Tibetan Buddhist nuns offering prayers in Kathmandu. Prakash/Mathema /AFP via Getty Images Images of Buddha’s enlightenment often portray him sitting alone under the bodhi tree, his body emaciated from fasting. Some depictions show the Buddha’s right hand pointing down, asking the earth goddess to bear witness to his enlightenment. Demonic armies or dangerous temptresses can be shown on both sides of the Buddha, demonstrating his fortitude in the face of violent threats and seduction. In some images, he may also be flanked by two male disciples while expounding his teachings. A third- to fift ..read more

A perfectly imperfect tea bowl. Zen Rial/Moment via Getty Images On a recent visit to New York I stopped at a Japanese bookstore in Manhattan. Among the English-language books about Japan, I encountered a section of a shelf marked “WABI-SABI” and stocked with titles such as “Wabi Sabi Love,” “The Wabi-Sabi Way,” “Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers,” and, in all lowercase, “simply imperfect: revisiting the wabi-sabi house.” What is wabi-sabi, and why does it rate its own section alongside such topics as sushi and karate? Wabi-sabi is typically described as a traditional ..read more

The future of the UK’s Inter Faith Network (IFN), a long-standing charity that promotes dialogue and cooperation between Britain’s religious groups, is in doubt after the government announced it was withdrawing funding for the group. Communities secretary Michael Gove has cited concerns that a member of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), with which the government has suspended cooperation since 2009, has been appointed an IFN trustee. In response to Gove’s letter, the IFN has said it had never been advised “to expel the MCB from membership”. It also said that while the government might choos ..read more

Sending human remains to the Moon on the first commercial lunar lander, Peregrine 1, on Jan. 8, 2024, along with scientific instruments, caused a controversy. Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, objected, saying that “the moon holds a sacred place” in Navajo and other tribal traditions and should not be defiled in this way. The inside of the lander was to be a kind of “space burial” for remains of some 70 people. Each of the families had paid over US$12,000 for a permanent memorial on the Moon. As professors of religious studies who have taught courses on death rites, we know that deat ..read more

A Lotus Sutra scroll praising the manifold mercies of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. Universal Gateway chapter of the Lotus Sutra/Calligrapher: Sugawara Mitsushige/The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection State legislatures across the United States have introduced over 400 bills to limit transgender Americans’ rights. Many of these bills’ sponsors, such as the Christian nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, cite Christian values as well as the values of the other Abrahamic faiths – Judaism and Islam – to justify their anti-trans positions. The Alliance Defending Freedom claims that Christia ..read more

A gilded statue of the Buddha at Wat Phanan Choeng Temple in Thailand. Kittipong Chararoj/ iStock via Getty Images Plus Walking into a favorite restaurant here in Knoxville, Tennessee, I was immediately greeted by a golden statue of Buddha, its sparkling gemstone eyes meeting my own as I made my way through the door. The aromas of Thai curries beckoned, but as I was led to a table, I kept thinking about those glinting eyes. Sacred objects are everywhere: Statues and paintings of gods fill museum galleries and catalog pages alike. You might also see them gracing a neighbor’s yard or upon an alt ..read more

Hindu devotees prepare to scatter ashes of the deceased into the sea as part of Ngaben, a mass cremation ceremony, in Surabaya, Indonesia. Juni Kriswanto/AFP via Getty Images Many people see death as a rite of a passage: a journey to some new place, or a threshold between two kinds of being. Zoroastrians believe that there is a bridge of judgment that each person who dies must cross; depending on deeds done during life, the bridge takes the deceased to different places. Ancient Greek sources depict the deceased crossing the river Styx, overcoming obstacles with the help of coins and food. But ..read more

'Monkey: Journey To The West,' a nine-act opera adaptation performed at the Chatelet Theater in France. Bertrand Rindoff Petroff/French Select via Getty Image One summer afternoon in the late 1980s, my mother and I passed by a tea house on our trip out of town. The crowded building was usually a boisterous place filled with chatter, laughter, and the happy, clacking shuffle of mahjong tiles. At the moment we were passing, however, a great hush came over the teahouse: People were held spellbound by the black-and-white glow of a small TV in a corner, playing an episode of the series “Journey to ..read more

An android called 'Kannon Mindar,' which preaches Buddhist sermons. Richard Atrero de Guzman/NurPhoto via Getty Images Early in the summer of 2023, robots projected on a screen delivered sermons to about 300 congregants at St. Paul’s Church in Bavaria, Germany. Created by ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna, the experimental church service drew immense interest. The deadpan sermon delivery prompted many to doubt whether AI can really displace priests and pastoral instruction. At the end of the service, an attendee remarked, “There was no hea ..read more

More than half of Australia’s LGBTQIA+ Buddhists feel reluctant to “come out” to their Buddhist communities and nearly one in six have been told directly that being LGBTQIA+ isn’t in keeping with the Buddha’s teachings. These are some of the findings from my research looking at the experiences of LGBTQIA+ Buddhists in Australia. I’m a genderqueer, non-binary Buddhist myself and I was curious about others’ experiences in Australia since there has been no research done on our community before. So, in 2020, I surveyed 82 LGBTQIA+ Buddhists and have since followed this up with 29 face-to-face inte ..read more