I was a molecular biology student in ...

“American Tall Lotus” by Lisa Ernst. What is enlightenment? This is often the first question people ask when they begin to explore Buddhism, because enlightenment is the culmination of the entire ...

At the heart of Shakyamuni Buddha’s spiritual revolution was the doctrine of anātman, meaning “no-soul” or “selflessness.” This was not just a refinement of existing spiritual thought — it was a ...

The 2009 Copenhagen Accord failed to become a robust international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases because negotiations fell apart. After that fiasco, the prevailing view was that international ...