Dark times can be a source of progress in our spiritual practice, since they allow us to see clearly the difference between what truly matters in life (inner peace, altruistic love and compassion for instance) and what is just the unavoidable upheavals of any life. Having confidence in an ethical or religious system that has at its core c...

Meditation, or more accurately mind training, helps to cultivate the inner resources that give us confidence to deal with the ups and downs of life. These inner resources include inner freedom that makes us less vulnerable to ever-changing outer conditions. Here, inner freedom means being free from the influence of automatic mental processes ...

Himalayan Hills late afternoon Stars at dawn above the Himalayas

We would be very happy to receive personal accounts, anecdotes, or stories concerning actions that clearly point to manifestations of genuine altruism. These could be examples that you witnessed or heard about, or facts that belong to our time or to a distant past: heroic acts or expressions of kinship and altruistic concern in daily life...

Rajgir is the place where the Buddha taught the Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom (Prajna paramita), at the Vulture Peak, sixteen years after his enlightenment, to an assembly of 5,000 monks, nuns and laity, as well as innumerable bodhisattvas. This teaching is known as the second turning of the Wheel of Dharma and if focus on understanding t...

After Kusinagar and Kesaria, our pilgrimage took us the great University of Nalanda, about 90 kms south east of Patna and a few kms away from Rajgir. Nalanda was one of the world's first universities and the largest Buddhist University in history. It was established during the reign of the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta. The complex was built ...

Kushinagar is the place where Buddha Shakyamuni entered ‟Mahaparinirvana”, the ‟great transcendence of suffering”. When he reached his eighty-first year, the Buddha gave teaching at the Vulture's Peak of Rajgir, and went north with his nephew to Nalanda and then Vaishali, a place where he often stayed and where he had given teachings on the u...

On the occasion of then Indian pilgrimage accomplished by Yangsi Khyentse Rinpoche, Shechen Rabjam Rinpoche and a group of monks, nuns and disciples, after visiting Sarnath, the place where the Buddha gave his first Teaching, the group went early morning on a boat to witness the sunrise upon the Ganges, on the banks of the Holy City of Vanare...

On emptiness When Buddhism states that emptiness is the ultimate nature of things, it means that the things we see around us, the phenomena of our world lack any autonomous or permanent existence.  But emptiness is not at all a void, or the absence of phenomena, as early western commentators of Buddhism once thought.  Buddhism does not at a...

Sarnath is located in a dozen of kilometers of Varanaresi. It is there, in the Deer Park, that the Buddha delivered his first conferred his first teaching on the Four Noble Truths: the truth of the suffering, the truths of the causes of the suffering (the afflictive mental states and the fundamental ignorance), the truth of the possibility of...